Jewish Studies Courses
Fall 2010 Courses
Maymester 2010 Courses
Spring 2010 Courses
Fall 2009 Courses
Maymester 2009 Courses
Spring 2009 Courses
Fall 2008 Courses
Jewish Holiday Information for Students and Faculty
MAYMESTER 2010
Religious Studies RELG 491M and 594M
Literature and Film of the Holocaust
Professor: Kevin Lewis
Syllabus
Course Description: The course is primarily about Holocaust-related films—several
in the documentary genre, several in the feature-length, commercial genre—but also about related literature (memoir,
fiction, poetry), and a little about related music. We will view the films as artistic representations, as attempts
at crafted persuasion. We will ask questions such as: does the work touch the elusive truth or truths about what
actually happened and how it was actually experienced? And: do the commercial films tell a big enough “Truth” to
excuse small “lies?” (Cf. Picasso’s definition of art.) What is its moral point of view? Is it emotionally
`recognizable? In what sense are we “entertained,” or should we be?
The course presumes some previous acquaintance with Holocaust/Shoah history, testimony, and visual
images, as well as some experience in critiquing/analyzing works of film and literary art.
Registrar info for RELG 491M
Registrar info for RELG 594M
FALL 2010
English ENGL 650 & Comparative Literature CPLT 740
Women and Shoah: Memory, Memoirs and Memorials
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Course Description:
This course will survey a number of memoirs by first-hand victims and second-generation
Shoah witnesses. Using the vast theoretical body of work produced in the last 30 years on
trauma, post-memory, feminist voices in autobiographical narratives, we will analyze works
by women who live in Europe, the United States and Israel and examine the ways in which these
authors have dialogued with, challenged and affected the Shoah canon and the contemporary practice,
discourse and politics of memorialization.
Registrar info for ENGL 650
Registrar info for CPLT 740
History HIST 492G
The Holocaust
Professor: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Syllabus
Course Description: This course introduces students to Nazi Germany’s
systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews and other minorities during the Second World War. We will
examine the forces that led to the Holocaust, including the emergence of scientific racism, the implementation
of Nazi policy towards the Jews, and the dynamics of annihilation in a condition of war. We will explore
the motivations and actions of the perpetrators and ask why citizens of a country known for its cultural
and intellectual prowess could turn into mass murderers. In addition, we will consider the fate of the victims,
their resistance efforts and coping mechanisms during the war, and their attempts to recover and to memorialize
in the post-war period.
Registrar info for HIST 492G
Religious Studies RELG 381 & History HIST 383
Jewish History I
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Syllabus
Course Description: This course surveys Jewish history from the Second Temple
Period to 1492 and offers insights in the highly complex
history of the Jews living under western Christendom and Islam.
We will begin in Late Antiquity, a period that set the
stage for the development of Judaism as we know it today
and will move on to the medieval Jewish experience with a
special emphasis on the Mediterranean and especially Iberia.
We will read some of the foundational texts that
determined the host society's stance vis-à-vis the Jewish
communities (and vice versa) for much of the period under
discussion and explore the religious, cultural, social, and
political conditions that shaped the Jewish experience.
Registrar info for HIST 383
Registrar info for RELG 381
PREVIOUS SEMESTERS
SPRING 2010
English ENGL 282
Fiction: Biblical Echoes in Modern Culture
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Course Description:
Was Abraham a villain or a hero? Is Exile ever going to end, or are we still roaming the desert?
Could the Garden of Eden be my backyard? So, am I or not my bother’s keeper?...
(And what did Voltaire, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Chagall or Bob Dylan say about it?)
Starting with the Enlightenment, this course will look at the way in which modern literature,
art and culture has dealt with the question of God, Justice and the human bond—taking inspiration
from or issue with the way in which these concepts are problematized and represented in the
Hebrew Bible. We will compare how the Judaic ethical and philosophical tradition as formulated
in the Bible has influenced the Western canon and is echoed in modern Jewish and non-Jewish texts.
