This course will provide an overview of Israeli art and culture and its place within the international cultural world. We will examine museums, theatre, visual art, popular music, and cinema, as they reflect the multi-cultural and pluralistic Israeli society. 

While Jews are often imagined as having European roots, many are unaware of the rich and complex histories of Jewish communities that thrived for centuries across the Middle East and North Africa. This course offers a broad perspective on these communities—collectively known as Mizrahi Jews—their distinctive cultures and histories, examining both their diversity and the threads that connect them.

The course moves between the cultural worlds of Mizrahi communities in their countries of origin—such as Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Tunisia—and the global Mizrahi communities that evolved throughout the twentieth century (particularly following the establishment of the State of Israel), as political and social changes led these once-thriving Jewish societies to disperse and re-form in new cultural contexts around the world. Through this dual lens, the course explores the continuities of Mizrahi culture and the ways in which traditions, identities, and memories have been sustained across generations and geographies.

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Requirements class fulfills