Courses

In this course, students will explore key moments in Chicago Jewish History and culture. We will read and examine primary source documents from the founding of the city's first Jewish communities, hospitals, and philanthropic institutions to the public performance of Jewish identity at Chicago's World's Fairs to the 2020 Metropolitan Chicago Jewish Population Survey. Drawing upon literary, journalistic, and archival accounts, we will uncover the vibrancy of Chicago's historic Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, Jewish urban politics, and Jewish suburbanization, mapping out a multivocal understanding of Jewish life in the city. The course will have a research project component

The goal of this sequence is to develop proficiency in Yiddish reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Touchstones of global Yiddish culture are also introduced through song, film, and contemporary Yiddish websites. 

The beginner's course is the first of three sequential courses offered to students at the university. The course aims to introduce students to reading, writing and speaking Modern Hebrew. Toward that end all four-language skills are emphasized: comprehension of written and oral materials; reading of non-diacritical text; writing of directed sentences, paragraphs, and compositions; speaking. You will learn the Hebrew root pattern system, and by the end of the year you will have mastered the five (active) basic verb conjugations in both the past and present tenses (as well as simple future). This grammatical knowledge is complemented by an 800+ word vocabulary, which is presented with an eye toward the major syntactic structures, including the proper use of prepositions. At the end of the year, you will conduct short conversations in Hebrew; read materials designed to this level and write short compositions.  

Jewish Civilization is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings through its rabbinic and medieval transformations to its modern manifestations. Through investigation of primary texts—biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary—students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history.

Jewish Civilization I deals with antiquity through the Middle Ages. Its readings will include material from the Bible and writings from the Second Temple, Hellenistic, rabbinic, and medieval periods. All sections of this course share a common core of readings; individual instructors will supplement with other materials.

Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of profound and violent transformations in Europe, the United States, the Middle East. Topics include the impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the last stages of European empire; nationalism, socialism, and religious politics in Jewish life; birth of Jewish secular culture and secular-religious struggles within Jewish life; the remaking of American Jewry; Zionism, Jewish settlement and nation-building in Palestine, and the emergence of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict; antisemitism, Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinian dispossession, and the trajectories and tensions of Jewish nationhood and Israeli society-building; the postwar reordering of Jewish life amid Cold War, Israeli statehood, conflict in the Middle East, and unprecedented communal integration in the United States; trajectories of Jewish identity and religion in a century of tremendous creativity and bitter Jewish disagreements. Much attention to contemporary history including the dramatic changes and conflicts within Israel and trajectories of conflict and crisis in Israel and Palestine under Israeli domination. Lectures with ample space for discussion. No prior study of Jewish history expected. 

This course offers students the opportunity to study the Yiddish language at the intermediate level. It reviews and extents students' knowledge of the grammar of the Yiddish language, enhances vocabulary, and includes literary and cultural readings. Designed to further develop listening, speaking, reading comprehension, and writing skills. 

A continuation of Elementary Classical Hebrew (HEBR 10101-10102-10103 [JWSC 22000-22100-22200]). The first quarter consists of reviewing grammar, and of reading and analyzing further prose texts. The last two quarters are devoted to an introduction to Hebrew poetry with readings from Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets. 

As Ben Franklin once famously said, “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” This was no more true in early America than it was in the ancient world, in which humans invested significant amounts of time and energy responding to the seeming inevitability of death. In this course we will investigate how ancient peoples understood, mediated, mitigated, observed, mourned, sought to escape, accepted, and continued on after death. To do this, we will examine literary, inscriptional, and material evidence from the eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Egypt, the Levant) and Mesopotamia (Assyria, Babylonia, Persia) that reflects how the ancients thought about death and the processes that ultimately led to it. No prior knowledge of religion, the ancient world, or death is required for this course. 

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is a complex anthology of disparate texts and reflects a diversity of religious, political, and historical perspectives from ancient Israel and Judah. Because this collection of texts continues to play an important role in modern religions, new significances are often imposed upon this ancient literature. In this course, we will attempt to read biblical texts on their own terms and will also contextualize their ideas and goals with texts and material culture from ancient Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine, and Egypt. In this way, we will discover that the Hebrew Bible is fully part of the cultural milieu of the ancient Near East. We will read a significant portion of the Hebrew Bible in English, along with selections from other ancient Near Eastern texts as well as secondary literature. This course will include discussion sections. 

