Joel Swanson

The question of how Judaism does and does not map onto contemporary racial categories has been, for centuries, a defining question of how Jews, as a small minority group, relate to their surrounding cultures. In many ways, the story of the historical construction of racial categories is itself a story indissolubly bound up with Jewish history—ranging from the development of the concept of blood purity during the Spanish Inquisition, which was then exported to the New World through Spanish colonialism, to late 19th-century racial theorists preoccupied with the question of how Jews do or do not relate to European peoples. As such, this course will consider the overarching question—Are Jews white?—from a historical and sociological perspective. In so doing, we will think about the historical development of the concept of whiteness itself and the relationship between the emergent concept of race and concepts of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, and nationality. We will look at how Jews were and are racially defined and categorized in different historical and cultural contexts in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States—and how this question is bound up with broader questions about power relations, political structures, and minority and majority identities. We will look at how Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism have altered Jewish racialization; how Jews relate to broader discourses of postcolonialism and Orientalism; and the different racializations of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The course will look at the ways in which Jews responded to the rise of Black nationalism in the United States and how racialized divisions between different ethnic Jewish communities shape politics in the modern state of Israel, with a particular focus on the rise of the Mizrahi Black Panthers. We will read sources from Jews of color and Jews who identify as white, from many diverse national backgrounds, as well as from many non-Jewish thinkers who find Jewish identity a fruitful way to think about the question of racial identity and its attendant political conflicts. We will explore how racial categories for Jews function both internally, within the Jewish community, and externally. In so doing, we will come to see how Jews and their relationship to whiteness is a defining question not just for Jewish identity but also how Jewishness can help shed light on the very concept of race itself.

This course will provide a historical overview of how key philosophical thinkers have thought about religious themes within the philosophical tradition broadly known as Continental philosophy, beginning with Spinoza and ending with contemporary postmodern thinkers. We will engage with key questions of the modern period emerging from the challenge to traditional religious forms and belief systems, such as: What is the nature and existence of God? Can we understand God through rational thought? How do we make sense of evil? How is God reconcilable with a belief in human freedom? How do we make sense of religious pluralism and the existence of multiple belief systems? Does God actively work within human history? What is left of morality if we do not maintain a traditional belief in God? We will think about such questions comparatively and historically, discussing key thinkers and ideas from philosophical movements such as German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and poststructuralism and deconstruction. By the end of the course, students will have a broad understanding of the historical development of the field of Continental philosophy of religions, which should support further work in philosophy for interested students. Though primarily focused on Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish thinkers, as well as atheist and agnostic thinkers from these cultural backgrounds, there will be opportunities for students to explore the field of philosophy of religions within a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox Christian, or other religious framework, if so interested.

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality, a race, an ethnicity—or all or none of these? This question has driven Jewish thought for centuries and has preoccupied both Jewish thinkers and non-Jewish thinkers attempting to make sense of the place of the Jewish minority in surrounding cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which Judaism and Jewish peoplehood are understood historically, theologically, and sociologically and how this form of identity does or does not map onto emergent modern concepts of religion and nationality. We will use Judaism as a test case for exploring the very concept of “religion” itself, as it evolved in European culture, and the question of whether religion is a universal concept that applies to all humans around the world or a particularist construction emerging out of a uniquely Christian history. We will investigate topics such as the nature of Jewish religious practice, the relationship between Jewish law and identity, the rise of secular Jewish movements, and the implications of Jewish nationalist movements. We will engage with key texts from the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and modern Jewish thought while also considering contemporary debates on Jewish identity, secularism, and the intersection of faith, practice, and culture. We will also spend some time on comparative religious studies, examining how Judaism fits within broader categories of religion and spirituality and how these categories describe the multifaceted nature of Jewish life. The course will encourage students to grapple with the way in which concepts that we use in our everyday life, such as “religion,” in fact reflect deeply embedded histories and cultural biases and to think about what it means to do comparative religious studies as an academic project. Students will complete both short essays and in-class presentations over the course of the year in addition to one group presentation. The final conference project will serve as a culmination of a research question that the student has pursued; and while it may take a variety of forms and media, depending on the personal interests of the student, the project will display sustained research and engagement with academic sources related to the topic of choice. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality, a race, an ethnicity—or all or none of these? This question has driven Jewish thought for centuries and has preoccupied both Jewish thinkers and non-Jewish thinkers attempting to make sense of the place of the Jewish minority in surrounding cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which Judaism and Jewish peoplehood are understood historically, theologically, and sociologically and how this form of identity does or does not map onto emergent modern concepts of religion and nationality. We will use Judaism as a test case for exploring the very concept of “religion” itself, as it evolved in European culture, and the question of whether religion is a universal concept that applies to all humans around the world or a particularist construction emerging out of a uniquely Christian history. We will investigate topics such as the nature of Jewish religious practice, the relationship between Jewish law and identity, the rise of secular Jewish movements, and the implications of Jewish nationalist movements. We will engage with key texts from the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and modern Jewish thought while also considering contemporary debates on Jewish identity, secularism, and the intersection of faith, practice, and culture. We will also spend some time on comparative religious studies, examining how Judaism fits within broader categories of religion and spirituality and how these categories describe the multifaceted nature of Jewish life. The course will encourage students to grapple with the way in which concepts that we use in our everyday life, such as “religion,” in fact reflect deeply embedded histories and cultural biases and to think about what it means to do comparative religious studies as an academic project. Students will complete both short essays and in-class presentations over the course of the year in addition to one group presentation. The final conference project will serve as a culmination of a research question that the student has pursued; and while it may take a variety of forms and media, depending on the personal interests of the student, the project will display sustained research and engagement with academic sources related to the topic of choice.

