2018 Winter Program

Course List · January 3 – 25, 2018

Three Geniuses: An-sky, Kafka, Kantor

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

Despite belonging to different nations, writing in different languages, and living in radically different socio-economic conditions, S. An-sky (Shlyome Rappoport, 1863-1920), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), and Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) produced master works—The Dybbuk (1913-1916; first performed, 1920), The Metamorphosis (1915), and Wielopole, Wielopole (1981)— that represented fundamental “distortions” of narrative, character, memory and tradition through which the cataclysmic reality of twentieth century East European, and especially Jewish, experience could be understood.

Through intensive, close reading of their works we will try to understand this reality, how their vision of it developed a powerful current in modern Jewish literary sensibility and became a key element in European literary modernism before WWII and in its half-life in post-War Europe and America.

The Book Smugglers of the Vilna Ghetto: Jewish Cultural Resistance to Nazi and Soviet Oppression

Instructor: David Fishman

This course will explore the dramatic rescue of Jewish cultural treasures in Vilna, utilizing primary sources such as the ghetto diaries of Herman Kruk and Zelig Kalmanovitch. Each session will focus on the analysis of documents, provided in their original language and in English translation, that illuminate the actions of the book smugglers and of the powerful regimes they resisted. We will seek to address the underlying question: why were these heroic intellectuals willing to risk everything for the sake of books and papers, first under the Nazis and then again under Stalin?

The American Jewish Family Drama

Instructor: Stefanie Halpern

The family is quintessential to the American Jewish drama. This course will examine how the family unit—a site of intimacy and distance, unity and disjunction—ties characters to the past and informs individual identity, allowing the tension between generations, between religion and modernity, and between tradition and Americanization to be played out.  

The plays that will be read cover a broad range of topics that relate directly to questions of gender and sexuality: stereotypical portrayals of the weak Jewish male and the overbearing Jewish mother (and their subversions); the disparities between public life and the domestic sphere; performative acts; the ways in which Jewishness is made manifest on and through the performing body.

The class will incorporate video clips, music, paintings, and photographs that relate directly to and supplement the dramas being read. This will help move the class from page to stage, focusing not only on the texts of the dramas themselves but also on performance.

The Jewish Workers' Bund

Instructor: Jack Jacobs

The Bund was the first modern Jewish political party in Eastern Europe, and, arguably, the strongest Jewish party in Poland on the eve of World War Two. One hundred and twenty years after it was established, the Bund continues to be of abiding interest. In this course we will examine the Bund’s history and the development of its program. We are likely to focus particular attention on the process by which the Bund came to endorse national cultural autonomy for Russian Jewry, on its activities during the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, on the significance of the constellation of organizations which surrounded the Bund in interwar Poland (including the Bundist youth movement, women’s movement, and movement for physical education), on the fates of Bundists in the era of the Third Reich, and on the Bund’s approaches to Israel and other important matters in the post-Holocaust  era. We will, in other words, discuss the reasons which underlie both the Bund’s rise and its decline, and will also debate the extent to which the Bund’s attitudes towards socialism, Zionism, and secular Yiddish culture do (or do not) have contemporary resonance.​

Under the Tenement Rooftops: Immigrant and Migrant Families in New York

Instructor: Annie Polland

Ninety-seven Orchard Street opened in 1863 and housed a succession of European immigrants until the double blow of the Great Depression and the impact of the 1924 Johnson Reed Act forced the landlord to evict the tenants. Down the block, 103 Orchard, built in 1888, kept its doors open throughout the twentieth century, hosting Jewish and Italian immigrants in its early years, and Holocaust refugees, Puerto Rican migrants and Chinese immigrants in its later years. This mini course traces how immigration law impacted the residents of these buildings, and how they carved out new lives once they arrived. Census records, newspaper articles and oral histories will be used to bring the families’ situations to life and situate them in their contexts. A visit to these buildings—now home to the Tenement Museum—will focus on how primary sources from the  Center for Jewish History shed light on an 1870s German Jewish family and a 1950s Polish Jewish refugee family.

The Early Writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Instructor: Jan Schwarz

Most people know I.B. Singer as a Jewish American storyteller and fabulist but his early writings reveal an edgier, darker side of his Yiddish work. Through readings of Singer’s early writings published before he arrived in New York in May 1935, the course will offer new perspectives on a major 20th century Jewish writer.

The first decade of Singer’s literary career in Warsaw is virtually unknown except for the acclaimed historical novel Satan in Goray (1935) about the messianic Sabbatai Zevi movement in the aftermath of mid 17th century Chielmnicky pogroms. In addition to this novel, we will be reading stories, essays, memoirs and sketches which Singer published in the Yiddish press between 1925-1935. Singer’s first steps as a Yiddish writer will be situated in the literary and cultural-political context of realism, modernism, and the popular literature (shund) which characterized interwar Yiddish literature in the three main centers Warsaw, New York and Moscow. All the primary and secondary texts will be available in English and Yiddish.

The Jewish Political Tradition

Instructor: Michael Walzer

Many people think that there was no Jewish politics from the time of Bar Kochba to the time of Ben Gurion. In fact, the engagement with politics is continuous in Jewish history, despite the difficulties and vulnerabilities produced by statelessness—and despite the fact that political activity was valued far less than intellectual activity in Jewish tradition. This seminar will look at three aspects of Jewish politics, the first having to do with attitudes, the second with practice, and the third with theory.

In the first session, we will reflect on what Jews thought about politics, its importance and its perils, and discuss what might be called the rules of engagement for Jews in their own politics and in the politics of their host countries.

The second session will focus on the medieval and early modern kahal, the autonomous or semi-autonomous communities within which Jews organized common life. Who ruled in the kahal? How did its institutions work? How was mutual aid organized? What were the recurrent conflicts?

The third session will deal with the Jewish view of war and the conduct of war. Since Jews had neither a state nor an army for most of their history, the topic is, until 1948, largely theoretical, but Jews did think about war—necessarily, because they were so often its victims. In '48 and after, the subject became an urgent one in which Jews are unavoidably if also unhappily engaged.

Radical Jewish Culture

Instructor: John Zorn and Anthony Coleman

What is Jewish music? Since its inception in 1992, the artists who created work under the banner of Radical Jewish Culture have asked this question, pushing the boundaries of how we think about and engage with Jewish cultural expression. To date, that questioning has grown into a body of work spanning over 200 CDs under John Zorn’s Tzadik label, redefining the role of Jewishness in music within contemporary culture.

In this three part series, join John Zorn and Anthony Coleman as they explore and reflect upon the origins, development, present, and future of Radical Jewish Music. Featuring live performances from Zorn, Coleman, and guest performers Steve Bernstein, Uri Caine, Jon Madof and others, the sessions will include listening and analysis of groundbreaking recordings, open-ended discussions, and Q&A. Participants will also be provided with supplementary listening and reading lists, compiled by Coleman and Zorn, to enhance the experience and facilitate the exploration of each week’s material.

What will be the future of Jewish music in the 21st century and beyond? How do we respond to the challenge of Gershom Scholem’s “treasure hunt within tradition,” that search for the New as we pull from the depths of culture and history?  This series will go to the heart of these questions, exploring Jewish music as an art-form in a constant process of becoming.

1/11 Featured special guests: Jewlia Eisenberg, Ben Goldberg, Jon Madof
1/25 Featured special guest: Uri Caine

View Past Courses

2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012