This course surveys the history of religion in ancient Israel and Judah in the first millennium BCE. The main topics considered include the major religious ideas and practices attested, their representation in literary sources (especially the Hebrew Bible) and material culture, the role of social, political, and economic conditions in the development of Israelite religion, and the emergence of monotheistic ideas from within a polytheistic culture. A consistent aspect of the course will be comparison between Israel and Judah and other ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures.

Course Notes: Students are encouraged to take all three quarters of this sequence (fall-winter-spring) but it is not required. 

‬The course, which builds upon Introductory Modern Hebrew (HEBR 10501-10502-10503), focuses on the acquisition of proficiency and communicative skills in Modern Hebrew. The purpose of this class is to expand and strengthen beginners' Hebrew skills so that they become more self-assured, communicative, and versatile when they listen to, read, speak, and write Hebrew. It emphasizes both communicative and cultural themes and focuses on developing a rich and active vocabulary in several language domains. 

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is a 9 ½ hour film composed of Holocaust testimonies—by survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. It represents the streamlining of 150 hours of film footage collected over the course of nearly a decade all over the world. In this class, we will explore the film and the discourses that have grown up around it, such as the nature of Holocaust representation, the ontology of Holocaust testimonies, and the limits of translation in understanding the history of the Holocaust. We will work with the outtakes from the film at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to better understand the narrative Lanzmann constructed not only through what he chose to include in the final cut, but also what he chose to exclude. As we analyze Lanzmann’s magnum opus, we will also explore associated films – by Lanzmann and by others – that grew out of Shoah and that shed further light on it. A final “Outtakes” project will give students the opportunity to suggest their own version of the film, with materials from the archive. 

Scriptural Reasoning is a method of approaching the scholarly study of texts of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and the Quran, by reading them as if they are to be understood as in conversation with one another, and as in reception communities that have historically understood them as such. This seminar will explore the practices and methods of a distinctive academic methodology of study, as well as the theoretical and philosophical scaffolding that has emerged from these practices. We will consider both the scholarly work that extends and recommends the practice, and the critiques of the practice. Reading from the perspectives of theology and philosophy, we will consider how the academic reading of Scriptures frames the narrative and the ethical perspectives within the text and how that framing might be disrupted/repaired/interrogated by new exegetical interpretations. Scriptural Reasoning is both a method and a feature of the academy (in journals, in a section at the AAR, and in scholarly books and articles); and it is also a way of making Scriptural reception and interpretation publicly legible. The seminar will allow graduate students an entrance into understanding the Scriptures of their own tradition or research interest, and those of others, with which they may not be conversant, and thus create the possibility for new avenues of comparative scholarship. 

What texts and contexts constitute American Jewish experience? In this class, we will consider the birth of a unique Jewish ethnicity in America, with a deep dive into the literature, the theology, and the politics of American Judaism from the post-Holocaust period to the American-Jewish response to October 7th.

This course is the first of a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to the language of biblical Hebrew, with special emphasis on the fundamentals of its morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. This course follows a standard textbook supplemented by lectures, exercises, and oral drills aimed at refining the students’ grasp of grammatical sound translation/interpretation. At the conclusion of the sequence students will be prepared to take biblical Hebrew reading and exegesis courses.

The goal of this sequence is to develop proficiency in Yiddish reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Touchstones of global Yiddish culture are also introduced through song, film, and contemporary Yiddish websites. 

The beginner's course is the first of three sequential courses offered to students at the university. The course aims to introduce students to reading, writing and speaking Modern Hebrew. Toward that end all four-language skills are emphasized: comprehension of written and oral materials; reading of non-diacritical text; writing of directed sentences, paragraphs, and compositions; speaking. You will learn the Hebrew root pattern system, and by the end of the year you will have mastered the five (active) basic verb conjugations in both the past and present tenses (as well as simple future). This grammatical knowledge is complemented by an 800+ word vocabulary, which is presented with an eye toward the major syntactic structures, including the proper use of prepositions. At the end of the year, you will conduct short conversations in Hebrew; read materials designed to this level and write short compositions.  

