Course Description

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the intellectual son Ivan puts forth an axiom that preoccupied 19^th-century thinkers: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”  What would become of morality without faith?  On what grounds would we construct social and political bonds?  What would limit human appetites and desires?  Where would we find meaning and inspiration?  This course takes up the question of ethics without religion in the context of modern Jewish history, culture and politics.  Tracing out the history of Jewish thought from the Enlightenment to the 20^th century, we consider how Jewish thinkers have grappled with fundamental ethical questions in an increasingly secular world.  Central themes include the role of the sacred in the modern world, alienation and exclusion, national consciousness and utopianism, emancipation and assimilation, memory, and cultural despair.  We read historical documents, theological treatises, philosophical essays, novels, poems, and letters.  Authors include Baruch Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, H.M. Bialik, Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha-Am, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Heine, and Amos Oz.

“Ethics Without Religion” is the core course of the new Jewish Studies Program at The New School.  Students who are interested in pursuing Jewish Studies are also encouraged to take “The Origins of Secular Society: Jewish Intellectual History.”  “The Origins of Secular Society” is not a prerequisite for this course.

Required Texts 

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Moses and Monotheism

Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State

Franz Kafka, Letter to my Father

Solomon Maimon, The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon

Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise

Recommended Secondary Readings

David Biale, ed., The Cultures of the Jews, v. 3: Modern Encounters

Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times

Renee Kogel and Zev Katz, eds., Judaism in a Secular Age: An Anthology of Humanistic Jewish Thought

Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2^nd. Ed.

Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of the Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870

I. Introduction

Jan. 25 Jonathan Sarna, “The Rise, Fall & Rebirth of Secular Judaism,” Contemplate: The International Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought 4 (2007)

Peter Berger, “The Process of Secularization” and “Secularization and the Problem of Legitimation,” in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)

II. Secularization, Emancipation, and Enlightenment

Feb. 1 Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670), preface, ch. 4-8 and 13-20

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, chs. 1, 2, and 7

Feb. 8 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783)

Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (1973), chs. I, III, and IV

Feb. 15 No class

Feb. 22 Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography (1792-93)

Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenmenbt of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (2006), exerpts

III. Persecution and Pogroms

March 1 H.N. Bialik (1873-1974), “In the City of Slaughter” (1903)

Michael I. Aronson, “The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia in 1881,” in J.D. Klier and S. Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (2004)

IV. Assimilation

March 8 Heinrich Heine, “A Ticket of Admission to European Culture” (1823, c. 1854), in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World (1995)

Yigal Lossin, “A Jew of the Third Kind: Heine: His Double Life,” Contemplate 4 (2007)

March 15 Spring break

March 22 Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (1995), ch. I

Irish Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (2004), ch. 2

V. National Consciousness and Zionism

March 29 Theodor Herzl, A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question (1896)

April 5 Ahad Ha-Am, “The Law of the Heart” (1894), “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem” (1897), and “Flesh and Spirit” (1904)

Dov Ber Borochov, “The National Question and the Class Struggle” (1905), “Our Platform” (1906)

VI. Modern Thought: Existentialism, Alienation, Psychoanalysis

April 12 Franz Kafka, Letter to My Father (1919), “Before the Law,” and “My Father’s Bourgeois Judaism” (1919)

Recommended Reading: Sara Loeb, Franz Kafka: A Question of Jewish Identity: Two Perspectives (2002)

April 19 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Moses and Monotheism (1939)

VII. German Jews

April 26 Isaac Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1968)

George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (1997), excerpts

May 3 Hannah Arendt, excerpts from Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1958), excerpts from The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978)

VIII. “A Land of Two Peoples:” The Arab-Israeli Conflict

May 10 Martin Buber, “We Need the Arabs, They Need Us!,” (1954), in Mendes-Flohr, ed., A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (2005)

Selections from Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (1976) 

May 17 Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2005)

The Book of the World: Interpretation in Freud, Kafka, Benjamin, and Derrida

Professor Carolyn Vellenga Berman

Course Description

This course surveys some of the founding works of modern literature, psychology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, with the aim of uncovering their debt to Jewish tradition.  The notorious complexity of modern thought may derive from the ancient rabbinic practice of midrash, which condoned plural and even divergent readings of the bible.  For the rabbis, the work of interpretation was never done:  “Deliberate over it again and again, for everything is contained in it.”  The modern works of secular Jews like Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida may be said to transfer these strategies of biblical analysis to a variety of new “texts,” ranging from dreams and free-associations (Freud) to private fantasies and public bureaucracies (Kafka), from storytelling practices and city planning (Benjamin) to philosophy and autobiography (Derrida).  In this course, we read short works by all of these writers alongside biographical and critical essays exploring how they confronted their Jewishness.  We develop an understanding of influential strands of modern thought, while highlighting their roots in Jewish culture.  This course is recommended for students preparing for graduate study in literature, cultural studies, or Jewish studies.  

