As its core course, Brandeis offers Secular Jews: Lives and Choices from 1750 to the Present, with Secular-isms: Yiddish Culture in the Modern World and World Without God?: Theories of Secularization as the secondary courses.
Secular Jews: Lives and Choices from 1750 to the Present
Dr. Antony Polonsky
Course Outline:
A
survey of the lives of those Jews who in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries saw their identity in new ways, either as individuals without
religious faith but still identified as Jews or as adherents of new
ideologies, above all, nationalism and socialism, which provided new
definitions of Jewish identity.
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Description
Can a Jewish identity exist without religion? Are there secular Jews? Is it possible for people to consider themselves Jewish without any formal affiliation with either a religious or other specifically Jewish institution? If so, what sort of Jews are they? These questions concern all those interested in the history, present position and future prospects of the Jews as a people. There have been many answers: Zionist, non-Zionist, cultural, ethnic, sociological, and theological (both Christian and Jewish). We have no answers but we have a different way of posing the question, a biographical way, which may help to define the parameters of a possible answer. In this course we ask how have individual Jews defined themselves and how have they chosen to live their lives.
Such choices only became possible in the Western world after the Enlightenment, the American and the French Revolutions created the category of ‘citizen’, a new, free, universal, abstract person, who had the right to be what he or she chose. The governments of the Enlightenment and their liberal successors believed that the emancipation of the Jews, the granting to them of the rights of citizens, would break down the division between Christian and Jew, undermining the separate status of the Jews as members of a community linked by a common set of religious, moral and cultural values, which transcended national boundaries and making them into Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans and even Poles or Russians of the Jewish faith. The process by which governments, politicians and a section of the Jewish community attempted to incorporate the Jews and Judaism into European society was painful and protracted, and it took place against the background of what Karl Polanyi has called the ‘Great Transformation’, the process by which European society was transformed by the double impact of the principles of liberalism and popular sovereignty and of the industrial revolution.
Some Jews thought that they could simply shed their old identities and become members of the new community of citizens. In many countries, whatever Jews thought they were, the host populations saw them as Jews. The most violent and terrible of those rejections ended in the Holocaust, which made ‘Jews’ of communists, socialists, believers and non-believers, rich and poor, assimilated and orthodox. A national home for the Jews arose out of the ashes but it could not agree on a definition of Jewish identity to ground its Law of Return and the ‘Jewish’ identity of many groups of immigrants to Israel remains contested. In the USA and Western Europe, inter-marriage rates have risen. In what sense can mixed couples or their children still be ‘Jewish’? This course will try to address these questions in a strictly historical way, following a selection of lives of important Jews who at different times and places attempted their own answers to these questions. These lives will be drawn mainly from Europe, where until the Second World War, the majority of Jews lived. We shall also consider some American lives since during the twentieth century the American Jewish community became the place where choice of identity became an unusually important issue. We shall also look at the lives of some who adopted a ‘national’ answer to the question of Jewish identity and some who chose socialism or communism as the way to ‘solve the Jewish Question’.
Course Requirements
Three short papers (5-6 typed pages)
Final take-home exam.
75% of the assessment will be based on the essays, 25% on the final take-home examination.
Required Reading
All students should, if possible, purchase the following books:
Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World. A Documentary History, Second Edition, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
David Biale (ed), The Cultures of the Jews, Volume 3, New York, 2002.
George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, Cincinnati, 1985.
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, New York, 1993.
Ezra Mendelsohn, Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, New York, New York University Press, 1977.
Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, Jewish Publication Society, New York, 1959.
Recommended Reading
Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, 2006).
Alan Mintz, Banished from His Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, 1989)
Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle, 2004).
Erik Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment, (New York, 1975).
Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1991) particularly ‘The Study of the Jewish Intellectual: A methodological Prolegomenon’ 23–53.
Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2006).
Course Schedule
Introduction to the Course
Week 1:
Jews and Secular Society
*Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (Syracuse, 1998) 1-41.
