Selected Courses

JudaismS: An Introduction

This course offers an introductory exploration of Jewish histories, politics, cultures, texts, practices, and beliefs in all their diversity. Designed for beginners with no prior background, it serves as a foundational course for the Jewish Studies major. Students trace the development of diverse expressions of Jewish culture and religion, examining their engagement with scripture, interpretation, Jewish law, and the observance of commandments. The course introduces fundamental dimensions of Jewish life — life-cycle, calendar, and holidays — while exploring evolving understandings of God, Torah, and the People and Land of Israel from antiquity to the present. It also examines the various methodologies employed in Jewish Studies to analyze these traditions and transformations.

Jewish Studies Fishman Family Travel Seminar

A biennial exploration of the historical and contemporary Jewish world, topic varies from year to year. The course involves in-depth investigation of historical, cultural, and religious topics in the life of the community under consideration, and includes travel to the locale studied during Spring Break.

Topic 1: Italy

How can the Jews of Italy be understood through the intertwined histories of Rome, Venice, Florence, and Padua? The course examines how Jewish life developed within the distinct urban, political, and cultural settings of these four cities, tracing patterns of settlement, community formation, civic interaction, and artistic and intellectual exchange. It considers Venice’s ghetto and its cosmopolitan Jewish population, Rome’s ancient community, Florence’s humanist environment, and Padua’s university and rabbinic networks. Attention is given to material culture — ceremonial objects, synagogue spaces, and the pivotal role of Hebrew printing — as well as to the ways Jews were depicted in Christian art. Together these cities offer a framework for understanding the diversity and continuity of Italian Jewish experience within the wider European and Mediterranean worlds.

Topic 2: Spain

How can the Jews of Sepharad be understood through the shifting interplay of convivencia, conquest, and expulsion across the landscapes of Castile, al-Andalus, and Catalonia? The course traces Jewish life within the layered urban and political environments of Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, Sevilla, Granada, and Barcelona, examining how Jewish communities developed under Islamic rule, negotiated Christian reconquest, and were ultimately displaced in 1492. It considers Córdoba’s intellectual and philosophical milieu, exemplified by Maimonides; Toledo’s dense fabric of synagogues transformed into churches; and Granada’s Alhambra as both the apex of Andalusian culture and the site of the expulsion decree. Attention is given to the persistent visual and architectural entanglement of Islamic, Christian, and Jewish forms — Mudejar art, appropriated mosques and synagogues, and hybrid urban spaces — as well as to the afterlives of Jewish presence in memory, museum, and myth. These sites together frame Sepharad not as a lost idyll of convivencia, but as a contested and unstable terrain in which cultural proximity and violent rupture are inseparably bound.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims

An historical comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The course focuses on such themes as origins, development, sacred literature, ritual, legal, mystical, and philosophical traditions, and interactions among the three religions.

Jesus: A Radical Life

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Yeshua bar Yosef of the town of Nazaret in the Upper Galilee — in the Roman-occupied territory Jews called Eretz Yisrael and the Occupation renamed Palestine — was a radical and extraordinary historical figure, and an even more fascinating literary figure. With the Gospels as our guide — not only the four that made it into the New Testament, but some of the hundreds of others — we attempt to situate Jesus in his indigenous context at a crucial time in the history and development of Jewish thought, before there were either “Christians” or “Christianity.” Jesus himself asks, “Who do you say I am?” One might answer in terms we may think we understand: radical teacher, preacher, healer, political revolutionary. But historically, the terms Messiah, Son of God, God have also been applied to Jesus. What can we know historically? And when do we cross the line from history into theology?

Sacred Scripts: Torah, Text, and Restoration

Students study Jewish scribal tradition while working with master scribes and faculty to restore a late eighteenth– to early nineteenth-century Bavarian Torah scroll with unique and exquisite textual flourishes. Students cut quills, mix ink, clean parchment, patch holes, and restore letters, while learning about Bavarian Jewish history, manuscript culture, and preservation. The scroll, otherwise destined for ritual burial, is instead returned to teaching and ritual life for the first time in more than two centuries.

Western Mystical Traditions: Kabbalah

How does Kabbalah construct a map of divine reality through language, symbol, and myth? The course examines the emergence and development of Jewish mystical traditions from late antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods, focusing on texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, the Zohar, and the Lurianic corpus. It considers key concepts — sefirot, emanation, divine contraction, exile, and restoration — and the role of human action in shaping the cosmic order. Attention is given to the interplay between esoteric speculation and lived religious practice, as well as to the reception and transformation of Kabbalah in Christian and modern contexts. The course situates Kabbalah within broader Western mystical traditions while attending to its distinctively Jewish textual, ritual, and theological frameworks.

Western Mystical Traditions: Hasidut

How does Hasidism translate the abstractions of Kabbalah into a lived, embodied religious culture? The course explores the rise of Hasidism in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe as a devotional movement that reconfigures earlier mystical traditions around charisma, storytelling, and everyday practice. It examines the teachings of key figures such as the Baal Shem Tov and his successors, focusing on themes of divine immanence, joy, devekut (cleaving to God), and the sanctification of ordinary life. Attention is given to the social structures of Hasidic communities, the role of the rebbe, and the tensions between innovation and tradition. The course also considers the afterlives of Hasidism in modern and postmodern contexts, where its forms and ideas are adapted, translated, and reimagined beyond their original settings.

Jew-ish

What does it mean to be Jewish today — when belief, practice, politics, and culture don’t line up neatly? This course examines lived Jewish experience both “religious” and “secular,” asking when those categories converge and when they diverge, and thinking about how ritual, ethics, storytelling, and everyday choices create both connection and conflict. Team-taught by two professors who both heartily agree and deeply disagree, we track arguments over authority, authenticity, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and identity across the U.S., Israel, and Europe.

Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”: Religion, Art, and Politics

Holy or heretical? Sensual or symbolic? All of the above? Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” (ca. 1490–1510), currently housed in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, is one of the greatest enigmas of art history and religious studies. This course, which takes place before a specially-created meticulous full-scale exact facsimile of the work, explores the mysteries of the painting in its religious, social, psychological, art-historical, and cultural contexts.