Core Courses
The following are examples of core courses of programs that have been part of the Posen Project and taught at colleges and universities in North America.
Bard College
Jewishness Beyond Religion: Defining Secular Jewish Culture
In the pre-modern world Jewish identity was centered on religion but expressed as well in how one made a living, what clothes one wore, and what language one spoke. In modern times, Jewish culture became more voluntary and more fractured. While some focused on Judaism as (only) a religion, both the most radical and the most typical way in which Jewishness was redefined was in secular terms. This course will explore the intellectual, social, and political movements that led to new secular definitions of Jewish culture and identity in the modern period, focusing on examples drawn from Western and Eastern Europe and the United States.
Click here for the complete Bard College syllabus
Binghamton University
Secular Jewish Ideologies and Identities
This course will focus on the emergence and development in modern times of essentially non-religious definitions of Jewish identity and strategies for maintaining Jewish survival. It will explore the principal writings of the most important modern Jewish secularists from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as well as the programs for action outlined and implemented by secularist leaders and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Click here for the complete Binghamton University syllabus
Brandeis University
Secular Jews: Lives and Choices from 1750 to the Present
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.
Click here for the complete Brandeis University syllabus
Dickinson College
Secular Jews from Spinoza to Seinfeld
This course traces the development of secular Judaism through an analysis of key figures in Western Jewish thought and culture. We will seek to understand how these figures have understood themselves and their place within the societies in which they lived. We will examine the many forms that secular Judaism takes, and the many different ways that secular Jews have found to relate to their Jewish heritage. The course will conclude with a look of recent films and television episodes that explore secular Jewish themes.
Click here for the complete Dickinson College syllabus
Goucher College
Judaism, Secularism, Modernity
The modern world opened up vistas of possibilities for Jews, but it also posed profound problems for Judaism as a religious culture. The possibility of political and social integration, demographic changes, and development of a modern historical consciousness challenged traditional models of Jewish religiosity and identity, and opened up the space for new, secular forms of “Jewishness.”
Click here for the complete Goucher syllabus.
Graduate Theological Union
Secular Jewish Thought
By nearly every demographic measure, most of the world’s Jews today can be described as secular, that is, as living outside of traditional Jewish belief or practice. (Because practice is so central to Judaism, it may be more reliable to define secularism as non-observance of Jewish law rather than by recourse to categories of belief, though certainly changes in belief have been important in Jewish secularization and secularism.) Nevertheless, the history and phenomenology of Jewish secular identities and cultures remains relatively unexplored - untaught in Jewish schools and often neglected in both popular and academic studies of Jewish experience. This course aims to provide Jewish adults with the tools to understand Jewish secularism from historical, philosophical and cultural perspectives.
Click here for the complete GTU syllabus
Hampshire College
The Rise of Secular Jewish Culture
Jewishness has always involved more than religion. Jewish identity, even in the pre-modern world, was expressed through language, work, music, food, and other cultural behaviors. Modernity brought with it even more possibilities, and a sense of radically different political, cultural, and artistic Jewish identities beyond religion began to emerge. This interdisciplinary course draws upon history, literature, political philosophy, and sociology in tracing the rise of a pluralistic, multifaceted modern Jewish culture in Europe and the U.S. between the seventeenth century and the Second World War. We begin with Spinoza, the most significant “heretical” Jewish thinker in the 17th century, and continue through the European Enlightenment, the rise of modern Jewish nationalist movements, and the emergence of secular Yiddish and Hebrew literature. Finally, we will address the crisis of Jewish modernity provoked by the Holocaust, and briefly survey secular Jewish identities today.
Click here for the complete Hampshire College syllabus
Harvard University
Theories of Secularization
What is secularization? What does it mean to describe the modern world as wholly secular or independent of any prior religious foundations? Is modern political identity intelligible apart from religion? Or does politics remain a translation of religious concepts and therefore a mode of political theology? This advanced undergraduate
course surveys various debates concerning the historical process and philosophical-political significance of secularization, most especially the secularization of political norms.
Click here for the complete Harvard University syllabus.
Hunter College
Topics in History: Secular Judaism
The modern world has brought forth a proliferation of Jewish identities, including many that are primarily secular. These are conceptions of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish collective and personal identity that are not primarily religious or that are not religious at all. They do not advocate faith in God, in Torah as a divine revelation in any sense, or in the communal authority of the rabbi. Instead, they place at the center peoplehood, social justice, and personal rootedness in the Jewish heritage. This course will describe these ideologies and their main proponents and analyze their relation to modern science, historical scholarship, and the changed status of the Jews in society.
