Graduate Courses Spring 2012

GTU: HSHR 2020, Deena Aranoff
Introduction to Judaism
T: 12:40-3:30, MUDD 102
This course will examine the historical development of Judaism, its canonical texts,
practices, calendar, and culture. We will survey important features of Biblical and rabbinic
literature, Jewish mystical and philosophical traditions, as well as aspects of modern Jewish
culture. Short paper/exam.

GTU, BS5420
Aaron Brody
F 9:40-12:30, 102 MUDD
Household Religions in Ancient Israel
This course will investigate religious ideas and practices at the family level. Past scholarship
has privileged state run religion or official religion and either downgraded or ignored the
family or house holds. This is due in part to the elite nature of the texts we have preserved in the
Hebrew Bible, or the editorial preferences and theologies of ancient editors/authors. Families
and households were the basic level of ancient societies, thus their religion gives new insights
into diversity in Israelite and Near Eastern religions

BSHR 4531, Naomi Seidman
The Politics of Bible Translation
M 2:10-5, HDCO
This course will explore the history of Bible translation from antiquity to our own day,
focusing on translation as political and cultural as well as linguistic negotiation. Our goals will
be to understand the historical emergence of major Bible translations and to acquire methodological tools drawn from translation studies to enable us to analyze these translations.

HRHS 2015, Noah Greenfield
Introduction to Talmud and Rabbinic Thought: Law, Politics, Theology
TH 9:40-12:30, Hedco
The exciting field of rabbinics has been energized in the last few decades by cultural studies,
literary, gender, post-colonial and various other critical theories. This course will consider the
fruits of these projects within a framework in which rabbis have been neglected: the history of
ideas. How can the rabbis be studied for their thought? In what way have they and can they
contribute to theories of justice, politics and religion? This course will expose students to a
wealth of primary rabbinic texts (in translation) and seminal theoretical sources which shed light
on them.

Hebrew 202B (3 Units), Daniel Boyarin
Advanced Late Antique Hebrew Texts
T 2-5, 8B Barrow
Historical and literary study of Hebrew and Aramaic Judaic texts (e.g., Talmud and Midrash).

GTU: HSHR5190, Deena Aranoff
Medieval Jewish Philosophy
M 9:40-12:30, HEDCO
This course will examine Jewish philosophical trends from the 10th-15th centuries. We will focus on Jewish philosophers in the Islamic cultural world, examining the impact of neo-platonic and Aristotelian ideas upon Jewish philosophers in the eastern and western regions of the Muslim empire. Questions that will emerge as part of our studies are: What is the definition of Jewish philosophy? What kinds of questions occupied Jewish philosophers of the medieval period? How did religion and philosophy combine to address these questions and how did they clash? The course will also examine the impact of philosophical notions upon two significant aspects of Jewish intellectual life: mysticism and Biblical hermeneutics.


Hebrew 204B, Chana Kronfeld
Th 6-9, 252 Barrows
Modern Hebrew Literature in its Multilingual Contexts
We will look at a selection of modern, modernist and postmodernist Hebrew works of poetry and fiction which maintain a variety of contacts with works in other languages, either via the internal bilingualism of Jewish literatures (Hebrew-Yiddish, for example), regional formations of literary culture (Hebrew-Arabic), or modern intertextualities (e.g. with Anglo-American and European literature). My aim is to enable participants to use the Hebrew texts as points of departure for exploring the multilingual contexts that are of the greatest interest to them. I will introduce the Hebrew-Yiddish contacts together with participants who work on Yiddish as well, but I hope that people working on Arabic, English or other relevant literatures will contribute the texts and lead the discussion on those literary contacts. We will also read critical texts that explore issues of intertextuality, multilingual cultures, and the specific phenomenon of auto-translation. Hebrew literary works will all be read in the original. Collaborative projects will be encouraged. Course Reader will include participants' contributions, due 3rd week of classes.

CL 202B:1, Chana Kronfeld
The Lyric – A View from the Margins
Tu 2-5:00, 225 Dwinelle
CCN 17374
This seminar will focus on lyrical poetry produced in the margins – or outside of — the modern Anglo-European canon in order to call into question static typological theories of genre, as well as what may be a majoritarian, heteronormative or Eurocentric set of biases behind contemporary attacks on the lyric as solipsistic, apolitical “personal expression.” Participants will draw on their own cultural and linguistic specialties to compile a multi-lingual course Reader of modern lyrical poetry marginalized by gender, sexuality, class, race, place or language. My own contribution to the readings will include selections from bilingual anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry, and examples of biblical poetry as an alternative model of the lyric, in which the distinction between the personal and the collective, the political and the “apolitical” is rendered meaningless. Through a series of historically and linguistically informed close readings, we will examine both standard and non-normative theoretical studies of the lyric, maintaining a critical awareness of the extent to which our paradigm examples affect our understanding of the genre. Questions we may want to ask include: How does the view from the margins problematize such western commonplaces as the coherence and authority of the lyrical “I,” the subject-object divide, the dichotomy between apostrophe and address, the conflation of the “lyrical” and “subjective” with the “feminine,” or the lyric’s purported freedom — or flight! — from the historical and the social?
Requirements: The seminar group will compile a Reader of modern lyrics as well as cultural and theoretical background materials relevant for the participants’ different languages of specialization. 1 in-class presentation and 1 seminar paper. COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS WILL BE ENCOURAGED.

Reading List:
1. Selections from: The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (bilingual anthology), eds. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse & Khone Shemruk. New York: Penguin, 1988. (Out of print; photocopy available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing).
2. The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; paperback edition (available online for UC students). Hebrew readers will be supplied with the Hebrew texts.

History 280/285B.4, John Efron
The Jewish Body    
W 4-7    89 DWINELLE    
In this course we will study the modern history of German Jews through an examination of the perceived physical and psychological nature of their Jewishness. In other words, we will study the Jewish body, as both Jews and non-Jews represented it. What is special about Germany in this regard was the unparalleled access to medical knowledge the Jews enjoyed there. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Jews used medicine to engage with the entire universe of assumptions, both positive and negative that characterized the discourse on the corporeal nature of Jewishness. Beyond this medicine was used by Jews as a tool to fashion modern Jewish ideologies and promote social change. As such, the Jewish body can be used as a meaningful lens through which to observe the German-Jewish encounter with modernity.