Established in 1973, the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies promotes academic study of Jewish culture, history, and politics for all students at the University of Florida. The Center offers a major and a minor program; some of our students engage in a double or dual major with other programs. In addition, students can take individual classes or certificate programs in European Jewish Studies, Holocaust Studies, or Israel Studies consisting of fifteen credit hours each. The Center’s curriculum encourages critical thinking, textual analysis, research, oral argumentation, and writing. The Center also has a number of scholarships.
Holocaust: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Film, Literature and Theater
JST3930(22481), LIT3173(20478) by Dr. Roy Holler
T | Period 7 (1:55 PM – 2:45 PM) R | Periods 7-8 (1:55 PM – 3:50 PM)
Counts for Holocaust Studies Certificate & Israel Studies Certificate
Fills Gen Ed requirement for Humanities and International
The Holocaust’s impact on the Zionist project served as a catalyst for the Israeli state, which perceives itself as a metaphor for Jewish destruction and rebirth. What does it mean when a young nation forges its identity by commemorating and seeking retribution for the millions who were murdered, transforming unprecedented trauma into an ideological cornerstone for nation-building? We will explore post World War II Hebrew literature and film in order to answer these questions.
Gender and the Hebrew Bible
JST3930(28829), REL3291(28765) by Dr. Robert Kawashima
T | Period 4 (10:40 AM – 11:30 AM) R | Periods 4-5 (10:40 AM – 12:35 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
The course introduces the modern, critical study of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), as well as other ancient works, emphasizing analysis of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. Careful readings of a range of biblical texts (narrative, law, wisdom literature), in order to investigate questions such as: What happens to the goddess in monotheism? How does biblical narrative imaginatively realize the lives of women and men? What roles are constructed and assigned to each? How are their bodies and sexualities conceptualized and legislated by biblical law? No previous coursework on the Bible is required.
The Poetics of Justice: Law, Literature and Film
JST3930(26952), GET3930(13377), LIT3400(30315) by Dr. Eric Kligerman
T | Period 7 (1:55 PM – 2:45 PM) R | Periods 7-8 (1:55 PM – 3:50 PM)
Counts for Holocaust Studies Certificate
This course explores the interplay between justice, law, and violence in shifting modes of representation. By turning to the works of history (Thucydides), Religion (Book of Job), philosophy (Nietzsche and Arendt), literature (Sophocles, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka), and film (Tarantino and the Coen brothers), our objective is to trace the narrative of justice through ancient Greece to the present. We will examine trials (real and imaginary) to probe the relation between justice, ethics, guilt, and responsibility.
Religious Studies and The Bible
JST3930(27554), REL3931(16929) by Dr. Robert Kawashima
T | Periods 8-9 (3:00 PM – 4:55 PM) R | Period 9 (4:05 PM – 4:55 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
Seminar introducing students to major approaches to the study of religion. We will use Daniel Pals’ classic Introducing Religion as a guide and read excerpts from major theorists. We will also analyze various passages from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as empirical data with which to test some of these theories. What light (if any) does a given theory or approach shed on the Hebrew Bible and Israelite religion?
Hebrew Language, Culture, and Society – Intermediate Hebrew
HBR4905(Departmentally Controlled) by Iris Cohen
MTWRF (Remote) | Period 6 (12:50 PM – 1:40 PM)
Intermediate-level Hebrew Language class on Israeli culture and society. This is a 5-credit hour course. Contact goda@ufl.edu to register.
Promise of Israel in Cinema
JST4936(22493), LIT4930(29333) by Dr. Dragan Kujundzic
T | Period 10 (5:10 PM – 6:00 PM) R | Periods 10-11 (5:10 PM – 7:05 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
Cinema in Israel was from the outset a construction of the country as the Promised Land. It combined a social message about collective labor with a heroic aspiration, blended into a cinematic narrative. We will see the relationship between the early ZIonist cinema (The Land of Promise, 1924), the subsequent tradition it inspired (Land of Promise, 1934), and postwar heroic representations (Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, 1955; Exodus, 1960; Operation Thunderbolt, 1976; Munich, 2005), and others.
Arguing Jewish Law
JST3930(30339) by Howard Stuart Lidsky
MWF | Period 3 (9:35 AM – 10:25 AM)
Counts for European Jewish Studies Certificate
This course explores the techniques of persuasive argument as developed in Rabbinic Biblical commentary and Talmudic legal disputes. Students will develop skills in forming arguments and in employing rhetorical devices. Additionally, the course will compare and contrast Rabbinic disputation methods with Aristotelian Rhetoric.
Topics in Israeli Politics
JST3930(29628), CPO3011(28571) by Dr. Patricia Sohn
T | Period 4 (10:40 AM – 11:30 AM) R | Periods 4-5 (10:40 AM – 12:35 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
This course addresses Israeli politics and society from a comparative politics perspective with a focus on several important themes including religion, state, and society; government and politics of Israel; origins of the state; judicial politics and constitutional jurisprudence; Supreme Court biography; Labor, Likud, and the Kibbutz movement; Mizrahi politics; and social movements.
