Freshman and Sophomore seminar. European Jewry’s destruction in the Holocaust has greatly impacted the subsequent development of the Western tradition and Jewish civilization. Students in this course will examine responses to the Holocaust across a range of intellectual and artistic domains, including poetry, philosophy, history, memoir, and more.

This course introduces students to the diversity of Jewish communities across time and geographies through a survey of literatures, histories, and cultures. Jewish cultures have always been co-produced in interaction with their non-Jewish neighbors. Through this study of Jewish cultural pluralism throughout history, we will investigate complex issues of identity and layers of belonging. Students from all majors and backgrounds are welcome. No previous knowledge of Judaism or Jewish Studies is necessary.

– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Coming from exclusion and powerlessness, Jewish creators invented the modern comic book. Comics are where Jewish stories get told, from the Holocaust to daily life. The superhero genre, mostly invented by Jews, narrates core Jewish ethical concepts such as Responsibility to the Other. We will read lots of comics and focus on the overlapping themes of Jewish history, identity, and faith.

– Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course deals with the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in World War II and the Holocaust, with a special focus on the Anne Frank’s diary. We will discuss literature, film and historiography with a focus on anti-Semitism, collaboration and resistance as well as the postwar discussion on guilt and responsibility. All materials will be in English, no knowledge of Dutch is required.

– Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The course will explore dynamics of change in issues of state, religion and gender in Israel, as manifested in social movement activism through law and society. The course will illustrate and reflect upon different strategies and spheres for promoting social change, by examining core issues involving state, religion, and gender in Israel: religious marriage and divorce, gender equality in the religious establishment, conversion, spiritual leadership of women, and free exercise of religion at the Western Wall (the struggle of Women of the Wall). Spheres of activism to be covered include parliament, state courts, alternative private initiatives and courts, and social media.

– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Israel is the ultimate immigrant society: 95% of its Jewish population is built of immigrants of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd generation, and 40% of today’s Israelis were born abroad. In fact, immigration of the Jews from over 70 countries of the world has been the major resource of the nation building for the Jewish State since its foundation in May 1948. The goal of this course is to familiarize the students with the main landmarks of Israel’s social history in conjunction with the mass immigration waves (Aliyah) and show how these subsequent waves of Olim (newcomers) have gradually shaped the social, ethnic and cultural tapestry of modern Israel. We will explore the main schisms and contested issues of religion and inter-cultural relations among Israeli Jews. Our perspective will be both historical and sociological, and the readings discussed in class will reflect the cross-fertilization of these disciplines and outlooks.

– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

In this class, we will read a selection of biblical texts as literature; that is, we will read them in many ways but not as divine revelation. We will take up traditional literary questions of form, style, and structure, but we will also learn how to ask historical, political, and theoretical questions of a text that is multi-authored, dialogic, and historically layered. Among other topics, we will pay special attention to how authority is established and contested in biblical texts; how biblical authors negotiate the ancient Hebrew prohibition against representing God in images; and how the gospels are socially and historically poised between the original Jesus movement that is their source and the institutionalization of the church that follows. Assignments will include a midterm exam, a paper, and a final exam.

– Meets Arts and Literature, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

France prides itself on being the birthplace and the home of human rights which were first articulated in the “Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” (1789). Indeed, it conceives many of its engagements around the world today as the necessary corollary of its commitment to human rights. Why was it that the idea of human rights first came into being in France? How did a notion of the “human” evolve there and how did the idea of “rights” get attached to it? How and why did literature participate in the creation of what we might call a culture or a “mentalité” of human rights? Why and how did rights appear as a remedy to problems of suffering and inequality? How did a specifically literary discourse act upon and with other discourses, e.g., political and economic? Can we distinguish a literary history of human rights? In this course we will examine the development of the idea and the figure of the human—that is, of some nature that is specific to human beings, on the one hand, but that is shared by all of them on the other. We will see how the human evolves in relation to the State, the family, and love. We will examine the relation between citizenship and humanity—why and when are some humans and some citizens? Who is included and who is excluded from these categories? We will also study critiques of human rights and debates over human rights both from the earliest period of the invention of human rights and in our period. Readings will include primary literary texts such as Corneille, Horace, Montesquieu, “Les Lettres persanes,” Rousseau, “Le Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité” and more. We will also discuss some of the voluminous secondary literature: Hannah Arendt, Samuel Moyn, Jacques Rancière and more.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Social & Behavioral Sciences Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Elementary Hebrew instruction.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Intermediate Hebrew instruction.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Advanced Hebrew, especially designed for those going on to the study of modern Hebrew literature. Vocabulary building, grammar review, and literary analysis of a sampling of modern texts.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

An introduction to the language of the Hebrew Bible.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Historical and literary study of Hebrew and Aramaic Judaic texts (e.g., Talmud and Midrash).

