Syllabus
History, Politics and Culture of Central European Jewry
Course Schedule
Introductory Class and Syllabus Reading
Traditional Jewish Society
Salo Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” reprinted in Leo W. Schwartz, ed. The Menorah Treasury (Philadelphia 1964): 50 - 63.
Enlightenment and the Haskalah
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (New York 1978): 42-103. (Focus on pages 42-56)
Emancipation
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.
Origins of Racial Antisemitism
Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge 1980): 1-10, 245-300
Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism
Isaiah Friedman, “Theodor Herzl: Political Activity and Achievements,” in Israel Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 46-79.
Assimilation and Identity Crisis
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.
The Holocaust
Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London 2002): 1-13, 39-67.
Final Paper Outlines Due / No Class
The Holocaust as a Communal Genocide
Omer Bartov, Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies, in East European Politics & Societies 25:3 (2011): 486-511.
Postwar Jewish-Gentile Experience
Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York 2007): 81-117.
Holocaust Memory and European Identity
Karen Auerbach, Review Essay: Holocaust Memory in Polish Scholarship, in AJS Review 35:1 (April 2011): 137-150.
Course Requirements:
Active participation: 30%
Final paper: 70%
Evaluation is performed in accordance with the Dean’s Provision.
Annotation
This course explores histories of (East-)Central European Jewry. It introduces and critically examines selected core themes that formed histories and cultures of the Jews from the eighteenth until the twenty-first century. Topics include traditional Jewish society, enlightenment, emancipation, racial antisemitism, Jewish nationalism and Zionism, Holocaust and the rebirth of Jewish life after 1945.
Readings include both primary and secondary sources. All students are required to have read the assigned weekly reading before attending the class. Apart from that, students will be given occasional in-class readings (in the form of handouts).