This course will look at how Jewish conceptions of masculinity, femininity, and gender beyond the binary are constructed and challenged in different historical contexts, attending to both Judaism on its own terms and in the way Jewish gender and sexuality norms have been shaped by interactions with neighboring communities. We will put “traditional” Jewish sources (from biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern periods) in conversation with theoretical work in gender, sexuality, queer, and trans studies in order to think about both how using gender and sexuality as focusing lenses may help us learn something new about Judaism but also how analyzing Judaism, as a case study, might contribute to the wider theoretical conversations in gender and sexuality studies. Topics addressed may include gender and sexuality in the Tanakh and rabbinic culture, sex-segregated ritual and educational spaces, the politics of reproduction (including contraception, abortion, and debates about Jewish “continuity”), the gender politics of Zionism, and differences across different denominations and styles of religious observance (Orthodox, Reform, etc.). We will also look at how Jewish texts, liturgy, rituals, culture, and community are reimagined in light of insights from queer and trans scholarship and activism.

A continuation of Elementary Classical Hebrew (HEBR 10101-10102-10103 [JWSC 22000-22100-22200]). The first quarter consists of reviewing grammar, and of reading and analyzing further prose texts. The last two quarters are devoted to an introduction to Hebrew poetry with readings from Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets. 

This course compares the picture of ancient Israel and its history that is presented in the Bible to the results obtained from archaeological excavations and surveys, seen in the light of modern historical-critical analysis of the Hebrew Bible and the study of ancient non-biblical inscriptions. The focus will be on the biblical narratives from the books of Genesis through Kings concerning the Creation and Flood, the ancestors of the Israelites (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), Moses and the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, the “pre-monarchical” period of the Judges, and the actions of the rulers and prophets of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah until the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Subsequent developments until the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE will be covered more briefly. 

This course surveys the religious developments around the Mediterranean during the period of Late Antiquity. We will begin with the emergence of the early Christian movement within its first-century Jewish and Roman contexts. In addition to the different ways of being Christian in Late Antiquity, students will learn about other contemporary religious movements, such as early rabbinic Judaism, Manichaeanism, and paganism which continued alongside Christianity. We will then review political, social, and economic trends in the Roman Empire on which Christianity had transformative effects, such gender, care for the poor, and relations between religion and state. In the final weeks, we will delve into foundational theological debates of late antique Christianity and explore their legacies in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds following the decline of Roman hegemony.  

Course Notes: Students are encouraged to take all three quarters of this sequence (fall-winter-spring) but it is not required.  

‬The course, which builds upon Introductory Modern Hebrew (HEBR 10501-10502-10503), focuses on the acquisition of proficiency and communicative skills in Modern Hebrew. The purpose of this class is to expand and strengthen beginners' Hebrew skills so that they become more self-assured, communicative, and versatile when they listen to, read, speak, and write Hebrew. It emphasizes both communicative and cultural themes and focuses on developing a rich and active vocabulary in several language domains. 

What is the language of Yiddish scholarship? Today, we find Yiddish studies largely in English, Polish, German, and Hebrew—and only rarely in Yiddish itself. But it was only a few short decades ago that Yiddish Studies scholarship was regularly produced in Yiddish, both simply because it was the shared language of its scholarly community and as a defiant activist sensibility that Yiddish could and should remain a language of scholarly inquiry. Through this course, students will read articles from late 20th century Yiddish academic journals such as YIVO Bleter, Yidishe Shprakh, Kheshbn, Leket, and Oksforder Yidish, exploring how academic language activists used Yiddish to express and circulate their research in addition to using it as a language for reading and research. Students will write short response essays and will try their hand at writing their own academically-oriented scholarship in Yiddish. Ultimately, students will be encouraged to produce proposals to give talks in Yiddish about their own scholarship, either for the Farbindungen conference or the Symposium for Yiddish Studies in Germany (Dusseldorf), two contemporary conferences in which presentations in Yiddish are encouraged.  

Diaspora, nationhood, statehood—the dangers, possibilities, and ethical problems within each of these seemingly bloodless terms have sometimes generated intense debate and inquiry within Jewish life. This class investigates the intellectual and political history of three such moments. We ask how traditional Judaism negotiated the relationship between cultivating a fulfilling religious existence in dispersion and potent theological traditions of seeing diaspora as Exile from the Holy Land. We investigate new forms of Jewish thought and politics of the late 19th century, when—against the backdrop of wider currents of secularization, nationalism, colonialism, and antisemitism—growing numbers of Jews looked to overcome diaspora through Zionism and other territorial and statist visions while others sought to remake diaspora itself through liberal integrationism, revolutionary socialism, or federalist autonomism. We will examine Jewish political thinking in our own fraught moment, as the ethnonationalist trajectories in Israeli Jewish political culture and society, the renewed enormities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rising tensions between liberal and Orthodox forms of Judaism in both Israel and the US, and the crisis of the liberal order around the globe provoke debate about the value, morality, potentials, and dangers of Jewish sovereignty and diaspora alike while inciting urgent thinking about the unfolding situation in Israel and Palestine. 

