Introduces films about the Holocaust with particular emphasis on popular films. Develops the requisite tools for analyzing films, a historical perspective of the Holocaust, and the problems involved in trying to represent a historical event whose tragic dimensions exceed the limits of the imagination.

Modern and contemporary ideas about violence and their emergence as intellectual responses to historical events. Topics may include histories of physical violence, such as slavery, colonialism, or the Holocaust, as well as structural forms of violence.

Intersections of food and community in Hispanic cultures. Past and present practices. Food and material culture, urban design, foodways and gender roles, food and race, diet and hygiene, religious, and civic celebrations, and food preparation techniques.

Introduces modern Hebrew language and culture, focusing on fundamental structures of the language, the revival of Hebrew in modern times, and connections between contemporary usage and Jewish traditions. Topics include: the alphabet, the verb system, the Hebrew calendar, Jewish and Israeli holidays, names, songs, popular sayings, and more. Credit/no-credit only.

Rethinks the promise and peril of large-scale humanitarian interventions, ideas that harm and heal the world. Explores humanistic genres and modes of thinking about power and diversity in racial, religious, political, and scientific realms.

Examines religion as a framework through which individuals and communities understand their lives, values, and sense of belonging. Using Judaism as a case study, the course explores religious stories, rituals, laws, and holidays as frameworks for meaning and identity through close reading of texts and attention to lived religious practices.

Modern and contemporary ideas about violence and their emergence as intellectual responses to historical events. Topics may include histories of physical violence, such as slavery, colonialism, or the Holocaust, as well as structural forms of violence.

Jewish humor plays an important role in American popular culture. Investigates the modern history of Jewish humor through the writers, comedians, and actors who have shaped American comedy. Discusses the purpose of humor and the role that Jewish humor plays in shaping American and American Jewish identity.

This course introduces the social history of Sephardic Jews (Jews who can trace their ancestry back to the Iberian Peninsula) in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East through the English translations of archival materials, organized around weekly themes such as language, humor, music, etc. Modern Sephardic Cultures will be a stimulating experience not only for those interested in modern Jewish history in the region but also for those who want to further explore digitization projects in the Humanities, historical fiction, and languages.

Examines the experience of Russian Jews from the late 19th century to the present through fiction, films, memoirs, graphic novels set during the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the post-Soviet era. Explores issues of identity, gender, class, place of Jews as individuals and as a minority within Russian & Soviet society, as well as Jewish-Russian emigration to USA, Israel and elsewhere at the turn of the 21st century.

Graduate Fellowship Seminar

Cultural, social, and political histories of Palestine, the Land of Israel, and the State of Israel; Zionist and Palestinian nationalist movements, in their larger regional, transnational, and global contexts.

Introduction to biblical (classical) Hebrew beginning with the alphabet. Integrates core vocabulary and basic grammar with reading short selections directly from the Hebrew Bible.

Modern Israeli Hebrew. Core vocabulary, grammar, conversational text, and oral and written communication. Excerpts from modern Hebrew prose and poetry. First in a sequence of three.

Readings of selected texts in modern Hebrew with continuing emphasis on grammar, syntax, composition, and conversation. First in a sequence of three.

A comparative exploration into ancient religious customs, rituals, and beliefs (ca. 3000-500 BCE). Focus on peoples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Israel. Topics include conceptions of worship and divinity, sacred space and time, and types and roles of priesthoods, divination, prayers, and afterlife beliefs.

Investigates and critically assesses trends and topics in recent studies of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East, pertaining especially to texts, artifacts, art and images from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Levant. Explores ancient Near Eastern taxonomies and functions of gender and sexuality, and examines social, political and religious forces that inform and construct gendered categories of gods, humans, and their worlds.

Examines fiction, poetry, memoir, diaries, monuments, film, and pop culture from several languages and cultural milieus, with emphases on English and Hebrew. Topics include survivor testimony, shaping of collective memory, the second generation, Holocaust education and children’s literature, gender and the Holocaust, and fantasy and humor as responses to catastrophe.

Principal literary works of the Spanish Middle Ages in the context of evolving intellectual, spiritual, and artistic climates of the period. Covers the evolution of narrative and lyric prose and verse in both their traditional and learned manifestations.