Screening the Holocaust
JST3930(29584), ANT3930(30585) by Dr. Jack Kugelmass
M | Periods 7 – 9 (1:55 PM – 4:55 PM)
Counts for Holocaust Studies Certificate
The Holocaust continues to generate narrative films of extraordinary quality. In this course, we examine some of them and pair them with theories about the Holocaust and genocide drawn from psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and comparative literature.
Children of the Revolution: Citizenship, Social Engagement, and the French Avant-Gardes
JST3930(30386), FRT3004(24812) by Dr. Gayle Zachmann
T | Period 7 (1:55 PM – 2:45 PM) R | Periods 7-8 (1:55 PM – 3:50 PM)
Counts for Holocaust Studies Certificate & European Jewish Studies Certificate
Survey of French literary avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries, Selected for their engagements with national identity and social transformation at key moments in history. Includes the post-Jewish emancipation period, the Dreyfus Affair, the Inter-War Years, and the German Occupation. Particular attention to the presence of Jewish and gendered avant-gardist interventions, examining how artistic dissent and resistance may redirect revolutionary ideals and rhetoric to redefine French culture. Discussion, assignments, and primary texts will be in English.
History of the Holocaust
JST3930(26633), EUH3033(Various Sections) by Dr. Natalia Aleksiun
MW | Period 4 (10:40 AM – 11:30 AM) Friday Sections | Periods 2,3,4,5
Counts for Holocaust Studies Certificate & European Jewish Studies Certificate
The Holocaust is the definitive event of the twentieth century and the turning point of Jewish, German, and European history. What made it possible? How do Historians reconstruct and analyze it? The course examines perspectives from perpetrators, victims, and bystander accounts, from persecution to the gradual emergence of the politics of mass murder. We also study the responses of individual Jews and Jewish communities to the Nzai onslaught within the larger context of the Second World War.
Jerusalem in the 19th Century – A City in Transition
JST3930(29552) by Dr. Yehoshua Ecker
MWF | Period 5 (11:45 AM – 12:35 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
Jerusalem’s political and technological transitions to the modern world, transformations in the Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Jewish spheres, European imperial and religious rivalries, and the ebbing of regional and national conflicts.
Beginning Modern Hebrew 2
HBR1131(25475) by Iris Cohen
MTWRF (Remote) | Period 5 (11:45 AM – 12:35 PM)
Continues beginning Hebrew, covering four skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This is a 5-hour credit hour course.
Remembering Jewish Baghdad
JST3930(29556) by Dr. Yehoshua Ecker
M | Periods 10-11 (5:10 PM – 7:05 PM) W | Period 10 (5:10 PM – 6:00 PM)
Counts for Israel Studies Certificate
Tracing the building blocks of personal and communal remembrance of the once largest ethnoreligious groups in the city, through textual and visual materials, following the dispersal of Baghdadi Jews in the 20th century, particularly the mass departure and traumatic relocation after 1948.
Introduction to Yiddish Literature
JST3930(29643), LIT3173(30137) by Dr. Jason Wagner
M | Periods 7-9 (1:55 PM – 4:55 PM) OR W | Periods 7-9 (1:55 PM – 4:55 PM)
Counts for European Jewish Studies Certificate
Fills Gen Ed in International and Humanities
Survey of major European and American authors who wrote in the Yiddish language. The course includes the three classic 19th century Yiddish writers: Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz from the traditional Yiddish literary centers in Eastern Europe. The course also includes the Yiddish Modernist movement: How did the destruction and displacement caused by the pogroms during and after WWI affect Yiddish literature? We end with the major figures in Holocaust and post-Holocaust Yiddish literature: I.B. Singer, Chaim Grade, and Abraham Sutzkever. All tests are in English translation.
Ukraine and Jews
JST3930(29585), LIT4930(29339) by Dr. Dragan Kujundzic
T | Periods 8-9 (3:00 PM – 4:55 PM) R | Period 9 (4:05 PM – 4:55 PM)
Analysis of the rich literary and film tradition associated with Ukrainian Jews and their descendants. We will read Sholem Aleichem, Isaak Babel, and Sergei Eisenstein, and we will watch Golda (with Helen Mirren), Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. We will also analyze leading Ukrainian filmmaker Sergey Loznitsa’s Small Jewish Cemetery, Austerlitz, and Babi Yar.
Jews in Istanbul in the Last Ottoman Century
JST3930(28554) by Dr. Yehoshua Ecker
MWF | Period 8 (3:00 PM – 3:50 PM)
Counts for European Jewish Studies Certificate
The transitions and restructuring of the Jewish community of the Ottoman capital, the largest and one of the most influential in the Jewish world, through the upheavals, transformations, reforms, and imperial growth and demise of the long 19th century.
Exploring Israel Through Media – Advanced Hebrew
HBR4905(Departmentally Controlled) by Iris Cohen
MTWRF (Remote) | Period 7 (1:55 PM – 2:45 PM)
Advanced Hebrew language course on Israeli News. This is a 3-credit hour course. Contact goda@ufl.edu to register.