Click here for the complete Hunter College syllabus
Lehigh University
East European Jewish Civilization in the Modern Era, 1750s-1939
East European Jewry created the world to which most American Jews and a half of all Israeli Jews trace their origin. This course surveys, within the context of European history as a whole, the unique civilization that Jews built in the lands of Eastern Europe. It will focus on the vast changes in Jewish life resulting from the encounter of the Jewish
communities of the areas, particularly of the Polish territories and Russia, with modernity. It will investigate the political, social and cultural history of these communities since the middle of the eighteenth century until the Second World War (1939-1945). The investigation will also include the discussion of mutual relations between the Jewish communities and the dominant nations of the region.
Click here for the complete Lehigh University syllabus.
Miami University (Ohio)
Secular Jewish Culture from the Enlightenment to Zionism
The Jewish encounter with modernity saw traditional Jewish society as a socio-religious way of life bifurcate into a more narrowly circumscribed religion, on the one hand, and an ethnic culture, on the other. Coeval with this process, form the moment of their (partial) inclusion in the European nation state, Jews must negotiate their Jewish heritage and religious-cultural identity in relation to modern national identity. In this course we will survey some of the major developments in secular Jewish culture, thought and politics in Western and Eastern Europe, and to a lesser degree also in the United States and the British Mandate of Palestine, between the late 18th century and the founding of Israel in 1948. We wil study attempts to inscribe Jewish identity within various European nationalisms; the relationship between Jewish identity and various forms of (international) socialism; and competing Zionist projects that emerged against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle European antisemitism.
Click here for the complete Miami University (Ohio) syllabus
Muhlenberg College
Jewish Experience in a Secular Age: A History of Modern Jewish Identity
This course will explore secular Jewish experiences in the modern west. We will examine how traditional Jewish society has been transformed by new ideas and new social realities by exploring the many and multifaceted ways that Jews have constructed modern, secular identities in the wake of those transformations. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, as well as film and literature, this course will consider the ways in which Jewish identity has been defined and redefined in the modern period across Europe and the United States. Particular attention will be paid to questions of gender and the ways that men and women each experienced processes of modernization and secularization.
Click here for the complete Muhlenberg College syllabus
Queens College
Jews Beyond Religion: Aspects of Secular Judaism
Modernity: How did Jews change yet remain Jews? In this course we’ll explore the rise of secular Jewish cultures, asking such questions as: What is the process of secularization? What do we mean by cultural or secular Jew? How are secular/cultural Jews claiming space on the Jewish spectrum? We’ll combine analytical academic readings with film and other art forms, and lectures and discussions leavened by guest speakers and performers. We’ll examine intellectual and political Jewish wrestling with religion, nation, and culture, race and gender, looking at competing notions of what binds Jews together: shared family and peoplehood? or common doctrine and practice? We’ll study the emergence of political movements such as the Bund, Ottomanism, Zionisms and other nationalisms, and investigate the status of Diasporism.
Click here for the complete Queens College syllabus.
Rice University
Secularizing Jewry / Judaizing Secularity
This course examines the intersection and bisections of a secular Judaism and a Jewish secularism from the seventeenth century until the present. For they evince an ambiguity in the valid priorities assigned the terms of secularity and Jewry. On the one hand, secularism arises from a revolution within and a reformulation of Judaism, such that Jewish religion haunts the secular. On the other hand, secularism designates Jews' coordinated defense of a particular cultural resource threatened by globally hegemonic regimes, from Islam to Christendom to capitalism and communism. In the course of examining this ambiguity we raise theoretical and historical questions.
Click here for the complete Rice University syllabus.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Making Jews Modern: Varieties of Secular Judaism
This course will examine the many different ways Jews have engaged the challenges of modernity through a wide array of new secular cultural activities--including autobiography, theater, music, art, film, journalism, language use, architecture, modern scholarship, political action, philanthropy, foodways, and tourism. Primary works and
secondary literature will be drawn from the Enlightenment era to contemporary times and from an array of Jewish communities, focusing on Europe and North America.
