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.
The course is organized thematically, within a general chronology, but making
deliberate comparisons across time and place within each thematic unit. The course is
designed to complement the study of modern Jewish political and social history and
modern Jewish thought by focusing on how Jews realize new modernist ways of
Jewishness through secular cultural practices that are either themselves new to Jewish
experience or are conceived as providing new venues for realizing Jewishness in
unprecedented ways.
Course Outline:
1. Introduction: The Historical Emergence of Secular Judaism
• Characteristics of pre-modern Judaism: community and authority
2. Enlightenment culture
• Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, eds. Jewish Women and Their Salons; the
Power of Conversation. New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005 (selections)
• Solomon Maimon. Autobiography. New York: Schocken, 1947.
3. Jews take the stage
• Jacques Fromenthal Halevy. La Juive (audio or video recording).
• Martin Goldstein. “Halévy and Meyerbeer and a Jewish contribution to French
opera.” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Jewish Music
(1997): 26-36.
• Edna Nahshon, ed. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish
Plays. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2005. (selections)
4. Jewish language
• Norman Berdichevsky. “Zamenhof and Esperanto.” Ariel 64 (1986): 58-71.
• Benjamin Harshav. Language in Time of Revolution. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993 (selections).
• Jacob Glatshteyn, et al. “Introspectivism” (Manifesto of 1919). In American
Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
5. Jews and science
• Sigmund Freud. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1963.
• John Efron. Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-
Siecle Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
6. Building secular Jewish places
• Barbara Mann. A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, And the Creation of
Jewish Urban Space. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. (selections)
• Robert Weinberg. Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a
Soviet Jewish Homeland. Berkeley: University of California Press/Judah L.
Magnes Museum, 1998.
7. Sculpting Secular Jewish Heroes
• Olga Litvak, “Mark Antokolsky,” forthcoming essay.
• Beth S Wenger. “Sculpting an American Jewish hero; the monuments, myths, and
legends of Haym Salomon.” In Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America,
eds. Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, Yale University Press, 2001: 123-151.
8. Jews and print culture
• Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in
the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004. (selections)
• Isaac Metzger, ed. A Bintel Brief. New York: Schocken, 1990.
• Steven Cassedy. "A bintel brief: the Russian émigré intellectual meets the
American mass media.” East European Jewish Affairs 34:1 (2004): 104-120.
9. The Political Culture(s) of Secular Jews
• Tony Michels. A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. (selections)
• Mir kumen on (documentary film), 1935.
• Michael Staub. The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook. Waltham:
Brandeis University Press, 2004.
10. Muscle Jewry
• George Eisen, Haim Kaufman, Manfred Lämmer, eds. Sport and Physical
Education in Jewish History; Selected Papers from an International Seminar Held
on the Occasion of the 16th Maccabiah, 2001. [Netanya]: Wingate Institute, 2003
(selections)
• Aviva Kempner, dir. Hank Greenberg (film)
11. European Jewish popular culture
• Anna Shternshis. Soviet And Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union,
1923-1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
• Michael Steinlauf and Anthony Polansky, eds. Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol.
16 (2003) Focusing on Jewish Popular Culture and Its Aftermath. (selections)
12. The culture of Philanthropy
• Jonathan S. Woocher. Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. (selections)
• Rebecca Kobrin. “Contested contributions; emigré philanthropy, Jewish
communal life, and Polish-Jewish relations in interwar Bialystok, 1919-1929.”
Gal-Ed 20 (2006): 43-62.
13. Consuming Jewishness
• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “Kitchen Judaism.” In Getting Comfortable in
New York; the American Jewish Home, 1880-1950, ed. Susan L. Braunstein and
Jenna Weissman Joselit. New York: Jewish Museum, 1990, 77-105.
• Jack Kugelmass, “Green Bagels: An Essay on Food, Nostalgia, and the
Carnivalesque.” YIVO Annual 19 (1990): 57-80.
14. Touring the Jewish world
• Michael Berkowitz. “The invention of a secular ritual; Western Jewry and
nationalized tourism in Palestine, 1922-1933.” In The Seductiveness of Jewish
Myth (1997) 73-95.
• Ruth Ellen Gruber. Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe.
University of California Press, 2002 (selections).
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