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York, 1968).
Uriel Acosta, A Specimen of Human Life (New York, 1967).
*Yirmiyahu Yovel, ‘Spinoza, the First Secular Jew?’ Tikkun, vol. 5, no.1, 40-42, 94-96.
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity (New York, 2006).
*The Writ of Excommunication against Baruch Spinoza (July 27, 1656) and Baruch Spinoza, ‘Letter to Albert Burgh’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 57-8.
*David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (London, 1996) 120-155.
*Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews and the debate it provoked in The Jew in the Modern World, 28-48.
Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, with Introduction by Michael Shapiro (University of Illinois Press, 2003)
*Richie Robertson, ‘From the Ghetto to Modern Culture: The Autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer’ in Polin. A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, 1992
*Biographies of Spinoza, Da Costa, Moses Mendelssohn and Maimon in Encyclopedia Judaica.
Weeks 2 and 3:
Dilemmas of Integration in Western and Central Europe
Jewish Attempts to Achieve Integration
*The Jew in the Modern World, 112-154.
*Michael Meyer, ‘Jewish Self-Understanding’, in Michael Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 2 (New York 1997), 128-167.
The Society for the culture and Science of the Jews: Statutes, Eduard Gans, ‘A Society to Further Jewish Integration’ and Immanuel Wolf, ‘On the Concept of a Science of Judaism’ in The Jew in the Modern World, 213-220.
*Rahel Varnhagen, ‘O how painful to have been born a Jewess’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 260-1.
Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen : the life of a Jewess (edited by Liliane Weissberg; translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore, 1997).
*Hannah Arendt, ‘Writing Rahel Varnhagen. From a Letter to Karl Jaspers’, in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York, 2000) 68-72
Jews in the Arts
*Michael Meyer, ‘Becoming German, Remaining Jewish’, in in Michael Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 2 (New York 1997), 199-250.
*Heinrich Heine, Jewish stories and Hebrew melodies; with a new introduction by Elizabeth Petuchowski (New York, 1987).
Ezra Mendelsohn, ‘On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life’, in Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Studies in Contemporary Jewry volume IX (New York, 1993), 3-16.
Jeffrey S Sposato, The Price of Assimilation: Mendelssohn and the 19th century Anti-Semitic Tradition (New York, 2006).
*Meyerbeer letters to Heine, letters about Wagner. in Heinz and Gudrun Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer. A Life in Letters (London, 1989).
*Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850) and other essays (Lincoln, Nebraska and London 1995).
James Harding, Jacques Offenbach: a biography ( New York, 1980).
*Articles from New Groves’ Dictionary of Music and Musicians on Mendelssohn, Offenbach and Meyerbeer.
Weeks 4/5:
Jewish Nationalism and Zionism
Zionism in Central Europe
*Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna. Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1981),146-175.
*Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State. Translated from the German by Sylvie D’Avigdor, This edition published in 1946 by the American Zionist Emergency Council.
Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (Old-new land, a novel), translated by Paula Arnold.
(Haifa, 1961).
Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the fin-de-siècle : cosmopolitanism and nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, 2001).
Zionism and Nationalism in Eastern Europe
*Steven Zipperstein, ‘Representations of Leadership (and Failure) in Russian Zionism: Picturing Leon Pinsker’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 191-209.
Leo Pinsker, ‘Auto-emancipation: An appeal to his people by a Russian Jew’, in Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York, 1959), 181-198.
*Steven Zipperstein, ‘Symbolic Politics, Religion, and the Emergence of Ahad Haam’, in Shmeul Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Zionism and Religion (Hanover, NH, 1998) 55-66.
Ahad Ha-am, ‘Extracts from his work’, in Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York, 1959), 249-277.
*Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on old and new Judaism (Philadelphia, 1958).
The Zionist Cultural Project
*Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882-1948’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 727-744.
Chaim Rabin, ‘The National Idea and the Revival of Hebrew’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 745-762.
