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Jewish Studies

Courses Offered in Jewish Studies

Approaches to Jewish Studies (Hochman)

Designed for advanced students concentrating in Jewish studies, this course focuses on the nature, development, and enactment of the field of Jewish studies. We will look at the process of creating, critiquing, and debating Jewish studies as a way of determining the methodological foundations of the field. Together we read about the history of Jewish studies as an academic enterprise to ask several critical questions: what is Jewish studies, what are its political and/or ideological underpinnings, how has it evolved, and what constitutes the field as a major field concentration?

Bridge of Understanding: Jews and non-Jews in Contemporary Germany (Hochman)

This course explores the long, complex and often painful history shared by Germans, both Jews and non-Jews. By looking at diverse literary, philosophical, historical and religious sources, we will explore the changing terrain of identity politics in national, cultural and religious realms. Several days of close study on campus in Gainesville will be followed by an intense study tour of Germany. An application process is required in order to participate in this class.

Israeli Cinema (Saposnik)

Films and nations are both relatively recent innovations in human experience (and this is, of course, particularly true of the Israeli nation), and both have, in their relatively brief existence, become omnipresent in our lives, shaping the ways in which we understand, view, and represent reality. Film has a unique ability to act both as a reflection of a given (national) culture, and at the same time acts as a catalyst stimulating further development of that culture. Throughout the semester, we will view Israeli cinema as a means for understanding Israeli society, its changing culture, and its image of itself from a range of perspectives.

The Jewish Question in Post-Revolutionary France (1789-203) (Moskowitz)

In 1791, France stood alone as the first European country to emancipate the Jews of its territory. And yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, rampant antisemitism would challenge the French republic, its institutions, and the country’s national narrative as the home of human rights. In the twentieth century, the citizenship of Jews was once again at issue, and it is widely noted that there has been a spike in antisemitic activity since the turn of this, the twenty-first century. Focusing on the place of Jews, Jewishness, and Antisemitism in French society, cultural production and cultural politics, this course will provide an introduction to the issues and images associated with what is known in France as “the Jewish question.” It explores the issues of citizenship, secularism, republican values, cultural agency, and memory in a chronological and introductory survey of nineteenth,- twentieth-, and twenty-first century French history, literature, journalism, and visual imagery, with particular attention to the role of caricature (literary and visual). Class will be conducted in French.