Click here for the complete Rutgers syllabus
Temple University
Jewish Secular Civilizations I: From Spinoza to Seinfeld
What is it about Jerry Stiller's humor that is quintessentially Jewish? What makes a corned beef special "Jewish food"? Can atheist Jews “believe” in Judaism? How is the ex-communicated philosopher Spinoza a “Jewish” thinker? This course is a survey of modern Jewish secularism. Jewish secularism raises problems about the nature and viability of “traditions,” “faith,” “belief,” and “practice” in the modern world. We will focus on how Jews have critiqued Jewish religious traditions, and in turn created new sorts of Jewish traditions, politics, and cultures, as we try to answer the question: What is secular Judaism?
Click here for the complete Temple University syllabus
Tulane University
Building Jewish Identity: Secular Judaism in Historical Perspective
The starting point for our investigation of a distinctively secular Jewish conception of the world will be the fact that roughly one half of the American Jewish population possesses a secular non-religious orientation (American Jewish Identity Survey, 2001). How did this non-religious orientation arise amongst what many people consider to be a religious community? We will explore how certain non- religious features, such as shared culture, language, customs, dress, and education played an integral role in the definition of Jews and Judaism from their inception, and the role played by these features in the constitution of variant secular forms of Judaism and secular Jewish orientations in the modern period.
Click here for the complete Tulane University syllabus
University at Albany
Secular Jewish Identity and Culture
This course is an exploration of the creation of a secularized Judaism. Since the onset of the Enlightenment (if not earlier), many Jews have sought to construct expressions of Judaism that are not contingent upon religious obligations and practices. After an introduction in which we will discuss some of the tensions between secular and religious Judaism in contemporary times, we will explore several ancient and medieval challenges to normative Judaism (Hellenism, messianism, and historical consciousness) that helped to set the foundation for the shaping of modern secular Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will then looks at several "snapshots" of secular Judaism in the ninenteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries in the regions of Europe, Russia, the United States, and Israel. At the end of the course, we will consider the possibility of a "post-secular" Judaism.
Click here for the complete University at Albany syllabus
University of California - Davis
Secular Jewish Thinkers
Is it possible to be Jewish without believing in Judaism? Since the
dawn of the modern age, secular Jewish thinkers have sought to
construct identities beyond Judaism, that is, beyond the bounds of
religion. This course will trace the history of secular Jewish thought
from the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza to the
twentieth century. Some of the thinkers who will be considered, such as
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, rejected religion altogether, while
others, including Spinoza, Franz Kafka, and Gershom Scholem, redefined
religion and theology in new, often radically subversive ways.
Click here for the complete UC Davis syllabus
University of California, Los Angeles
The Spirit of Secularism: Jewish Cultures in a Secular Age
This course examines the emergence of distinct forms of Jewish culture in the modern age that challenge or depart from traditional Jewish sources and authority. The subject is the rise of a secular Jewish culture, or more accurately, series of secular Jewish cultures over the past two centuries. It begins with a discussion of key definitional questions: What is secularity? Can we trace roots of a secular impulse Jewish culture prior to modern times? The course will explore diverse cultural expressions beginning in early modern times and extending up to the present. In the process, students will take note of the substantial degree of intellectual and cultural creativity produced by modern Jews as they have sought to refashion their identities beyond traditional religious categories.
Click here for the complete UCLA syllabus
University of Colorado - Boulder
Global Jewish Secular Societies
This course uses a transnational lens to explore contemporary debates about Jewish people, places, and practices of identity and community. Drawing on history, sociology, international studies, and anthropology, students will examine the places that Jewish people have called 'home,' and what has made, or continues to make those places 'Jewish.' The course will also explore diverse practices that express the extraordinary varieties of Jewishness.
Click here for the complete UC syllabus
University of Denver
Jews on the Move: Culture, People and Ideas
This course focuses on culture, people and ideas to think about how Jewish lives and communities have changed with the emergence of modernity, particularly in the United States. Jews have been characterized as people perpetually on the move, from early biblical stories of exodus and exile to contemporary narratives of global migration and tourism. Movement in this sense is both literal – in the case of Jews who pack up, pick up, and leave for other places – and metaphorical – in the case of Jews who traverse long distances to adopt new and different identities. We will focus on a specific group and period of time: European Jews and their descendants encountering the modern age of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries in the United States.
Click here for the complete University of Denver syllabus
University of Florida
Secular Jewish Culture
In their encounter with modernity, Jews confronted unprecedented challenges that required them to redefine themselves in non-traditional ways. Central to this process of rearticulating Jewish identity was the production of a new body of Jewish texts remarkable in its heterogeneity. This class explores the key texts of Jewish culture as it developed outside the boundaries of religious life and forms. Throughout the course we read selections from a range of sources from within Jewish cultural environments in order to orient ourselves towards the various expressions of Jewish history, politics, literature, and art. No prior coursework is required.