Since the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing Jewish exile in 70 CE, most of Jewish history has been spent in a state of exile and dispersion. As such, Jewish thinkers have grappled extensively with how to understand exile and diaspora as foundational concepts of identity and meaning. This seminar will examine how the concepts of galut (exile) and diaspora have functioned as central, generative, and contested categories within Jewish intellectual, religious, political, and cultural history. Rather than treating exile simply as a condition of loss or punishment, the course will ask how Jewish thinkers have interpreted exile as a theological problem, a historical reality, a political framework, and a mode of identity, and whether diaspora may be understood as a productive and creative condition. The course will begin with rabbinic and Talmudic understandings of exile, exploring how the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jewish people were reinterpreted through law, narrative, and ritual. We will examine how rabbinic Judaism transformed exile into a livable and meaningful condition, reimagining sacred space, authority, and communal life in the absence of sovereignty. From there, we will turn to medieval Jewish thought, focusing on figures such as Maimonides and Judah Halevi, whose writings articulate divergent theological and philosophical responses to exile, ranging from rational universalism to longing for land, language, and embodied collectivity. The core of the seminar will concentrate on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish thought, when exile and diaspora became urgent categories in the context of emancipation, nationalism, imperialism, antisemitism, and mass migration. We will read Jewish philosophers, political theorists, poets, novelists, and artists who grappled with alienation, homelessness, translation, and minority existence. Special attention will be paid to non-Zionist political projects, including the Jewish Labour Bund, Jewish Autonomism, and other diasporist movements that imagined diaspora as a site of political possibility, cultural autonomy, and ethical internationalism rather than solely as a problem to be overcome. Throughout the course, we will investigate the question of whether exile must be conceived solely in negative terms, or whether it can be understood as positive, generative, and critical, a condition that produces new forms of subjectivity, solidarity, creativity, and critique. We will also ask how Jewish diasporic identity has functioned as a lens for thinking about diaspora more broadly, including questions of race, displacement, colonialism, and statelessness. In the final portion of the seminar, Jewish texts and experiences will be placed in conversation with Black studies and postcolonial studies, exploring shared and divergent accounts of diaspora, memory, trauma, and resistance. These comparative perspectives will allow us to consider how exile and alienation challenge not only the nation-state, but also stable notions of selfhood, belonging, and political identity. Through close reading and sustained discussion, students will engage exile as both a lived condition and a powerful framework for critical thought.