This course will explore the 1,000-year history of Yiddish language, literature, music, and artistic expression, covering key tests in Old Yiddish; the rise of secular literature; modern experiences of urbanization, immigration, and political change; the impact of the Holocaust and contemporary Yiddish life. Knowledge of Yiddish is not required; Yiddish texts will be provided by request and students can arrange to meet with me in office hours to discuss the originals. 

This course will examine the origins, development and historiography of Christian art in the Roman world and into the first centuries of Christian Europe. It will explore this in parallel with the development and historiography of Jewish art in the same period, also known as 'late antiquity', examining issues of the construction of religious identity through images in hegemonic and non-hegemonic contexts, whether as markers of triumphalism or resistance, and investigating also question of the penetration of these religions and their iconographies into the larger Afro-Eurasian context. 

This seminar aims to introduce students to the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary theorists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. More than any other member of the so-called Frankfurt School, Benjamin was committed to bringing German letters into dialogue with other national literary traditions and literature itself into contact with the newly emergent media of his time. He fundamentally changed the way we study both literature and culture to this day. While we will be reading most of his best known works, we will be organizing our syllabus around four major topics: 1) Benjamin’s studies of media and technology, especially photography and film, and their impact on literature and culture; 2) his writings on allegory in early modern drama; 3) his essays on modern literature and culture and, more generally, his theorization of modernity; and 4) his theoretical essays on language and history. Reading and discussions in English. A reading knowledge of German is helpful. 

The goal of this sequence is to develop proficiency in Yiddish reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Touchstones of global Yiddish culture are also introduced through song, film, and contemporary Yiddish websites. 

The beginner's course is the first of three sequential courses offered to students at the university. The course aims to introduce students to reading, writing and speaking Modern Hebrew. Toward that end all four-language skills are emphasized: comprehension of written and oral materials; reading of non-diacritical text; writing of directed sentences, paragraphs, and compositions; speaking. You will learn the Hebrew root pattern system, and by the end of the year you will have mastered the five (active) basic verb conjugations in both the past and present tenses (as well as simple future). This grammatical knowledge is complemented by an 800+ word vocabulary, which is presented with an eye toward the major syntactic structures, including the proper use of prepositions. At the end of the year, you will conduct short conversations in Hebrew; read materials designed to this level and write short compositions.  

Jewish Civilization is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings through its rabbinic and medieval transformations to its modern manifestations. Through investigation of primary texts—biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary—students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history.

Jewish Civilization II begins with the early modern period and continues to the present. It includes discussions of mysticism, the works of Spinoza and Mendelssohn, the nineteenth-century reform, the Holocaust and its reflection in writers such as Primo Levi and Paul Celan, and literary pieces from postwar American Jewish and Israeli authors. All sections of this course share a common core of readings; individual instructors will supplement with other materials.

A continuation of Elementary Classical Hebrew (HEBR 10101-10102-10103 [JWSC 22000-22100-22200]). The first quarter consists of reviewing grammar, and of reading and analyzing further prose texts. The last two quarters are devoted to an introduction to Hebrew poetry with readings from Psalms, Proverbs, and the prophets. 

‬The course, which builds upon Introductory Modern Hebrew (HEBR 10501-10502-10503), focuses on the acquisition of proficiency and communicative skills in Modern Hebrew. The purpose of this class is to expand and strengthen beginners' Hebrew skills so that they become more self-assured, communicative, and versatile when they listen to, read, speak, and write Hebrew. It emphasizes both communicative and cultural themes and focuses on developing a rich and active vocabulary in several language domains. 

