Hannah Zaves-Greene

Time: a concept that has stymied many readers, authors, and thinkers alike. Measuring change over time, however, is central to Jewish thought and practice, as well as to the historian’s craft. From weeks to months, season to season, and across the stages of the lifecycle, Jews have historically engaged with time religiously, spiritually, philosophically, and practically. Human life, when mediated through the written word, leads to a rich portrayal of life's internal complexities and inconsistencies. In this class, we will attend to the poetics of time as it shapes human lives and to human lives as they shape the poetics of time. Specifically, we will explore Jewish lives, defined broadly, to examine the intricacies of everyday experience, innermost thoughts and feelings, and interactions with the Jewish and non-Jewish world. Beginning with Baruch Spinoza, the infamous Jewish maverick, and time-traveling forward through a selection of biographies, memoirs, and fiction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious Jewish jurist, we will pursue our quest to discern—and tell anew—what makes a Jewish life.

Originating in biblical lore, the concept of being a foreigner—a stranger in a strange land—has struck a deep root in Jewish life and culture. Through violent expulsion, economic hardship, and political persecution, we will travel with Jewish migrants across the centuries as they gathered their belongings and left home to make new lives elsewhere. As they moved throughout the world, motivated by their search for security, freedom, and economic opportunity, the migrants established distinct communities, identities, and religious practices in each place they settled. This course will examine Jewish immigration, a complex and multifaceted process that embraces Jewish immigrants’ decisions to leave, journey across land and sea, settle in a new home, negotiate state bureaucracy, build new lives, and grapple with the question of naturalization. Together, we will question the nature of “borders”; the relationship between immigration policy and eugenics; shifting rhetoric about immigration; and how gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability influence immigration from departure to settling. We will ask what it means to be a foreigner, how related communities develop distinct characteristics, and how the diverse sets of Jewish practices that we know today emerged and evolved. As we trace the journeys of these migrants, we will discuss how the Jewish diaspora came to be, how gender impacted the migrant experience, and how Jews established their own social and political structures in an array of locations and moments across the sweep of history.

Does God exist? How should one read the Bible? Who should read the Bible? How can humans connect with the Divine? How does Judaism relate to social justice? How do we reconcile the dichotomy of reason and revelation? What makes one Jewish? What does it mean to live Jewishly? These questions—and still others—represent but a smattering of those with which the Jews whom we will study have grappled, both philosophically and practically, throughout history. From the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to the musical spirituality of Debbie Friedman and with a host of radical thinkers, rule-breakers, and religious innovators in between, this class will explore the myriad ways in which Jewish luminaries have broken with convention and disrupted the status quo. These individuals provide a lens into the humanity that undergirds the Jewish thought and ritual that, on the one hand, we take for granted and that, on the other, shocks or even appalls us. Drawing from an array of historical sources—including philosophical treatises, religious texts, and literary classics—we will explore how those Jewish pathbreakers have engaged with these questions across the ages and, in turn, offer our own responses.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” So wrote Sephardic New York Jew Emma Lazarus in 1883, putting her stamp on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and forever intertwining Jewish history with the professed American ideals of freedom, equality, and inclusivity. Whether as insult, compliment, or casual observation, the conflation of Jews and New York has become permanently entrenched in the American imagination. But how did we get from 23 Jewish refugees landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the New York City of Streisand, Sondheim, and Seinfeld? This course will explore 370 years of Jewish history steeped in the urban environs of the Empire State that millions elected to call home. From Lyman Bloomingdale’s retail empire to Mount Sinai Hospital’s pioneering medical research and from the groundbreaking literature of Chaim Potok to the feminist and queer activism of “Battling Bella” Abzug, the Jewish footprints on the streets and avenues of the city remain readily apparent. We will examine socialist Jews who demanded a brighter future for all, working-class Jewish women who rioted over the exorbitant price of kosher meat, and Jewish radicals who broadened the parameters of religious observance. Recognizing New York as the crucible of United States citizenship and a major center of the Jewish world, we will interrogate how—from generation to generation—the Jews shaped New York and New York shaped the Jews.