Our analysis of the selected works will move in three directions: we will look for Biblical
symbology and imagery in modern literature and art; we will analyze how modern philosophers,
authors and artists have reused and transformed certain biblical stories; finally, our most
important task will be to understand how these intellectuals have questioned, repudiated or
resignified the relation between Man and God/Man and Man (in their historical and national
contexts). Together we will explore the Jewish concepts of Exile, justice and messianism,
while unearthing the traces left by such Hebrew stories as creation, Akedah, captivity, sibling
rivalry, the Tower of Babel, etc. in Western cultural production.
Registrar info
History HIST 384
The History of Judaism:
The Middle and Modern Periods
Professor:Saskia Coenen Snyder
Syllabus
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major developments
in Jewish history since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The first half of the course
will explore Jewish life on the European continent and focus, among others, on the Sephardi Diaspora,
on Court Jews, and on the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah). We will then run our attention
to the modern period and examine the quest for legal and social emancipation, the rise of the Jewish
Question, and the various responses to this question on the part of the Jews, incl. acculturation,
Socialism, Zionism, and large-scale emigration to the West. In the second half of the course our lens
thus widens to include the American-Jewish experience.
Registrar info
Religious Studies RELG 301
Old Testament / Hebrew Bible
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Course Description: The aim of this course is to introduce students to the study of the Hebrew
Bible and to familiarize them with the historical, cultural and religious experiences of ancient Israel and
its surrounding cultures, taking into consideration rabbinic interpretations of some of these texts.
I hope that you will share my fascination for this intriguing and powerful literature, and develop an
awareness of the stories that continue to shape our western culture.
Books you should buy (available at the University bookstores and elsewhere):
• John J. Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Fortress Press) ISBN 9780800662073
• James Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now (Free Press, 2007)
• Recommended: Adele Berlin and Marc Brettler, ed, The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press, 2005) ISBN: 0195297547.
You will need a copy of the Bible next to you when you read Collins and Kugel. These texts often cite
biblical passages and you will want to check at least some of them in order to understand the argument.
Registrar info
FALL 2009
English ENGL 282E (evening)
At Home in the Shtetl: Pre-War Jewish Life through Literature
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Syllabus
Course Description:
Think of this course as a very particular journey. We will move far away in space and time,
we will travel back to Europe… but we’ll get out of there just before WWII. We will not
visit Paris, Berlin, Vienna and its other glamorous capital cities, but we will stop
in villages, small towns, and roam the countryside throughout central-eastern Europe
where we will look for traces of Jewish life before the war—which is, before the Holocaust
brought this vibrant, creative, diverse world to an end.
This course offers students the opportunity to look at a different, probably less familiar,
aspect of European and Jewish literature and to get acquainted with Jewish life (religious,
social, artistic, domestic) through the stories of famous Yiddish writers such as Sholem
Aleichem, Sholem Asch and I.L. Perez, but also through folk tradition, visual art, music and
pre-war films. Who were the Chassidim and the Maskilim? What are the roots of klezmer music?
What's a "golem", a "shlemiel" and a "shlimazel"? Was the shtetl a Jewish u-topia (non-place)?
We will analyze the way in which the Jews of central-eastern Europe saw and interacted with
their non-Jewish neighbors, their capacity to adapt to very harsh economic and social
conditions, and most importantly, the way in which out of a long history of cohabitation
and adaptation, a rich body of creative work was produced and how this stands in relation
to both the majority culture of the period and today’s assumptions about Jewish identity.
Registrar info
History HIST 492G
The Holocaust
Professor: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Syllabus
Course Description: This course introduces students to Nazi Germany’s
systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews and other minorities during the Second World War. We will
examine the forces that led to the Holocaust, including the emergence of scientific racism, the implementation
of Nazi policy towards the Jews, and the dynamics of annihilation in a condition of war. We will explore
the motivations and actions of the perpetrators and ask why citizens of a country known for its cultural
and intellectual prowess could turn into mass murderers. In addition, we will consider the fate of the victims,
their resistance efforts and coping mechanisms during the war, and their attempts to recover and to memorialize
in the post-war period.