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course studies Jewish-Muslim relations as they developed in the Middle East and North Africa from the rise of Islam to the present day. It analyzes how ethnic and religious boundaries were both drawn and transcended in historical settings including Arabia during the time of Muhammad, Islamic Spain, the Ottoman Empire, and modern Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, and Israel. It asks how this shared cultural heritage is remembered and mobilized in the contemporary world, shedding light on the current state of Muslim-Jewish relations not only in the MENA but in Europe and the US as well. Films, memoirs, scripture, and historical works will form the basis of our inquiry.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Social & Behavioral Sciences Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will survey the political, economic, social, and cultural development of Germany since 1914. Special attention will be paid to the impact of World War I; problems of democratization under the impact of defeat, inflation, and depression; National Socialist racism and imperialism; the evolution of the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic; unification and its problems; and modern Germany’s role in Europe.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Social & Behavioral Sciences L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the standpoint of Jewish, Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these topics and more.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Application for Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth currently in process
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This class will explore the intersection of antisemitism and the law. It will begin by covering the history of law as a vehicle for institutionalizing antisemitism, law as a vehicle for combating antisemitism, and law as a political tool to combat antisemitism. Historical topics will include, the Dreyfus case, the Holocaust denial trial of Irving v. Lipstadt, the Damascus blood libel trial of 1840, the blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, and the impact of the lynching of Leo Frank. We will also review discriminatory laws in the United States and other areas and countries against Jews, including in Nazi Germany. Other topics covered will include the intersection of legal antisemitism definitions and anti-Zionism, the intersection of free speech laws and antisemitism (e.g., the Skokie march), the historical discrimination of college and university campuses against Jews through admission quotas as well as the modern day application of Title VI of the Higher Education Act to issues of antisemitism on college and university campuses.

This is a seminar class. 10 seats are reserved for students with 3 or more terms in attendance; 19 seats are reserved for Legal Studies Majors.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Is this necessarily true? Wars are brutal and horrific events, but are they all necessarily the result of miscalculation, accident, or fanaticism? Can war serve a rational purpose? Are wars governed by rules and do states care about these rules? This course is designed for upper-level undergraduate students.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will examine the origins and forms of what a legal scholar once called an “odious scourge”: genocide. For years, genocide mainly referred to the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews during World War II. However, since the end of the Cold War events in Eastern Europe, Central Africa, and elsewhere have drawn scholars’ attention to genocide as a political phenomenon that may be studied across regions and time periods. Although ethical and policy concerns will underlie the discussion, as they do whenever genocide is the topic of study, our main objective will be to examine the determinants of genocide and related forms of mass violence.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Junior Seminar. Interested students should submit a 300-word proposal for a research topic related to Israel’s society or politics that they would like to investigate over the course of the semester.  The proposal should not include sources or references.  It should list a clear puzzle and one or more hypotheses.  Please send the proposal, and only the proposal, via email to Prof. Hassner at hassner@berkeley.edu no later than April 17th.  Please use “Israel Research Proposal” as the subject of your email.  Decisions will be made before the end of Phase 1.