*Gershon Shaked, ‘Shall All Hopes be Fulfilled: Genre and Anti-genre in the Hebrew Literature of Palestine’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 763-789.
Adam Rubin, ‘“Like Black Pearls Whose String Is Broken”:Bialik’s Aron Ha-Sefarim and the Politics of the Jewish Literary Canon’.
*Poems by Khaim Nakhman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichowsky and Uri Zvi Grinberg (to be provided by instructor)
Weeks 6/7:
Jews and Socialism
Socialism in Western and Central Europe
*Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and and ‘The Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York, 1992).
*Rosa Luxemburg. ‘No Room in my heart for Jewish suffering’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 161-2.
*Robert S. Wistrich, ‘Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and the Jewish Labour Movement, 1893-1903’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London 1986) 529-545.
Hannah Arendt‚ Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)’ [book review of J.P. Nettl’s Luxemburg biography] in The Portable Hannah Arendt, 419-437.
The General Jewish Labour Bund
*Nora Levin, Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917: While Messiah Tarried (London, 1978), 219-373.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935-1939’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London 1986) 547-77.
Jews and Bolshevism
*Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), 104-369.
Leon Trotsky, My life; an attempt at an autobiography (With an introd. by Joseph Hansen, New York, 1970).
Antony Polonsky, ‘Jewish Writing in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union 1917-1941’.
Soviet Yiddish Writers (to be provided by instructor)
Week 8:
Jews and Modernism
*Carl Schorske. Fin de Sciècle Vienna. Politics and Culture, 181-207
Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: a cultural history (Cambridge, 1990).
* Sigmund Freud, The History of the Psycho-analytic Movement. German original first published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 4. Translation first published in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series (No. 25). New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. Co.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (London, 1939).
Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New York, 1991).
Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, atheism, and the making of psychoanalysis (New Haven, 1987).
Klara Moricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, racism and utopianism in twentieth century music (Los Angeles, 2009).
*Articles in Groves’ Dictionary of Music and Musicians on Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.
Ritchie Robertson, Kafka : a very short introduction (Oxford, 2004).
Weeks 9/10:
Varieties of Polishness and Russianness.
*Antony Polonsky and Monika Garbowska, ‘Caught in Half-Sentence’: Polish-Jewish Writing before World War 1 and in Interwar Poland’, in Rodział współnej historii: Studia z dziejów Żydów w Polsce, Festschrift for Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw, 2001) 129-151.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘Julian Tuwim: The Polish Heine’.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘Jewish Writers in Independent Poland’.
Ephraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution, Cambridge, 1995.
Maxim D. Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Idenitity in Prose and Poetry, 2 volumes, New York, 2007.
Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Time of Ilya Ehrenburg, New York, 1996.
*Biographies of Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Ilya Ehrenburg,
Genrikh Sapgir and Aleksandr Galich (to be supplied by instructor)
Week 11/12:
The American Jewish Identity
*Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: a history (New Haven, 2004), 208-376.
*Jonathan Sarna, ‘America as it ought to be: the conflict between Jewish rhetoric and American realities’.
Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making. A Study of the Modern Evolution of Judaism, (New York, 1960), 450-511.
Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA, 2004)
Sylvia Fishman, The way into the varieties of Jewishness (Woodstock, Vt., 2007).
Mary Antin, The promised land (introduction and notes by Jules Chametzky; New York, 2001).
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep.
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet.
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.
*Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (Chicago, 2000), Chapters 8 and 9.
Week 13:
Israeli Identities: Secular and Religious
Amos Elon, The Israelis : founders and sons (New York, 1983).
*Shlomit Levy, Hanna Levinsohn and Elihu Katz, ‘Beliefs, Observances and Social Interaction Among Israeli Jews’, in Charles S Liebman and Elihu Katz (eds.), The Jewishness of Israelis. Responses to the Guttman Report, 1-37.
Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (eds.), Divergent Jewish cultures : Israel and America (New Haven, 2001).
Week 14:
Summing Up: Is there Secular Jewish Identity?
Stephen Pinker, ‘Why nature and nurture won’t go away’ Daedalus fall 2004, pp. 1-13.
David Biale, ‘Between Jewish Culture and Multi-culture: Historical and Contemporary Reflections on Jewish Identity’ Lecture
*Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Jewish Century’, 327-371.
David A. Hollinger, ‘Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century’, in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture. Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 17–41.
Secular-isms: Yiddish Culture in the Modern World
Professor Ellie Kellman
This course examines the origins and fruits of Yiddish secular culture in Eastern Europe and North America with a particular focus on literature. Vocal and instrumental music, criticism, journalism, popular fiction, drama, film and painting are also considered.
The rise of a secular Yiddish culture in the mid-nineteenth century was a consequence of the dissolution of the traditional Jewish world in Eastern Europe. Changes in the political and economic landscape of Eastern Europe in concert with competition between two new cultural movements - the embattled Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) and the widely successful pietist movement (Hasidism) - for the allegiance of the Jewish masses created new ground for the development of modern ideas. With the appearance of secular political movements, such as Zionism and Jewish socialism, toward the end of the nineteenth century, many Eastern European Jews turned to secular cultural expression in literature, criticism, drama, music and the visual arts. Some used non-Jewish languages or the newly revived Hebrew language as their means of expression, but the bulk of this new cultural work was created in Yiddish.
A key element of this process of breaking away from traditional Jewish life and creating new secular forms of Jewish culture is that it was replicated by successive generations, right up until the Nazi war against the Jews destroyed Jewish civilization in Europe, thus touching the lives of young Jews from every economic class and religious denomination. Those who emigrated from Eastern Europe to establish new lives in North America also created a secular culture in Yiddish that profoundly influenced the further development of American Jewish life.
Requirements
* Active participation in class. You are expected to do all assignments in advance and to come to every class session prepared to discuss the readings, films, visual and musical examples. There will be evening screenings of three films.
* You will write three 6-8 page papers in this course. You will be able to choose from a list of several topics for each paper. If you wish, you may propose your own paper topics. You may find it helpful to consult the recommended readings listed in the syllabus in formulating paper topics of your own.
* There will be a take-home final exam consisting of essay questions.
Graduate students
Instead of the three short papers and take-home final exam, graduate students will write one research paper of 20+ pages on a topic to be developed in consultation with the professor. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to do the recommended readings listed in the syllabus. Some articles will be found on LATTE. Books containing other recommended readings are on reserve in Goldfarb Library.
Required readings
David E. Fishman: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
Benjamin Harshav: The Meaning of Yiddish
Articles, book chapters, artistic and musical examples available via LATTE
Course Schedule
Introductory discussion
Week 1 Background readings: traditional Jewish life in Eastern European small towns
Readings:
August 31: John Klier: “What Exactly was a Shtetl?” in The Shtetl: Image and Reality, G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov, eds.
Ben-Cion Pinchuk: “How Jewish was the Shtetl?” in Polin vol. 17, Antony Polonsky, ed.
Daniel Soyer: "The Old World" in Jewish Immigrant Associations
Susan A. Glenn: “A Girl Wasn’t Much” in Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation
Yekhezkel Kotik: “My Town” in My Memoirs
Recommended readings
Abraham Ain: “Swislocz: Portrait of a Jewish Community in Eastern Europe” in Voices from the Yiddish, I. Howe and E. Greenberg, eds.
Alla Sokolova: “The Podolian Shtetl as Architectural Phenomenon” in The Shtetl: Image and Reality, G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov, eds.