In recent years, scholarship in Jewish studies has recognized that much of recorded Jewish history and writing has centered the male, heterosexual, cisgender Jew as the normative Jewish figure and has failed to reckon sufficiently with the perspectives of Jewish women, queer Jews, trans Jews, and other Jews holding marginalized gender and sexual identities. At the same time, scholars have noted that Jewish literature and rabbinic sources contain fascinating resources to interrogate gender norms and, in particular, to explore how the ambiguity of gender roles contained within rabbinic sources does or does not map onto contemporary gender binaries. Building from this perspective, this class aims to explore the evolution of debates about gender and sexuality in Judaism, focusing both on textual sources and on the lived experiences of Jewish people. Topics to be covered include: the status of women under halakhah (Jewish law); gender in the Talmud and Jewish religious texts; constructions of masculinity and femininity; debates over the proper role of the body and the gendered nature of religious practice and religious authority; the role of women in Jewish emancipation and the changing nature of Jewish gender norms in the modern era; the relationship of women and queer Jews to nationalisms and citizenship; Zionist discourses on the relationship between land, rootedness, and gender; and the gendered politics of Jewish identity in both Europe and the Middle East. Throughout the course, we will read both primary and secondary sources; the primary sources will include Jewish religious texts, as well as fiction and autobiography produced by Jewish women and queer Jews. We will ask the questions: Who claims the right to speak for a tradition, and what does it mean to say that certain Jewish bodies are and are not normative? In so doing, we will also review some of the key debates surrounding gender studies and queer studies in the field of religious studies more broadly, and students will gain a basic understanding of some of the key methodological and theoretical debates in contemporary queer theory.

This course will provide a survey of the history of the Jewish people, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and ending with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 CE—an event which some scholars have argued represented the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world. The class will be focused on two central questions: Firstly, what does it mean when a community that was once oriented around the Temple and the Holy Land went into exile and had to reconstitute itself as a community grounded in the text and the book? Secondly, what does it mean for the Jews to be a people; and how does the idea of peoplehood relate to emergent concepts of nationhood, religion, race, and ethnicity? The class will focus heavily on the emergence of the form of rabbinic literary interpretation known as midrash and the diverse modes of reading Jewish texts that emerged after the destruction of the Temple; the place of Jews under both Christian and Muslim rule; and the forms of Jewish philosophy, literature, and mystical thought that flourished in these differing cultural contexts. We will discuss the historical development of Jewish law (halakhah), how it emerged through contested interpretations of Jewish texts, and how legal concepts had to evolve to respond to the changing sociopolitical conditions under which Jews lived. Though the class will discuss anti-Jewish persecution and violence across the centuries, we will also focus on moments of cultural interchange and cooperation. Students will read both primary sources, including rabbinic texts and Jewish philosophical and mystical treatises, as well as selected secondary source materials. This course is designed to be taken as part of a two-semester sequence with Jewish History II in the spring semester, but students are permitted to enroll in only one semester or the other, based on interest.

This course will provide a survey of the modern history of the Jewish people, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and continuing until the present day. In so doing, we will focus heavily on the question of what modernity itself means and how modern concepts—such as nationalism and the nation-state, race and ethnicity, religious liberty, and individualism and collectivism—were, in many senses, defined in relation to the Jewish people, with Jewish minority communities serving as test cases for questions of what it means to be a modern human. The class will focus extensively on the process of Jewish emancipation and citizenship and on the philosophical and cultural changes underpinning this process. Yet, we will not focus merely on Jews as passive observers of these historical processes but, rather, as active agents shaping their own histories and their own struggles for rights. We will examine ways in which Jewish law had to be adapted to fit into emergent concepts of civil law and how Jews responded to and contested some of those changes. The class will delve into the relationship of Jews to Enlightenment philosophy, the emergence of distinctively Jewish political ideologies such as Zionism and Bundism, and the relationship of Jews to both European and Middle Eastern nationalisms. We will discuss the Holocaust, but we will situate it in relation to broader historical processes of nationalism and violence; and we will discuss the relationship of Jews in Europe to Jews in the Middle East and North Africa. Though not primarily a class on contemporary Israeli politics, we will discuss the formation of the modern state of Israel and the way in which the founding of the Jewish state shapes the identity of Jews who have chosen in remain in diaspora. Throughout the semester, we will continually ask these central questions: What does it mean to be a modern human, and how does the concept of modernity necessarily construct itself in relation to the Jewish people? This course is designed to be taken as part of a two-semester sequence with Jewish History I in the fall semester, but students are permitted to enroll in only one semester or the other, based on interest.