Registrar info
Religious Studies RELG 381 and 594Y
History HIST 383
History of Judaism I (Biblical to Rabbinic)
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Syllabus
Course Description: This course surveys Jewish history from the beginnings
to the beginning of the Middle Ages with an emphasis on the Second Temple and the Rabbinic Period,
covering the period from c. 1400 BCE to the sixth century CE. We will look at the achievements
of these societies in law and social organization, prophetic movements, the history of the
Israelite religion and early Judaism, and ancient Hebrew and Jewish literatures.
Our central sources are the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and Rabbinic literature, archaeological
excavations in Israel and neighboring lands, and recent discoveries of ancient writings in Hebrew
and related languages such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. All of these have greatly contributed to our
understanding of the history of Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. Of particular interest
is the early development of Israelite monotheism, which, in time, emerged as ancient Judaism,
the mother religion of Christianity and Islam. All readings are in English.
Registrar info for HIST 383
Registrar info for RELG 381
Registrar info for RELG 594
MAYMESTER 2009
Religious Studies RELG 491M
Literature and Film of the Holocaust
Professor: Kevin Lewis
Flyer
Syllabus
Course Description: The course is primarily about Holocaust-related films—several
in the documentary genre, several in the feature-length, commercial genre—but also about related literature (memoir,
fiction, poetry), and a little about related music. We will view the films as artistic representations, as attempts
at crafted persuasion. We will ask questions such as: does the work touch the elusive truth or truths about what
actually happened and how it was actually experienced? And: do the commercial films tell a big enough “Truth” to
excuse small “lies?” (Cf. Picasso’s definition of art.) What is its moral point of view? Is it emotionally
`recognizable? In what sense are we “entertained,” or should we be?
The course presumes some previous acquaintance with Holocaust/Shoah history, testimony, and visual
images, as well as some experience in critiquing/analyzing works of film and literary art.
Registrar info
SPRING 2009
English ENGL E285
Diasporas: Jews & Other Immigrants Writing their American Story
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Syllabus
Course Description: How many times have you heard the expression, and perhaps (G-d forbid) used it yourself, “The melting pot” referred to America? Have you ever stopped and reflected on what this expression actually means and implies? You will now… This course is designed to examine this question, by framing it within its twentieth-century multi-cultural and transcultural American literary context.
We live, you might have noticed, in a world of hyphenated identities: American-Jew, Hispano-American, etc. Is our hyphenated culture the antidote to the universalizing force of the “melting pot”? What does it mean to become American today—and how is it different from a hundred years ago? How is that accomplished? Do all immigrants at all times—regardless of gender, race, ideology—experience immigration, assimilation, cultural transformation the same way? Through the examination of how the “ethnic story” and “ethnic identity” come together and are progressively constructed, students will gain a new understanding of “ethnicity” as a very dynamic notion: one that also entails struggle, conflict and resistance to the dominant culture’s oppressive forces as well as to the pull and oppression of one’s own culture of origin.
In particular, we will take one specific immigrant experience, that of the Jews in America—as expressed in some classics of American Jewish literature—and use it as the paradigmatic example, against which and in dialogue with which, other immigrant voices are going to be explored.
Registrar info
German GERM 780N
Comparative Literature CPLT 750N
Anti-Semitism in Contemporary German Literature and Film
Professor: Agnes C. Mueller
Syllabus
Course Description: This course investigates representations of anti-Semitism in contemporary German literature and film. WWII and the Holocaust essentially rendered any post-1945 anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria taboo. However, sociological studies show that anti-Semitism in Germany has, especially since unification, been on the rise again. If we read film and literature as cultural artifacts that indicate trends and currents in societies, we must carefully investigate why and how such anti-Semitic utterances and trajectories are produced, transmitted, and received. We also need to think about how we might respond, and what kinds of traditions of anti-Semitism (anti-Zionism, Islamic prejudices, German right-wing, or German guilt rejection) are represented.