[Photos of Eastern European Jewish communities on the class LATTE site]
Week 2 History, cultural geography and politics of the Yiddish language
Readings:
Benjamin Harshav: “Language and History” in The Meaning of Yiddish
Benjamin Harshav: “The Nature of Yiddish” in The Meaning of Yiddish
Benjamin Harshav: “Some Sociological Aspects” in The Meaning of Yiddish
Max Weinreich: “Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz” in Voices from the Yiddish, I. Howe and E. Greenberg, eds.
[Maps on the class LATTE site]
Week 3 Haskalah, the Hebrew-Yiddish language war and the shaping of modern Yiddish literature and print culture
Readings:
Describing and defining the Haskalah: articles from Encyclopedia Brittanica and Encyclopedia Judaica
David Biale: “Childhood, Marriage and the Family in the Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment” in The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality, Steven Cohen and Paula Hyman, eds.
Irish Parush: “Reading Women and the Spirit of Jewish Enlightenment” and “Language, Literacy and Literature” in Reading Jewish Women
Naomi Seidman: “Introduction” and chapter 1 from A Marriage Made in Heaven
Recommended readings
David Biale: “Eros and Enlightenment” in Eros and the Jews
Naomi Seidman: “Lawless Attachments, One-Night Stands” in Jews and Other Differences
Week 4 Yiddish culture in the age of Jewish nationalism:
Readings:
David E. Fishman: “The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture: An Overview” and “The Politics of Yiddish” in The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
Itsik N. Gottesman: “Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Roots of Yiddishist Folklore in Poland” in Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland
Joel Berkowitz: “Yiddish Theater: a Thumbnail Sketch” in Yiddish Theater: New Approaches, Joel Berkowitz, ed.
J. Hoberman: Intoduction to A Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds
September 24: Sarah A. Stein: “Creating a Yiddish Newspaper Culture” in Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires
Mark Slobin: “Klezmer Music” article from Encyclopedia Brittanica On Line
Moshe Beregovski: Introduction to Jewish Instrumental Folk Music, Mark Slobin, Robert Rothstein and Michael Alpert, eds. [Musical examples on the class LATTE site]
Recommended readings
Jeffrey Veidlinger: “Reading” and “Musical and Dramatic Societies” in Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire
Topics for paper #1 distributed
Weeks 5-6 Classic Yiddish literature: Sh. Y. Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem
Readings:
Sh.Y. Abramovitsh: from Haskalah to Jewish nationalism
“The Little Man” in Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, Ken Frieden, ed., and “Shem and Japheth on a Train,” in No Star Too Beautiful, Joachim Neugroschel, ed.
Dan Miron: “Sh. Y. Abramovitsh and His ‘Mendele’” in The Image of the Shtetl, pp. 81-92
Sholem Aleichem: voicing the crisis in traditional Jewish life
Stories: “The Pot,” “Chava,” and Motl, the Cantor’s Son (excerpts)
Dan Miron: “Introduction” in Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son
Recommended readings
Ruth Wisse: “The Comedy of Endurance” in The Modern Jewish Canon
Dan Miron: “Sholem Aleichem: Person, Persona, Presence” in The Image of the Shtetl
Benjamin Harshav: “The Semiotics of Yiddish Communication” in The Meaning of Yiddish
October 1: Paper #1 due
Weeks 6-7 Classic Yiddish literature continued: S. An-sky and Y. L. Peretz
Readings:
S. Ansky: The Dybbuk (stage play)
Michael C. Steinlauf: “’Fardibekt!’: An-sky’s Polish Legacy” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: a Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century
Nathaniel Deutsch: “An-sky and the Ethnography of Jewish Women” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: a Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century
Recommended readings
Cecile Kuznitz: “An-sky’s Legacy: the Vilna Historic-EthnographicSociety and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: a Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century
Jack Kugelmass: “The Father of Jewish Ethnography?” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: a Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century
Film: The Dybbuk [evening screening]
I.L. Peretz: “Bontshe the Silent,” “Bryna’s Mendl,” “If Not Higher,” “The Magician” and “What is the Soul?”
Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg: “Introduction” in I.L.Peretz Selected Stories
Recommended readings:
Ruth Wisse: Chapters 1 and 2 in I.L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture
Weeks 7-8 Eastern European Jews and Political Change (1881-1917)
Readings:
David Fishman: “The Bund’s Contribution” and “Reinventing Community” in The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
Zvi Gitelman: “The Legacy of the Bund and the Zionist Movement” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, Zvi Gitelman, ed.
Benjamin Harshav: “The Modern Jewish Revolution” in The Meaning of Yiddish
Recommended readings:
Benjamin Nathans: “Integration and Modernity in Fin de Siècle Russia” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, Zvi Gitelman, ed.
David Aberbach: “Hebrew Literature and Jewish Nationalism in the Tsarist Empire, 1881-1917” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, Zvi Gitelman, ed.
Topics for paper #2 distributed
Week 8 Shaping secular Jewish culture in America – social change
Readings:
Tony Michels: “Socialism in American Jewish History” in A Fire in Their Hearts
Susan A. Glenn: “All of us Young People: the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Work” in Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation
Arthur A. Goren: “Traditional Institutions Transplanted: the Hevra Kadisha in Europe and America” in The Jews of North America, Moses Rischin, ed.
Recommended readings:
Arthur A. Goren: “Pageants of Sorrow, Celebration and Protest” in The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews
Ronald Sanders: Chapters 3 and 4 in The Downtown Jews
Paper #2 due
Week 9 Shaping secular Jewish culture in America - the arts, the Yiddish press and education
Readings:
Irving Howe: “The Restlessness of Learning” in World of Our Fathers
Sadie Frowne: “The Story of a Sweatshop Girl”
Morris R. Cohen: “The New World” in A Dreamer’s Journey
Charles A. Madison: “Early Yiddish Periodicals” in Jewish Publishing in America
Ellen Kellman: “Entertaining New Americans: Popular Fiction in the Forverts (1910-1930)” in Jews and American Culture, vol. 2, edited by Paul Buhle. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers (2006)
B. Gorin: “What do we Expect of Yiddish Drama?” in Building the Future: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and the Making of Tsukunft, Steven Cassedy, ed.
Mark Slobin: “Fiddler Off the Roof: Klezmer Music as an Ethnic Musical Style” in The Jews of North America, Moses Rischin, ed. [Musical examples on the class LATTE site]
Milton W. Brown: “An Explosion of Creativity: Jews and American Art in the Twentieth Century” in Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900-1945, Norman L. Kneeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, eds. [Paintings on the class LATTE site]
Film: Uncle Moses [evening screening]
Recommended readings:
Abraham Cahan: “How Should Yiddish Be Written?” Building the Future: Jewish Immigrant Intellectuals and the Making of Tsukunft, Steven Cassedy, ed.
Hankus Netsky: “Breaking the Silence on American Yiddish Popular Music,” in Yiddish in America, Edward S. Shapiro,.ed.
Nina Warnke: “The Child Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: Yiddish Theatre and its Critics” in Yiddish Theater: New Approaches, Joel Berkowitz, ed.
David Fishman: “From Yiddishism to American Judaism: the Impact of American Yiddish Schools on Their Students” in Imagining the American Jewish Community, Jack Wertheimer, ed.
Week 10 American Yiddish literature
Readings:
Benjamin Harshav: “Yiddish Poetry in America” and “Introspectivism: a Modernist Poetics” in The Meaning of Yiddish
Selected poems from Sing, Stranger: a Century of American Yiddish Poetry, Benjamin Harshav, ed.
Borukh Glazman: “The Hand of God” in New Yorkish and Other American Yiddish Stories, Max Rosenfeld, ed.
Isaac Raboy: “Joe the Tailor” in New Yorkish and Other American Yiddish Stories, Max Rosenfeld, ed.
