This class looks at the histories, religion, and material culture of Caribbean Jews from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and traces their impact on the US Jewish life. Prior to 1825, the largest, wealthiest, and best educated Jewish American communities were in the Caribbean. In the early nineteenth century many Caribbean Jews traveled North and settled in the United States, but the region would once again play a key role between WWI and WWII as a sanctuary for Holocaust refugees. Communities we will cover include Recife, Curaçao, Jamaica, Suriname, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

What is German-Jewish thought? Why are so many of the most influential thinkers of modernity German(-speaking) Jews? Think of Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and Arendt, not to mention writers like Kafka and Celan. In what sense can their writing and thinking meaningfully be described as 'Jewish'? How was the position of minoritization conducive to such extraordinary critical insight and literary creativity? Topics to include: secularization, tolerance, and 'the Jewish question'; messianism and eschatology; (anti-)Zionism; psychoanalysis and the Jewish joke. Readings from the Enlightenment to the present, with a focus on the 20th century.

An introduction to some of the major works of Jewish thought and literature that survive from antiquity until the early modern era. We'll closely read a wide array of primary texts in translation, from the Hebrew Bible to Spinoza, discuss the worlds in which the people who produced them lived, and consider some of the ways in which they add up to an ongoing tradition across time and space - and some of the ways in which they don't. Students with reading knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic are warmly encouraged to use them, but this is optional; no prior knowledge of Judaism is required.

There have been people who have hated Jews qua Jews for over two thousand years. Prejudice against Jews is often called humanity's "oldest hatred," and yet it has taken many different forms over the millennia. Using a historical-critical approach, we will trace Jew-hatred chronologically and across vast territories and cultures. We will consider anti-Jewish prejudice in both Christian and Islamic lands, in the west and the east. Over the course of the semester, students will study texts regarded as scripture, works of philosophy, legal texts, historical narratives, polemics, and screeds.

This course trains graduate students to work directly with documents from the Cairo Geniza, one of the largest and most varied documentary corpora to have survived from the pre-Ottoman Middle East. Students learn to find and decipher published and unpublished Geniza documents relevant to their research interests and become familiar with a range of tools for interpreting them as historical evidence. Arabic proficiency is required.

Palestine and Israel Studies is/are among the most deeply contentious fields of research within Middle Eastern Studies, corresponding to the polarized politics that the field studies. In this course, we choose a topic at the heart of these fields and study the scholarship about it and analyze the relevant primary sources.

This course introduces the Hebrew Bible (Christian "Old Testament"), a complex anthology written by many people over nearly a thousand years. In this class, we will ask questions about the Hebrew Bible's historical context and ancient meaning, as well as its literary profile and early reception. Who wrote the Bible? When and how was it written? What sources did its authors draw on to write these stories? And to what circumstances were they responding? Students will develop the skills to critically analyze written sources, and to understand, contextualize, and critique the assumptions inherent in modern treatments of the Bible.

In this course we will focus on the rich body of Jewish norms and practices, the literature that discusses and prescribes them, and the diverse ways in which Jews have lived them out throughout history. We will highlight the embodied, material, mundane, and habitual aspects of Jewish practice and the ways in which they are enforced. We will also explore the common ground that Jewish norms (halakha) have with Islamic norms (sharia). Our focus on Jewish religiosity will bring us to examine the relationship between practice and belief as well as the very concept of "religion."

Much of recent Jewish and Christian thought has focused on arguments defending the respective particularity of the Jewish and Christian traditions. With special attention to debates about God's people, the problem of election, the relation between religious and national identities, and the significance of the Apostle Paul, this seminar examines the historical and theological contexts of these arguments as well as their philosophical, ethical, and political implications.