Registrar info
Religious Studies RELG 592R
From Jesus to the Rebbe:
Jewish Messianism through the Ages
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Syllabus
Course Description: Messianic anticipation is an integral part of Jewish core beliefs. But how exactly did and do Jews envision the advent of this redeemer and how did they react to the various messianic contenders as they appeared throughout history? Taking a historical approach and beginning with Biblical notions of messianism and some early representatives (Jesus and Bar Kokhbar), we will continue with medieval authorities (Moses Maimonides) and leading kabbalists (Luria) whose writings have shaped mainstream ideas on messianism and mysticism until this day. We will end this class with a look at contemporary phenomena, in particular the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the impact of messianic ideas in Israel.
Registrar info
Religious Studies RELG 594J
Jews and Christians Throughout History
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Syllabus
Course Description: For most of the last two millennia, Jews and Christians had a complex relationship fraught with conflict as well as mutual gain that was based on a range of competing claims. This class looks at some of these claims and considers how cultural, social and economic conditions shaped this encounter from both the Jewish and Christian perspectives. In what ways did unfavourable teachings contribute toward violence against the Jews? What is the relationship between Christian anti-Jewish teachings and anti-Semitism? And, not least: how did Jewish thinkers react to claims made by Christians?
Registrar info
South Carolina Honors College SCHC 325K
Representations of the Holocaust
Professor: Ted Rosengarten
Course Description:
Although the Holocaust did not occur in this
country and touched only a small number of Americans directly, it looms large in the American moral
landscape. Hardly a day goes by without the media reporting some story related to this unprecedented
genocide, giving it the aura of a current event. Despite historical inaccuracies, artistic
deficiencies, and commercial motivations, documentary and dramatic films about the killing of
the Jews and other groups deemed "unworthy of life" by Nazi Germany impress the Holocaust into
popular consciousness. Novels and short stories, museum exhibitions and public memorials, works
of fine art and site-specific art—all shape conventional ways of thinking about this tragic past.
In one seminar-length session per week, our class will analyze representations of the Holocaust
in film, art, and literature produced in the aftermath of World War II in countries that fought
Germany or were occupied by or allied with the Nazi regime, as well as in works produced by Germans
themselves.
We will examine the plight of Jews and non-Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, communists, trade-unionists,
defiant Christians, individuals with disabilities—targeted for elimination. We will reflect on
courageous attempts at rescue and resistance. We will consider how artistic representations both
create and debunk mythologies that pose as authentic knowledge.
Registrar info
South Carolina Honors College SCHC 457P
The Shoah in American Literature and Film
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Course Description:
A Picture Worth Six Million Faces:
After-Imaging the Holocaust in American Film and Literature
Sixty-four years after the first photographs and news reports of concentration camps reached American
soil, the stories, images, and history of the Holocaust continue to shock, horrify, hurt, and enrage us.
Despite years of scholarly research and debate, the reality that was the Shoah continues to raise more
questions than it answers regarding the workings of trauma, individual and mass behavior, the viability
of Western humanism, as well as the tension between collective and personal memory, national and private history.
In particular, America’s fascination with the Shoah has spawned a seemingly endless production of works dealing
with the Second World War and the fate of European Jews under the Nazi regime. Drawing on a range of genres
including memoir, fiction, theater, documentary movies, and popular film, this course will explore the birth
and development of a specifically American language and discourse on and around the Holocaust (a phenomenon
referred to as the “Americanization” or “Hollywoodization” of the Holocaust). Specifically, we will examine
the limits, ethics and paradoxes of (its) representation; the role the historical event has had on the shaping
of American Jewish identity; and if, as some claim, the Holocaust has in fact created the “American Jew”
and what this means for twenty-first century Jewish and American culture.
A series of guest speakers during the semester will enlighten our understanding of this very complex theme
from a variety of scholarly perspectives.