Eliezer Blum-Alquit: “Attorney Street” and “Amerika, Amerika” in Revolt of the Apprentices and Other Stories
Recommended reading:
Irving Howe: Chapter 3 in World of Our Fathers
Week 11 Twentieth-century Yiddish culture in Poland
Readings:
“Henekh” and “Esther” in Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust, Jeffrey Shandler, ed.
Michael C. Steinlauf: “Jewish Politics and Youth Culture in Interwar Poland – Preliminary Evidence from the YIVO Autobiographies” in The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics, Zvi Gitelman, ed.
Ellen Kellman: “Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt!: Towards the History of Yiddish Reading in Inter-War Poland” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
Natan Gross: “Mordechai Gebirtig: the Folk Song and the Cabaret Song” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife [Musical examples on the class LATTE site]
Recommended readings:
Nathan Cohen: “Shund and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
Edward Portnoy: “Exploiting Tradition: Religious Iconography in Cartoons of the Polish Yiddish Press” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
Film: Yidl mitn fidl [evening screening]
Topics for paper #3 distributed
Week 12 Twentieth-century Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union
Readings:
Zvi Gitelman: “Revolution and the Ambiguities of Liberation” in A Century of Ambivalence: the Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union
David Shneer: “Ideology and Jewish Language Politics: How Yiddish Became the National Language of Soviet Jewry” in Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (1918-1930)
Jeffrey Veidlinger: “Soviet Jewish Culture or Soviet Culture in Yiddish?” in The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage
Anna Shternshis: “Soviet and Kosher in the Ukrainian shtetl” in The Shtetl: Image and Reality, G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov, eds.
Susan Tumarkin Goodman: “Chagall’s Paradise Lost: the Russian Years” in Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections [Paintings on the class LATTE site]
Recommended readings:
Gennady Estraikh: Chapters 1 and 2 in In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism
Paper #3 due
Week 13 Culture in the Vilna ghetto
Readings:
Dina Abramovicz: Guardians of a Tragic Heritage: Reminiscences and Observations of an Eyewitness
David E. Fishman: Embers Plucked from the Fire: the Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna in The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture
Solon Beinfeld: “The Cultural Life of the Vilna Ghetto” in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual vol. 1
Avrom Sutskever: “Teacher Mira,” “The Fortress” and “The Lead Plates of the Rom Printers” in Selected Poetry and Prose, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, eds. (selections)
Recommended readings:
Rachel Kostanian-Danzig: “Culture in the Vilna Ghetto” in Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto
Week 14 Yiddish culture since the Holocaust
Readings:
Ruth Ellen Gruber: “The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
Alex Lubet: “Transmigrations: Wolf Krakowski’s Yiddish Worldbeat in its Socio-Musical Context” in Polin vol. 16 Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Afterlife
[Musical examples on the class LATTE site]
Alicia Svigals: “Why We Do This Anyway” in American Klezmer – Its Roots and Offshoots, Mark Slobin, ed.
Jeffrey Shandler: “Postvernacularity, or Speaking of Yiddish” in Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture
Dovid Katz: “In the Twenty-First Century” in Words on Fire: the Unfinished Story of Yiddish
Avrom Sutskever: “Poems from a Diary” (1974) in Selected Poetry and Prose, Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, eds.
Recommended readings:
Jeffrey Shandler: “Imagining Yiddishland” and “Yiddish as Performance Art” in Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “Sounds of Sensibility” in American Klezmer, Mark Slobin, ed.
Take-home final distributed
Take-home final due
World Without God?: Theories of Secularization
Professor Eugene R. Sheppard
Course Description
This course addresses the meaning and origins of the process of secularization by looking at a number of thinkers who have tried to explain what it means to live in a modern world independent of God. The construction of secular politics will also be a central focus of the course. Can secularization account for new foundations of politics and culture or must it always be to a certain degree inexplicable without reference to religious phenomena?
