Sylabus
First Week: TRADITION
Reading Assignment: Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York 1993): 3 - 44.
Oral Presentation: Salo Baron, "Ghetto and Emancipation," reprinted in Leo W. Schwartz, ed. The Menorah Treasury (Philadelphia 1964): 50 - 63.
Second Week: HASSIDISM
Reading Assignment: Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York 2000): 183 - 213.
Oral Presentation: Jacob Katz, "The Hasid," "The Disputant," in Exclusiveness and Tolerance (London 1961): 93 - 113.
Third Week: HASKALA
Reading Assignment: Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The social background of Jewish Emancipation (New York 1978), 42 - 103.
Oral Presentation: Michael Meyer, "Moses Mendelssohn The Virtuous Jew," "An Ephemeral Solution" in The Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit 1967): 1-56.
Fourth Week: EMANCIPATION
Reading Assignment: Hillary L. Rubinstein, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, "Enlightenment and emancipation in continental Europe, 1750-1880," in The Jews in the Modern World: A History since 1750 (London 2002), 15 - 42.
Oral Presentation: Emancipation of Jews in Prussia/France/Austria-Hungary - primary documents: in Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed. The Jew in the Modern World (New York, Oxford 1995).
Fifth Week: ORTHODOXY
Reading Assignment: Michael Meyer, ed. German Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2, 90-167.
Oral Presentation: Moshe Samet, ?The Beginnings of Orthodoxy," in Modern Judaism (1988): 249-269.
Sixth Week: ANTI-SEMITISM
Reading Assignment: Richard Wagner, ?Modern" (1878), Adolf Stoecker, ?Our demands of Modern Jewry" (1878), Heinrich von Treitschke, ?A World about our Jews" (1879-80), Wilhelm Marr, ?The Victory of Jewry over Germandom" (1879)
Oral Presentation: Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge 1980): 1-10, 245-300
Seventh Week: THEODOR HERZL, POLITICAL ZIONISM
Reading Assignment: Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, available online.
Oral Presentation: Isaiah Friedman, "Theodor Herzl: Political Activity and Achievements," in
Israel Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2004): 46-79.
Eighth Week: CULTURAL, SOCIALIST AND RELIGIOUS ZIONISM
Reading Assignment: Ber Borochov, "The National Question and the Class Struggle," "Our Platform," Vladimir Jabotinsky, "Emdee," "Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission"
Oral Presentation: Ahad Ha-Am, "The Law of the Heart," "Flesh and Spirit," "On Nationalism and Religion," "The Negation of the Diaspora," "The Wrong Way," "Slavery in Freedom," "The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem."
Ninth Week: assimilation and identity crisis
Reading Assignment: Issac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew," Walter Rathenau, "Hear, O Israel," Otto Weininger, "The Jew must free himself from Jewishness, Theodor Lessing "Jewish Self-Hatred" in Mendes-Flohr, Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, (New York, Oxford 1995): 265-274.
Oral Presentation: Marsha Rozenblit, "The Dissolution of the monarchy and the crisis of Jewish identity, October 1918 - June 1919," in Reconstructing a national identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford, New York 2004): 128-161.
Tenth Week: HOLOCAUST
Reading Assignment: Yehuda Bauer, "What was the Holocaust," "Comparison with other genocides" in Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London 2002): 1 - 13.
Oral Presentation: Gavriel Rosenfeld, "The politics of uniqueness: reflections on the recent polemic turn in Holocaust and genocide scholarship" in Holocaust and Genocide studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999): 28 - 61.
Eleventh Week: HOLOCAUST
Reading Assignment: Stehen Eric Bronner, "Making sense of hell: three meditations of the Holocaust" in Political Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1999): 314 - 328.
Oral Presentation:
Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider, "Memory unbound: the Holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory" in European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002): 87 - 106.
Twelfth Week: STATE ISRAEL
Reading Assignment: "The Baltimore Program (May 1942)," "Resolution on Palestine (November 29, 1947)," "Proclamation of the State of Israel (May 14, 1948)," "Address to the Knesset on the law of return," "The law of return" in Mendes-Flohr, Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, (New York, Oxford 1995): 617-618, 626-633.
Oral Presentation: Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar, "Continuity and change in Israeli society: The test of the melting pot" in Israeli Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 2005): 91-128.