The core course at Rice University is Jewish But Not Religious: Ancient and Modern. A previously taught core course was Secularizing Jewry/Judaizing Secularity. The two peripheral courses are, German-Jewish Literature and Culture, and Spinoza and Levinas: Seminar in Secular Jewish Thought.

Jewish But Not Religious: Ancient and Modern

Instructed by Dr. Matthias Henze and Dr. Gregory Kaplan

Inspired by Azzan Yadin, Rutgers University

This course compares secular Jewish cultures of the Second Temple period with those of the modern period (seventeenth to twentieth centuries). The Jewish move into modernity is generally understood as a radical break with classical Judaism, a relatively closed and homogeneous universe that moderns have opened up to the inclusion of new and varied choices. To whatever extent the characterization of 'the classical" is true of medieval Judaism, it is not true of the Jewish world in late antiquity - after the close of the Hebrew Biblical canon yet prior to the Islamic conquest and the concomitant ascent of the Bablonian academies. Indeed, there are striking parallels between the parameters of choices available to Jews in late antiquity and in the modern West. Both periods/regions are characterized by an encounter of Jews and Judaism with a dominant culture that is not defined in competing religious terms and whose permeable borders are simultaneously inviting for and threatening to Jewish identity and community.

In surveying the two periods, we find that - despite undeniable historical differences - the circumstances addressed and strategies employed by Jewish cultures of the day were strikingly similar. Perhaps we could even argue that the religious character of "Judaism" in these periods is forged in response to the relative secularizations of Jewish culture (for a variety of reasons, to be considered). Beyond their common openness and fluidity, we find a series of issues that emerge as a result of attempts to live a secular Jewish life: defining the core of moral values and the limits of ethnic boundaries; cultivating languages; transmitting literatures; forging nationalities; relating homeland and exile; engaging with popular art, literature, and philosophy.

Secularizing Jewry / Judaizing Secularity
Professor Daniel Cohen and Dr. Gregory Kaplan

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.

To what extent has the Jewish religion been transformed, rigidified, or jettisoned by the Jewish people living under the conditions of secularization? Conversely, how has secularism been prompted, shaped, or affected by symbols, images, and practices inherited from the Jewish religion? Does secularization help or hinder Jewish life, and vice versa? What features characterize secular Jewish culture in the modern era? What is secular Judaism? Articulating and addressing such questions will help us begin to reframe the terms of secularity and Jewry from a historical perspective that could yield predictive and prognostic conclusions about their future.

Course Schedule

Wks 1-2. Theoretical Problems
Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question"
Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew"
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Antisemite and Jew"
Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews"

Wks 3-4. Historical Context
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (Syracuse, 1998)
Moshe Rosman, "Innovative Tradition," in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews (Schocken
Books, 2002), 519-570
Richard I. Cohen, "Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions: Jewish Culture in Western and
Central Europe in the Modern Age," in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 731-796

Wk 5. Spinoza
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (Israel edition, excerpts)
Steven Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy (Oxford, 2001) (excerpts)

Wk 6. France: From Napoleon to the Dreyfus Affair to Vichy
Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition"
Jay Berkowitz, “The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France (Wayne
State University, 1989)
Bernard Lazare, “Jewish Nationalism” in Job’s Dungheap: Essays on Jewish Nationalism and Social Revolution (1948 for English Translation)

Wk 7. Eastern Europe
Gerson Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania (excerpts)
David Biale, "A Journey Between Worlds: East European Jewish Culture from the Partition of Poland to the Holocaust," in Cultures of the Jews, 799-862

Wk 8. The Levant
Esther Benbassa and Aaron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry (selections)

Wks 9-10. German Jewish Thought
Buber, On Jews and Judaism (selections)
Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning (selections)
Strauss, “Introduction,” Spinoza’s Critique of Religion
Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Hebrew Union College Press, 1997)

Wks 11-12. Philosemitism and Human Rights
Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflections on the Jewish Question (1946)
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, Part II)

Wk 13. North America: A New Frontier
Horace Kallen, "The Melting Pot"
Joseph Soloveitchik, "Confrontation"
Yaakov Malkin, Secular Judaism: Faith, Values, and Spirituality (Mitchell Vallentine, 2003)

Wk 14. Israeli Jews and Jewish Others
A.B Yehoshua, “In Praise of Normalcy” (1975)
The A.B Yehoshua Controversy. An Israel-Diaspora Dialogue on Jewishness, Israeliness, and Identity
(Institute of American-Israeli Jewish Relations, American Jewish Committee, 2006)
Yuri Slezkin, The Jewish Century (excerpts)