Jewish mystics have left us with a vast corpus of imaginative literature that raises vital questions about the creation of the universe, the place of humans in the cosmos, the relationship of humanity to God, and the role of human agency in salvation and soteriology. This course will provide an overview of the development of Jewish mysticism, with a particular focus on the esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought known as Kabbalah. The course will approach mysticism not as a marginal or esoteric curiosity, but as a recurring and generative mode of Jewish religious creativity, deeply embedded in textual traditions, historical experience, and cultural imagination. We will begin with the hekhalot and merkavah literature of late antiquity, examining early Jewish mystical ascent narratives, ritualized practices of visionary experience, and the theological challenges posed by proximity to the divine. These texts will introduce key themes, such as sacred language, secrecy, embodiment, danger, and authority, that reverberate throughout the later history of Kabbalah. From there, we will turn to the emergence of medieval Kabbalah in 12th- and 13th-century Provence and Spain, focusing on the development of the sefirotic system, symbolic theosophy, and new conceptions of God, Torah, and human action. A central portion of the course will be devoted to the Zohar, the foundational work of Kabbalah. We will read extended passages closely, attending to its mythic imagination, narrative form, and radical reconfiguration of biblical interpretation, gender, and divine plurality. The seminar will then move to the Lurianic Kabbalah of 16th century Safed, exploring how doctrines of cosmic rupture and repair became powerful frameworks for understanding exile, history, and ethical responsibility. The course will then continue with Hasidism, analyzing how earlier mystical ideas were reshaped into devotional practices, charismatic leadership, and new models of religious subjectivity in early modern Eastern Europe. We will examine both the continuity and tension between elite esotericism and popular spirituality. We will also look at the rise of Christian Kabbalah, and Christian thinkers who reinterpreted Kabbalah according to a Christian framework. In its final section, the seminar will turn to modern and postmodern reinterpretations of Kabbalah, including both literature inspired by Kabbalah, and modern pop cultural appropriations of Kabbalah. Readings will include writers who draw on Kabbalistic motifs to grapple with trauma, language, identity, and the limits of meaning. Throughout the course, students will engage primary texts in translation alongside critical scholarship, developing skills in close reading, historical analysis, and theoretical reflection. The seminar will invite sustained attention to how mystical traditions endure, adapt, and provoke new questions about religion, interpretation, and the imagination.

As a method of analyzing human beings through the lens of unconscious mental processes, the field of psychoanalysis has long had much to say about the topic of religion and the divine, as foundational influences on human experience and the human condition. This seminar will explore how psychoanalytic theory has grappled with religion, myth, ritual, and the idea of the divine from the late 19th century to the present. Rather than treating religion solely as belief or doctrine, the course will approach it as a set of symbolic practices, narratives, and affects that shape subjectivity, desire, and social life. Psychoanalysis will provide a distinctive lens through which to ask why religious ideas persist, how they are experienced, and what psychic work they perform. The course will begin with Sigmund Freud, whose writings on religion, most notably Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism, frame religion as a response to unconscious wishes, anxiety, and authority. Freud’s controversial reduction of religion to illusion and neurosis will set the stage for later debates about whether psychoanalysis undermines, explains, or transforms religious meaning. From there, we will turn to Carl Jung, whose depth psychology offers a contrasting account of myth, symbol, and the sacred, emphasizing archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the religious dimensions of psychic integration. Mid-century figures such as D. W. Winnicott and Erich Fromm will allow us to think about religion beyond repression and illusion. Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena will open new ways of understanding ritual, prayer, and religious objects as creative spaces between inner and outer reality, while Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis will help us to reconsider religion in relation to ethics, freedom, and social critique. We will then examine Jacques Lacan, whose reworking of Freud through language, structure, and desire raises difficult questions about God, law, absence, and the symbolic order. The seminar will also foreground feminist psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who challenge masculinist assumptions in both psychoanalysis and religious traditions. Their writings will invite us to rethink embodiment, maternity, sexuality, and alterity, and to ask whether new imaginaries of the divine are possible beyond patriarchal symbolic systems. In the final portion of the course, we will engage postcolonial psychoanalytic perspectives, considering how religion, colonial power, race, and trauma intersect. These approaches will allow us to question the universality of classical psychoanalytic models and explore how religious myth and practice function within histories of domination, resistance, and cultural translation. Through close readings of theoretical texts and sustained discussion, students will critically assess psychoanalysis as both a critique of religion and a resource for reimagining it. The course will encourage reflection on enduring questions about belief, meaning, desire, and the unconscious in modern and global contexts.

