Course designed to permit regular and visiting faculty the flexibility to address topics that reflect their research interests and supplement regular curricular offerings. Consult department website each semester for specific descriptions.

This course will examine the impact of modern intellectual, political, cultural, and social forces on the Jewish people since the eighteenth century. It is our aim to come to an understanding of how the Jews interpreted these forces and how and in what ways they adapted and utilized them to suit the Jewish experience. In other words, we will trace the way Jews became modern. Some of the topics to be covered include Emancipation, the Jewish Enlightenment, new Jewish religious movements, Jewish politics and culture, immigration, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel.

In this class, modern Jewish history means the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It is the period in which Jewish culture became more diversified than ever before. Jews became more secular, more political, as well as more linguistically and religiously diversified than ever before. As ancient as Judaism is as a religious culture, the modern period gave birth to entirely new and now fully established forms of religious expression. During the period we’ll be studying, Hasidism, Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Judaism all emerged for the first time. From the standpoint of language, some Jews adopted vernacular languages for daily communication while others continued to speak Jewish languages. This happened among Ashkenazim as well as among Sephardim. Similarly, politics came to shape modern Jewish culture and with this development, the Jewish world split further in myriad ways. Among the topics we will examine are popular culture, religion, politics, language choice, urbanization, immigration, class stratification, religious experience, gender roles, war, the Holocaust, and the birth of Israel. Assigned readings will include a history of the Jews and many primary sources, which are first-person narratives written at the time events unfolded. Course requirements include one analysis of an object housed at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Culture in Berkeley (the class will visit the museum), two midterm exams, and a cumulative exam during finals week.

- This class counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor.

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