Bibliography:

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular
Charles Taylor, The Age of Secularism
David Biale, ed, Cultures of the Jews: A New History
Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehudah Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World


German-Jewish Literature and Culture
Professor David Brenner

The course will introduce you to issues in ethnic and minority studies by discussing literature, memoirs, and essays by Jewish Germans from the era of the Enlightenment and emancipation through the post-1945 period. In particular, we will explore the cultural and social conflicts that characterize the history of the Jewish experience in German-speaking countries throughout modernity. We will be exploring questions such as: What does it mean to have a “hyphenated” identity? What is the lived experience of someone who is Jewish and German or “Jewish-German”? And: to what extent has the Holocaust rendered this dual identity impossible? In addition, we will consider how the dilemmas of German-Jewish identity and assimilation are related to contemporary cultural struggles.

Schedule of Readings:

Wk 1: Course intro; Ruth Gay (The Jews of Germany)
Wk 2: Excerpts from Sigmund Freud (incl. “Moses and Monotheism”)
Wk 3: Excerpts from Abraham Geiger (in Reinharz/Mendes-Flohr, eds. The Jew in the
Modern World) and from Susannah Heschel (Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus)
Wk 4: Franz Kafka, “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony” (Neugroschel translation
preferred)
Wk 5: Kafka “Jackals and Arabs” (Pasley translation preferred); excerpts from Kafka, The Trial (Harmon translation preferred)
Wk 6: excerpts from poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar
Wk 7: excerpts from Walter Benjamin "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and "Some Reflections on Kafka," (Jennings/Bullock translation preferred)
Wk 8: Films
Wk 9: Art
Wk 10: excerpts from Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer) and “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” (Pickford translation preferred)
Wk 11: excerpts from Paul Celan (“Death Fugue,” Felstiner translation preferred)
Wk 12: excerpts from Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish
Dialogue”
Wk 13: excerpts from Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and from Arendt/Scholem correspondence (in The Portable Hannah Arendt)
Wk 14: excerpts from contemporary German-Jewish writing: Maxim Biller (“Robots” and “Finkelstein’s Fingers”), Katja Behrens (“Everything Normal”), and Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood

Bibliography:

Ruth Gay, The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait. With an introduction by Peter Gay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Elena Lappin (Editor), Krishna Winston (Translator). Jewish Voices, German Words : Growing Up Jewish in Postwar Germany and Austria. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1994.
Ritchie Robertson (Editor) The German-Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.


Spinoza and Levinas: Seminar in Secular Jewish Thought
Dr. Gregory Kaplan

The writing careers of Benedict Spinoza and Emmanuel Levinas bookend the triumph of secular Jewish thought and philosophy. Recent years have witnessed increased contestations to secularity by an opposing reaction of traditionalist forces. However, Jewish secularisms need not adopt a defensive posture. In their own ways, Spinoza and Levinas construe the opposition to defuse it; secular Jewish thought would benefit from reading them. For Spinoza, Jewish secularism meant the reduction of theology into politics, even though paradoxically divine nature suggests the surest measure of justice. For Levinas, secular Judaism demands the irreducibility of the ethical to the
metaphysical, even though ironically speculative imagination offers the surest way to goodness. This seminar will investigate compelling and convoluted aspects of secular Jewish philosophy in Spinoza’s Ethics, Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, and related major texts.

Course Schedule:

Wk 1. Introduction to class
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza
Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other
Wk 2. Influences of Bible (from Deuteronomy), Plato (from Republic), Maimonides
(from Guide of the Perplexed), and Hobbes (from Leviathan)
Wks 3-4. Spinoza, Political-Theological Treatise (Israel trans.)
Wks 5-7. Spinoza, Ethics (Curley trans.)
Wk 8. Influences of Husserl (Cartesian Meditations) and Heidegger (from Pathmarks)
Wk 9. Levinas, from Difficult Judaism and Basic Philosophical Writings
Wks 10-13. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence
Wk 14. Derrida, from Judeities

Secondary Bibliography:

Bettina Bergo, Levinas Between Ethics and Politics (2003)
Don Garrett, The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (1996)
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006)
Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza's Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (2004)
Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (2007)
Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (2005)
Steven Nadler, Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (2001)
Steven B. Smith, Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (2003)
Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason on Adorno & Levinas (2005)
Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (2000)
Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling With Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Other (2006)