Click here for the complete University of Florida syllabus.
University of Kansas
Jewish Culture in a Secular Age: The Modern Jewish Revolution
Beginning in the nineteenth century largely in Western Europe, and continuing through the twentieth century in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Jews and Jewish communities have been part of a secularizing world, even as Jewish religion and law have likewise been transformed. Jews have responded through the invention of organizations and idioms inconceivable before this era, often both in spite of and in response to massive dislocation. In the past century, Jews became full participants and protagonists in their surrounding cultures and societies, and simultaneously developed new, contingent and flexible ways of identifying as Jews. This course will study how the invention of modern and secular Jewish cultures leaves the question of Jewishness and its boundaries perhaps more richly complex than ever before.
Click here for the complete University of Kansas syllabus
University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Negotiating Religion and State: Jewish Secularism and the Emergence of European Modernity
Hotly contested issues such as the "right" to wear the veil in French public schools and the "right" to exhibit a massive sculpture of the Ten Commandments in an American Court of Law are just two examples of the eruption of "fundamentalist" religious claims upon the state in the West. Although the relations of Religion and State have been negotiated differently across national boundaries, this course will focus on the distinctive role of Jews and Judaism in shaping some of the basic terms of these negotiations. First in the Napoleonic "Sanhedrin," and then in the development of the so-called, "Jewish question" in the emergence of the modern nation-states, this negotiation will be examined, followed by the negotiation of the question of Religion and State in early modern philosophy and political thought and then the emergence of new forms of Jewish nationalism, including Zionism. The final segment will deal with the question of the separation/relation between Religion and State in the modern State of Israel and its consequences for both religious and secular forms of Judaism.
Click here for the complete University of Massachusetts-Amherst syllabus
University of Michigan
Secular Jewish Thought
This course examined three themes:
1. The ideas of enlightenment and progress and the question of emancipation: are the ideas of enlightenment and the fundamental beliefs of Judaism compatible? Can Jews become enlightened and remain Jews? Can religious Jews participate as citizens in modern politics? We examined how the ideas of enlightenment, progress, and emancipation were formed and transformed in debates on these questions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
2. The question of identity: what does it mean to be a secular Jew? Can it be a national or cultural identity and of what sort? Is it compatible with other identities (as a member of the working class, as a citizen, for example)? What are the relations between individual identity and group identity? After 1948, is Jewish identity tied to the State of Israel? Is support for the State of Israel or its policies a constitutive part of being Jewish?
3. Identity after the holocaust: This section examined the ways in which Jewish philosophers re-examined the enlightenment ideas of reason, universalism, and progress following the experiences of the holocaust.
Click here for the complete University of Michigan syllabus.
University of Toronto
Secularism and Strife: The Cultural History of Modern Jews
Modern Jewish culture is the product of a dynamic interaction between two sets of opposed elements: religion versus secularism and the individual versus the collective. This course will analyze the historical roots and development of the four possible combinations of these elements: the religious collective, the secular individual, the
secular collective, and the religious individual. Our starting point will be the invention of the modern Jewish self in the late 18th and 19th-century Jewish Enlightenment. We will see how Jews reacted to new promises of personal freedom by reforming, reframing, and abandoning Judaism. We will trace the connection between these developments and the creation in the late 19th and 20th centuries of new forms of secular, collective Jewish
identity through movements such as communism, diaspora nationalism, and Zionism.
Click here for the complete University of Toronto syllabus
University of Virginia
Judaism between Modernity and Secularization: An Introduction to Judaism as a Culture
Beginning with the European Enlightenment, the Jewish experience of modernity was marked by a radical transformation of communal life, religious habits, and individual as well as collective self-definition. Modernity not only redefined the boundaries of Judaism from outside and from within, but also called for a Jewish response to the process of secularization. While the modern period in Europe ended, arguably, with the advent of the Holocaust, the process of secularization continues to manifest itself in contemporary Jewish culture, whether in Israel, the United States, or the reemerging centers of Jewish life in Europe. At the same time, the relative unity of Jewish culture and practice in pre-modern time has given way to a plurality of Judaisms, ranging from Orthodoxy to Secular Humanism.
Click here for the complete University of Virginia syllabus.
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