As a far-right ultranationalist movement focused on social hierarchy, tradition, and the subordination of individual rights for the national collective, fascism has been deeply intertwined with religious themes and imagery since it arose in Europe in the early 20th century. As such, this seminar will examine the complex and often paradoxical relationship between religious ideas and fascist political movements in Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century. The course will investigate how religious traditions, symbols, and narratives were mobilized both to legitimize authoritarian, nationalist projects and also to inspire forms of resistance, dissent, and ethical critique in the decades leading up to, during, and immediately following World War II. Focusing on literary, artistic, philosophical, and political texts, the seminar will move beyond a singular focus on Nazi Germany to explore a wider Central European landscape shaped by fascist influence. We will examine responses to fascist movements and regimes in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Czechoslovakia, attending to both foreign occupation and homegrown forms of authoritarian nationalism. While Nazi domination and its catastrophic consequences will form an unavoidable part of the historical backdrop, the course will emphasize the diversity of fascist ideologies and the range of religious and cultural responses they provoked. Early in the course, we will consider how Christian, mystical, and quasi-religious concepts, such as sacrifice, redemption, mythic origins, and sacred nationhood, were appropriated by fascist thinkers and writers to naturalize violence, exclusion, and obedience. Alongside these pro-fascist or accommodationist texts, we will read religiously inflected critiques that challenged fascism from within theological, ethical, and spiritual traditions, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and heterodox sources. A central focus of the seminar will be the work of dissident writers and artists who, in the face of censorship, persecution, and mass violence, turned to religious symbolism, spiritual language, and philosophical reflection as resources for resistance. Essays, novels, poetry, film, and visual and performance art from across Central Europe will be studied as sites where older traditions were reworked to confront dehumanization, preserve moral agency, and imagine alternative forms of community. These creative responses often forged new spiritual and cultural openings rather than simply returning to inherited orthodoxies. In the final section of the course, we will examine post–World War II reflections on fascism, focusing on how memory, trauma, and responsibility were negotiated in the aftermath of destruction. We will ask how literature, philosophy, and art participated in the construction of collective memory, and whether it is possible to sustain national or cultural identity without reproducing the exclusionary nationalism that fueled fascist movements in the first place. Through close reading, historical contextualization, and comparative analysis, students will gain a nuanced understanding of religion’s ambivalent role in both enabling and resisting fascism, and of the enduring challenges posed by this history for politics, culture, and memory. Along the way we will explore themes that remain as relevant as ever today – technology, power, evil, faith, hope, and the political – all with a view to asking what it might mean to live freely as a human being in modernity.

The Holocaust is one of the most widely discussed and studied events of the 20th century, raising vital and challenging political and philosophical questions about nationalism, the nature of the modern nation-state, the human propensity for mass violence, and the possibility of minority integration. As a result, the Holocaust has become a sort of canvas upon which a huge array of postwar and contemporary political, philosophical, and cultural figures and voices have projected their own thoughts and messages. This course will examine the way in which the Holocaust has become a symbol of human evil and destruction in contemporary cultural memory and will ask difficult questions about the use of the Holocaust as a political symbol by both Jewish and non-Jewish voices. Questions to be examined in the course include: How has the construction of World War II as the “good war” shaped contemporary American cultural identity? How do American Jews relate to the destruction of European Jewry? How has Germany reckoned with its own historical guilt through the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coping with the past”)? How have Central and Eastern European nations confronted or denied their own collaboration and complicity with the extermination of their Jewish populations? How are countries such as Poland attempting to criminalize discussions of their potential historical complicity in the Holocaust? We will discuss Zionist and anti-Zionist mobilizations of Holocaust memory in political debates, the spread of Holocaust denial, and why political movements such as protestors against COVID restrictions have compared themselves to Jews under Nazism. We will also think about how Holocaust memory has shaped contemporary Jewish identity, as well as the fraught question of what it means to live as a Jewish person after more than one-third of the Jews on Earth were exterminated. The class will include both philosophical and literary sources, as well as select films. Students will also gain a basic introduction to some key texts in memory studies and trauma studies. We will inevitably confront moral questions about guilt, culpability, and the obligation to remember; but we will only pass moral judgment after attempting to understand the diverse perspectives animating the Holocaust as a symbol of cultural memory. Though the class will begin with a brief overview of the history of the Holocaust itself, it is not primarily a course about Holocaust history but, rather, about postwar cultural constructions of Holocaust memory. As a result, some familiarity with Holocaust history will be helpful for the course, though it is not required.