What is “Jewish” about American Jewish history? Does a single “American Jewish history” even exist? What does “Jewishness” mean, and does it differ from “Judaism”? How do we reconcile history and memory? This course invites us to think critically about American Jewish history beginning in the colonial period, when Jews first settled on American shores, and thereafter and continuing into the present. These questions will allow us to explore how Jews developed a diverse and fluid array of social, cultural, political, and religious practices as they encountered new social structures, ideologies, and cultures throughout what became the United States. Through the lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and disability, our discussions will center Jewish communal formation and evolution in response to the changing conditions of the United States over time. In our classroom community, we will deepen our conceptions of American Jewish history by analyzing texts, featuring both storied figures and marginalized voices, as we learn to apply different theoretical approaches and examine how historical narratives evolved and coalesced. Students will analyze primary sources, write creative pieces unpacking historical events, and produce a research paper on a topic of their choice. The readings chosen for this course are not meant to be exhaustive but, rather, to strengthen students’ understanding of American Jewish history, provide a range of theoretical approaches to enhance their analytical toolboxes, and illuminate the construction and perpetuation—and, when relevant, associated agendas—of American Jewish historical narratives.

Across the ages, Jews have maintained an intimate relationship with the written word. From the destruction of the Second Temple through the chaos of modernity, reading and writing have grounded and animated Jewish life and practice. Together, we will embark on an examination of critical Jewish and human issues mediated through short stories, novels, and plays. By exploring the deep textual history embedded within Jewish culture, we will wrestle with topics as varied as romantic love and marriage, the encroachment of the secular world, cross-cultural conflict and exchange, and evolving concepts of gender and sexuality. Alongside our literary journey, we will engage with an array of artistic adaptations like music, film, and visual art. Accompanied by authors—including Yiddish luminaries Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, American pioneers Philip Roth and Anzia Yezierska, and more recent visionaries Etgar Keret, Tony Kushner, and Dara Horn—we will interrogate the many ways that Jews both accommodated and broke convention.

The shrewd moneylender, the newly arrived immigrant, the nosy busybody, the heroic pioneer, the cunning villain...different images of Jews populate our history, literature, and media, impacting our cultural ideas of the “typical Jew.” How did these archetypes first develop? How did they evolve? What common biases do we unthinkingly accept? What is the relationship of these biases to Jews’ historical roles in society, and how do they manifest across time and geographical location? Together, we will explore these questions and more through a multidisciplinary array of sources that portray Jews—spanning centuries, borders, and diverse societies. As we do so, we will encounter a variety of images of Jews—including observant Jews who grapple with tradition in the face of modernity, Jewish immigrants adapting to their lives in the United States, displaced Holocaust survivors fighting for a permanent home, American Jews who push boundaries as they negotiate conflicting identities, and still others—allowing us to unpack our own assumptions and preconceptions about what it means to be a Jew.

Although historically pushed to the margins in both Jewish practice and scholarship, women have played a critical role throughout Jewish history. This course re-examines Jewish life and culture through the prisms of gender and sexuality, as we center previously silenced voices and overlooked experiences. Based on an extensive array of sources from the Hebrew Bible to contemporary scholarship, we will interrogate received narratives about Jewishness and Judaism, exploring how incorporating gender and sexuality reshapes and reanimates our established conceptions. What happens when we apply gender and sexuality as analytical lenses to the narratives that we think we know? Who has the authority to construct Jewish history and to determine who and what gets included? How do gender and sexuality shape hierarchies of power? How have feminist movements impacted our understanding of Jewish history and pushed us to reconsider Jewish identity and practice? And what about intersectionality? This class will situate gender and sexuality at the core of a re-envisioned, more comprehensive Jewish history, complicating Jewish identity and self-understanding in our contemporary landscape.