Students will be able to understand and contextualize the Holocaust not only as historical catastrophe but
also as a lasting intellectual and philosophical inextricable knot against which post-war America’s (and
Western) values, ethics, national self-concept, politics and even laws are still measured.
Registrar info
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FALL 2008
English ENGL 285
Melting Identities: The Formation of a Jewish-American Self
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Course Description: This course will offer old and new perspectives on Jewish American identity through short stories, fiction, film, theater and music. We will look at issues regarding immigration and degrees of assimilation among various ethnic communities in America, the early American anti-immigration feelings (Nativism), success/defeat of inter-ethnic relations in America, “outsiders” and the American cities (Why is New York everyman’s Promised Land?), Jewish American stereotypes, and the titanic tension between tradition (fathers) and secularism (sons). Through some wonderful works of past and contemporary Jewish American culture, this course will help raise questions about marginality and “hyphenated identities”; the transformation of individual, family and collective values in the global world; and how old parameters to talk about who we are might have become obsolete and need total rethinking. Through the lens of some tragic, subversive, humorous, intransigent, or irreverent products of Jewish culture we will be able to glance at how, from “fusion” to “confusion”, the face of American identity has changed in the last hundred years.
English ENGL 439H
Family Matters:
Twentieth-Century Jewish Women Remembering Family and/as History
Professor: Federica K. Clementi
Syllabus
Course Description: The course will explore the way in which Jewish women write about their families (especially about their fathers and mothers) and the way in which one’s private story together with the impact of History shapes one’s identity. In order to do so, we will work on the autobiographical writings of European and American twentieth-century authors. As a rich scholarship on the subject has revealed in the last 30 years, women’s narratives and especially autobiographical texts often center on everyday routines and rituals, the minutiae of domestic geographies, and all the daily familial details which are usually removed from traditional historiography. This course hopes to point out how (and by which textual and narrative strategies) the texts selected historicize the domestic, and blend larger universal history and politics in the microcosm of the personal and familiar. Our approach and reading selection will help us see how, through the contribution of women’s “domestic” perspective, the truth of personal history ends up enriching, reevaluating and even questioning the Truth of History.
History HIST 384
The History of Judaism:
The Middle and Modern Periods
Professor:Saskia Coenen Snyder
Syllabus
Course Description: This course will introduce students to the major developments in Jewish history since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The first half of the course will explore Jewish life on the European continent and focus, among others, on the Sephardi Diaspora, on Court Jews, and on the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah). We will then run our attention to the modern period and examine the quest for legal and social emancipation, the rise of the Jewish Question, and the various responses to this question on the part of the Jews, incl. acculturation, Socialism, Zionism, and large-scale emigration to the West. In the second half of the course our lens thus widens to include the American-Jewish experience.
History HIST 492S
The History of the Holocaust
Professor: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Syllabus
Course Description: This course introduces students to Nazi Germany’s systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews and other minorities during the Second World War. We will examine the forces that led to the Holocaust, including the emergence of scientific racism, the implementation of Nazi policy towards the Jews, and the dynamics of annihilation in a condition of war. We will explore the motivations and actions of the perpetrators and ask why citizens of a country known for its cultural and intellectual prowess could turn into mass murderers. In addition, we will consider the fate of the victims, their resistance efforts and coping mechanisms during the war, and their attempts to recover and to memorialize in the post-war period.
Religious Studies RELG 491H
Holy Women in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Professor: Katja Vehlow
Syllabus
Course Description: Over the centuries, holy women have inspired the faithful and they continue to fascinate: The 2007 publication of a posthumous edition of Mother Theresa’s Be My Light , for instance, challenged popular images of the conservative saint of the slums and was widely discussed in secular media. The ideal of holiness has taken many forms, inspiring increased piety, martyrdom, monasticism, mysticism, and social activism. An examination of holy women from various traditions will disclose the diverse ways in which particular communities have understood and practiced essential elements of holiness.
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