Required Texts

Peter Gay.  A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis.  Yale UP, 2009.    

Sigmund Freud.  Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.  Touchstone, 1997.  

Franz Kafka.  The Trial.  Schocken, 1995.  

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories.  Schocken, 1995.    

Walter Benjamin.  Illuminations: Essays and Reflections.  Schocken, 1969.  

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol, 3, 1935-1938.  Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2006.  

Jacques Derrida.  Of Grammatology.  Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.

Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida.  Jacques Derrida.  U of Chicago P, 1999.  

Schedule of Assignments 

1/27 Introduction

From Midrash to Modern

2/3 Stefano Levi Della Torre: “Midrash”

Bible: Genesis 1:1 - 2:24

Midrash: “Creation.”  Selections from Genesis Rabbah.  (all in packet)

Overanalyze This:  Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

2/10 Bernstein: Freud and the Legacy of Moses, Preface and Chapter 1 (in packet)

Freud: Moses and Monotheism, Part III, Section 2 (in packet)

Guest Lecture: Richard J. Bernstein, author of Freud and the Legacy of Moses

2/17 Freud: Civilization and its Discontents, chapters 1-2, 5-8 (in packet)

Peter Gay: The Godless Jew, chapter 3

2/24 Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (excerpt, in packet)

Freud: Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Before the Law:  Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

3/3 Kafka: “The Metamorphosis,” “A Report to the Academy,” “Investigations of a Dog,” “Josefine, the Singer, or:  the ‘Mouse Folk,’” in The Complete Stories

Kafka: “My Father’s Bourgeois Judaism” (in packet) 

Deleuze and Guattari: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (excerpt, in packet)

3/10 Paper 1 due

Kafka: “Jackals and Arabs,” “A Crossbreed,”“Cares of a Family Man,” in The Complete Stories

Isenberg:  Between Redemption and Doom, chapter 1 (in packet)

Guest Lecture: Noah Isenberg, author of Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism

3/17 NO CLASS - SPRING BREAK

3/24 Kafka: The Trial

The Task of the Critic: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

3/31 Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” Illuminations by Walter Benjamin

Benjamin:  “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” “Some Reflections on Kafka,” “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (all in Illuminations) 

4/7 Isenberg: Between Redemption and Doom, chapter 4 (in packet)

Benjamin: “The Currently Effective Messianic Elements,” “Critique of Violence,”“Capitalism as Religion,” “A Novel of German Jews” (all in photocopy packet)

4/14 Revised papers due (optional)

Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” “Review of Brod’s Franz Kafka,” “Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka,” “Berlin Childhood around 1900" (all in Selected Writings, vol. 3)

Guest Lecture: Jaeho Kang, author of Walter Benjamin and the Media 

Text without End:  Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

4/21 Derrida: “Before the Law” (1992), “Shibboleth: For Paul Célan” (1984).  In Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Célan.  2005.  

Gideon Ofrat, “The Last Jew,” The Jewish Derrida, chapter 1 (in packet)

4/28 Derrida: “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority” (1992), in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, and “Abraham, the Other,” in Judeities 1-35 (all in packet)  

In-class Screening: Derrida’s Elsewhere, dir. Safaa Fathy (2001)

5/5 Derrida: Of Grammatology, Part I, chapter 1 “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing”; and Part II, chapter 2, “...That Dangerous Supplement”; pp. 6-26 and 141-164.  

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Books 1 and 3 (excerpt, in packet)

5/12 Final Paper due

Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida.  Jacques Derrida.  (excerpts, t.b.a.)

N.B.  A meeting will be scheduled with the instructional librarian at the New School library during the semester.  

Select Bibliography

Bergo, Bettina, Joseph Cohen et al, Ed.  Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida.  Fordham UP, 2007. 

Bernstein, Richard J.  Freud and the Legacy of Moses.

Cixous, Hélène.  Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2004). 

Derrida, Jacques.  Archive Fever.  

Freud, Sigmund.  Civilization and its Discontents.  Norton, 2005. 

----------.  Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious 

Hartman, Geoffrey.  Midrash and Literature.  Yale UP, 1986.  

Isenberg, Noah.  Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism.  U of Nebraska P, 1999.    

Loeb, Sara.  Franz Kafka: A Question of Jewish Identity: Two Perspectives  

Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Jehuda Reinharz, Ed.  The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History.  2^nd Ed.  

Scholem, Gershom.  Walter Benjamin:  Story of a Friendship.