Prerequisite: PS 124A

– Meets the Historical & Modern City Course Thread
– Meets the Human Rights Course Thread
– Meets the Law & Humanities Course Thread
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The modern world we live in seems to be a constant procession of overlapping and intersecting catastrophes. From climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic, it appears that we are living in a unique historical period. However, to truly understand the world of crises we currently inhabit, one must look back. The Russian and Yiddish literary traditions provide just such a means of seeing how culture preserves the scars of tragedy, along with testimonies of survival and perseverance which inspire us today. To think about how culture responds to historical catastrophe, Russian and Yiddish literature make for a good comparison. Both traditions predominantly developed in Eastern Europe and responded to many of the same, or co-occurring, historical events. By the late 19th century, many Yiddish writers were actively turning to models developed in the Russian literary tradition, and many Russian writers were grappling with the social injustices which Jews faced in the Russian Empire through their prose. However, despite their similarities, Russian and Yiddish literature developed distinct forms for representing and responding to historical catastrophe. This course will look at the broad arc of Russian and Yiddish literature’s reaction to moments of destruction and rupture throughout history. Starting with the Book of Lamentations, we will then turn to an investigation of texts which primarily respond to the historical catastrophes of the modern era including the pogroms of the late 19th century, the Holocaust, and the Gulag. Throughout the course we will ask ourselves the questions: how do writers develop and adopt literary forms in depicting historical catastrophe? How do literary texts work with and present the dynamics of cultural memory and collective trauma? How do ideas such as messianism and millenarianism inform our understanding of historical catastrophe? Authors may include Nikolai Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Isaac Babel, I.B. Singer, Lamed Shapiro, and Varlam Shalamov. The focus of this course will be academic writing and literary analysis. By the end of the class students should be able to produce short and medium length compositions which are tightly argued, text-based, and stylistically appropriate. Students will also learn how to closely read texts, place texts in their appropriate cultural and historical contexts, and utilize concepts foundational to literary analysis such as: genre, style, point-of-view, figurative language, and intertext.

Requisite: Satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing Requirement.

– Meets the Humanities & Environment Course Thread
– First half of the Reading and Composition Requirement
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

In this beginners’ course students will learn to speak, read, and write Yiddish, the original language of East European Jews. Using the communicative method and the new textbook In Eynem, students will focus in class on speaking by playing out short dialogues. Grammar will be taught inductively, through examples. The course will introduce Yiddish culture through a variety of songs, stories, film clips, and illustrations.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The course is intended to give Jewish studies minors a general introduction to the field through a survey of religious and cultural expressions of Jews across time and geographies. No previous knowledge of Judaism or Jewish Studies is necessary.

– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Philology is the study of language in its various manifestations in texts. Its origins in the West lie in classical Greece and, later, in modern classical studies. In the 19th century, philology branched out to cover all ancient and modern languages and literatures, and today it is the unspoken method that underlies every study of texts read as texts. In the process, philology in the modern era frequently served to underwrite and legitimize national, colonial, and imperial aspirations by treating languages and their products as possessions to be had. Conducted in the language of the conquerors, philology became the arbiter of the languages of the conquered. More recently, calls have been made to decolonize philologies. We will consider this historical evolution from a still understudied angle—namely, philology as conducted off-site and off-label—in “exile”—by writers who were marked on racial, ethnic, and disciplinary grounds as ineligible to conduct philology in its conventional academic forms. In response, these writers, a great many of whom happened to be Jewish, turned their focus from the past towards life in the present and the everyday. They produced counterphilologies designed to call out harsh realities in the present that were distorting the realities of the past and the present. Taking our cue from this past, we can learn how counterphilologies challenge existing notions of what constitutes a text, its interpretation, and its ideological value. The aim of “Philology in Exile” will be to engage this history, to arrive at a robust definition of counterphilology as a template for philologies of the future, and to outline a practice that students can carry out in their own lives, given their own experiences of ethnic and racial inequality, and starting with blog posts and then with final papers or public-facing individual and team projects. No prerequisites. Students from all disciplines are welcome, including STEM and the social sciences.

– Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the respective standpoints of Jewish, Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the contested present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these challenging topics and more.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The course will explore dynamics of change in issues of state, religion and gender in Israel, as manifested in social movement activism through law and society. The course will illustrate and reflect upon different strategies and spheres for promoting social change, by examining core issues involving state, religion, and gender in Israel: religious marriage and divorce, gender equality in the religious establishment, conversion, spiritual leadership of women, and free exercise of religion at the Western Wall (the struggle of Women of the Wall). Spheres of activism to be covered include parliament, state courts, alternative private initiatives and courts, and social media.

– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The religion-state question was and still is at the center of the intellectual and religious discourse in Israel and the Middle East. This course traces this discourse and its implications on various spheres of life with special emphasis on the tensions and the compromises between religion and state in the various spheres of political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual interaction in Israel and the Middle East. Some fundamental questions to be addressed pertaining to the meaning of citizenship, national identity, human rights, ethnic and religious minorities, gender relations, democracy. The course consists of three main parts. The first part provides an overview of the critical history and philosophy of the separation of religion and state. The second part is dedicated to the modern discourse of religion-state in Israel and the Middle East through selected issues of religion and nationalism, secularism, religion and democracy, separation of religion and state, etc. The third part will be devoted to some case studies through which we will conduct a comparative analysis between four countries: Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel. These countries represent different and central paradigms of religion-state relations in the Middle East.

– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

The course will explore the topics of Jewish ritual and Jewish law from the interconnected perspectives of both halakhah and minhag, i.e. normative and non-normative Judaism, across legal and literary texts, music, and material culture, leveraging the holdings of UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection.

– Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

Hatred of Jews and Judaism is an enduring prejudice. Its chronological limitlessness is matched by its apparent lack of geographical boundaries. We will chart that history and Jewish responses to it from the age of Tacitus to the age of Trump. Among the themes we will examine are the old forms of religious anti-Judaism, the many medieval charges brought against Jews, the iconography of antisemitism, as well as modern, racist antisemitism and the myriad conspiracy theories about Jews that still grip the fevered imagination of antisemites. Throughout the course we will pay attention to the multiple ways Jews and Judaism have been used throughout history by religious and social critics to describe their own disaffection with the age in which they lived.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will survey the historical events and intellectual developments leading up to and surrounding the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. By reading a mixture of primary and secondary sources we will examine the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) against the backdrop of modern Jewish and modern German history. The course is divided into three main parts: (1) the historical background up to 1933; (2) the persecution of the Jews and the beginnings of mass murder, 1933-1941; and (3) the industrialized murder of the Jews, 1942-1945.

– Meets Arts & Literature, L&S Breadth
– Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will focus on the relationship between the individual and society, which is a classical topic of modernity. With the emergence of modern mass society as a result of industrialization and urbanization, the ideal of the Enlightenment, the autonomous individual guided by reason, also came into crisis. Using primary sources in English translations, the course will reconstruct the debate against the background of its historical context. Close readings of the original texts will be related to the major developments of 20th century European history. Among the authors covered are Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir and Max Weber, Ágnes Heller and V.I. Lenin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alexandra Kollontai, Frantz Fanon and Jean Améry, Giovanni Gentile and Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Theodor W. Adorno. All readings will be available in digital form.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets Philosophy & Values, L&S Breadth
– Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will provide an introduction to constitutional law using Israel as a case study. Topics include: Constitutionalism and judicial review, state neutrality and self-determination, minority rights, state and religion, Human Rights Law, the concept of “defensive democracy” and ban of non-democratic political parties, legal aspects of the fight on terror, freedom of expression, equality and anti-discrimination, social rights, and constitutional limitations on privatization.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This course will provide an introduction to constitutional law using Israel as a case study. Topics include: Constitutionalism and judicial review, state neutrality and self-determination, minority rights, state and religion, Human Rights Law, the concept of “defensive democracy” and ban of non-democratic political parties, legal aspects of the fight on terror, freedom of expression, equality and anti-discrimination, social rights, and constitutional limitations on privatization.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor

This class begins with a historical overview of war in the region. The second part of the class introduces theories that complement and elaborate on theories from PS124A: arguments about the relationship between war and resources, religion, authoritarianism, civil military relations, territorial disputes, sovereignty, and power. In the third part of the course, we will explore current policy concerns related to conflict in the region: Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, the civil war in Syria, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drone warfare, and the U.S. role in the region.

PS124A (“War!”) is a prerequisite for this class.

– Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth
– Meets International Studies, L&S Breadth
– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor (Student must complete at least one paper focused on Israel or Israelis.)

This course will trace the development of Yiddish culture from the first settlement of Jews in German lands through centuries of life in Eastern Europe, down to the main cultural centers today in Israel and America. The course will examine how changes in Jewish life have found expression in the Yiddish language. It will provide an introduction to Yiddish literature in English translation, supplemented by excursions into Yiddish music, folklore, theater, and film.

– Counts towards the Jewish Studies Minor