This advanced seminar surveys various debates concerning the historical process and philosophical-political significance of secularization, most especially the secularization of political norms. The course concentrates on the history of European thought since the 17th century, when the scientific revolution and the radical Enlightenment began to set reset European politics and science on thoroughly rational foundations. In the first half of the course, we will investigate historical and philosophical accounts of the translation from religion to science, or philosophical naturalism, in the early modern and modern period, paying special attention to Spinoza’s critique of religion and Hegel’s philosophical recasting of theology. In the second half of the semester, we will read some of the most consequential theories of secularization developed over the last 150 years by Hegel, Marx, Weber, Schmitt, Adorn and Horkheimer, Löwith, Arendt, and Blumenberg. We will also explore the question of how Judaism and Islam might be understood and transformed into secular phenomena.
Class Requirements
This course is a seminar for critical discussion. The readings are challenging, but no individual session will expect more than 150 pages of reading. The chief requirement in such a format is that you come to class prepared to engage in the discussion. You are therefore expected to have completed all of the assigned reading every week of the term. There will be only one paper, 13-18 pages in length, on a topic to be decided upon in consultation with me by March 15. A hardcopy of the paper is due in my faculty mailbox by 2pm on Thursday, May 6.
Final Grade determined by performance in the following two elements:
Class Participation 25%
Final Paper 75%
Books available for purchase
Required:
1. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Hacket, 2nd Edition)
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader (W.W. Norton & Co.; Second Edition, 1978)
3. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination. (Princeton, 1989)
4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Penguin Classics, 2002)
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, 1979)
6. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology. (Chicago, 2006)
7. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2002)
8. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History. (Chicago, 1957; and reprintings)
9. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. (MIT,1985)
Books on Reserve
1. Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton 2009)
2. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003)
3. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Harvard, 2002)
4. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon Press; 3rd edition, 2001)
5. David Biale, Secular Judaism
Weekly Syllabus
Please note: Readings from the course-reader, available on Latte, are marked with an asterisk (*).
Part I: Religion and the Radical Enlightenment
Week 1: Introduction: The Varieties of Secularization
Week 2: Historical Problems Concerning the Possibility or Impossibility of Unbelief
Reading: Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century,
selections: pp. xi-xxxii, 11-16, 90-100, 101-126, 147-163,
174-211, and pp.335-464.
Week 3: Spinoza, God, and the Naturalization of Religion
Reading: Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, selections, tba.
Steven Nadler, “Baruch Spinoza and the Naturalization of Judaism”*
Week 4: Spinoza, God, and the Naturalization of Religion, continued.
Reading: Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, selections, tba.
Week 5: From Theology to the Natural Sciences: The Migration of Theological Concepts
Reading: Amos Funkenstein, Theology & the Scientific Imagination, selections, tba.
Part II: Modern Theories of Secularization: Religion, Economics, Politics
Week 6 Hegel, Phenemonology of Spirit Part I.
Week 7: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Part II
Week 8: From Philosophy of Religion to Economics: Marx
Reading:
Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 16-52, 143-145, 469-500
Week 9: Protestantism and Secularization: Weber
Reading:
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Michael Hughley, “The Idea of Secularization in the Works of Max Weber”*
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation”*
Week 10: Carl Schmitt and Political Theology
Reading: Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
G.L. Ulmen, “The Sociology of the State: Carl Schmitt and Max Weber”*
Week 11: Historical Meaning as Secularized Theology: Löwith
Reading: Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, selections, tba.
Suggested Reading:
Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Löwith’s Concept of Secularization”*
Week 12: Hans Blumenberg: The Autonomy of the Secular and the Reoccupation Thesis
Reading: Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, selections, tba.
Robert M. Wallace, “Progress, Secularization, and Modernity: The Löwith-Blumenberg Debate”*
Week 13: The Perils of Enlightenment and Incomplete Secularization: Horkheimer and Adorno
Reading: Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (selections)
Week 14: Secularization of Judaism and Islam
Reading: David Biale, Secular Judaism; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (selections)
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