What is the language of Yiddish scholarship? Today, we find Yiddish studies largely in English, Polish, German, and Hebrew—and only rarely in Yiddish itself. But it was only a few short decades ago that Yiddish Studies scholarship was regularly produced in Yiddish, both simply because it was the shared language of its scholarly community and as a defiant activist sensibility that Yiddish could and should remain a language of scholarly inquiry. Through this course, students will read articles from late 20th century Yiddish academic journals such as YIVO Bleter, Yidishe Shprakh, Kheshbn, Leket, and Oksforder Yidish, exploring how academic language activists used Yiddish to express and circulate their research in addition to using it as a language for reading and research. Students will write short response essays and will try their hand at writing their own academically-oriented scholarship in Yiddish. Ultimately, students will be encouraged to produce proposals to give talks in Yiddish about their own scholarship, either for the Farbindungen conference or the Symposium for Yiddish Studies in Germany (Dusseldorf), two contemporary conferences in which presentations in Yiddish are encouraged.  

A careful study of select passages in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, focusing on the method of the work and its major philosophical-theological themes, including: divine attributes, creation vs. eternity, prophecy, the problem of evil and divine providence, law and ethics, and the final aim of human existence. 

What is the good act and what makes it so? What do with owe the Other? How does one construct a moral life?  
Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most important Jewish philosophers of the late 20th century. He produced a large body of dense, intricate moral theory that has come to define post-modern Jewish thought. In this course, we will read two of his most important works closely. In this way, we will consider the development of his thought on such key concepts as “the Other,” “substitution,” and “Infinity.” This course will reflect on a moral puzzle: why do humans chose to be good or evil? This seminar considers his arguments about human relationality, duty, judgment and moral action—the phenomenology of the encounter with the Other, for which he is best known. 

Why is Zionism discussed so often in terms of colonialism? What is colonialism, what is Zionism, and what discourses bring them together? Examining early texts from the Zionist movement, spanning political, labor, and cultural Zionism, this course introduces students to how language, history, religion, archaeology, literature, and political theory have shaped the discourse around Israel, Palestine, and opened up debates about the meaning sovereignty, self-determination, and indigeneity. Offering a variety of critical perspectives on the formation of Israel and the discourse around it, this course asks students to think about the relationship between knowledge, power, identity, and the institutions that maintain them. 

This course explores memoirs, plays, essays, poetry, novels, and journalistic writing of women who wrote in Yiddish, as well as a discussion of the context in which they wrote and their reception and self-perception as "women writers." Among the writers whose work may be represented in this course are Glikl, Yente Mash, Kadya Molodwsky, Chava Rosenfarb, Yente Serdatsky, Rosa Palatnik, Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Rokhl Korn, Beyle Shaechter-Gottesman, Gitl Shaechter-Viswanath, Bella Chagall, Blume Lempel, Esther Kreitman, Debora Vogel, Rokhl Brokhes, Sarah Hamer-Jacklyn, Malka Lee, Ida Maze, Roshelle Weprinski, Miriam Karpilove, Zina Rabinovitz, Rokhl Szabad, Rokhl Faygnberg, Paula Prilutsky, Shira Gorshman, Esther Shumiatsher-Hirshbein and Freydl Shtok. Many of these writers have been underexamined in the history of Yiddish literary studies and this course will bring renewed attention to their work. This course will be taught in English with readings translated from Yiddish. 

This course examines concepts of art that reflect iconophobia, “fear of images,” in the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Since antiquity, iconophobia has led to theological debates that resulted in the prohibition of images in sacred spaces, rituals, and other forms of religious practice. In extreme cases, iconophobia has caused acts of iconoclasm, the violent destruction of art. In all three religions, fear of idolatry (“idol worship”) has been the main cause of iconophobia. We will examine what exactly constitutes an idol and how the definitions of idols differ from iconophile (“image-loving”) assessments of religious art. Both iconophobic and iconophile arguments shed light on the various functions and effects of religious images and illustrate their power. Furthermore, they reveal attitudes towards artistic creation, materiality, aesthetics, sensory perception, and truth in art. Most of the topics and readings will focus on the premodern period from antiquity to the 16th century. However, we will also look at some of the effects of iconophobia in modernity. Readings will include, but are not limited to, texts from the Hebrew Bible, Christian exegesis, the Qur'an, Byzantine Iconoclasm, and the Protestant Reformation. Material evidence of iconophobia and iconoclasm from different religious contexts will also be discussed. 

This course is the second of a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to the language of biblical Hebrew, with special emphasis on the fundamentals of its morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. This course follows a standard textbook supplemented by lectures, exercises, and oral drills aimed at refining the students’ grasp of grammatical sound translation/interpretation. At the conclusion of the sequence students will be prepared to take biblical Hebrew reading and exegesis courses.

This course is the third of a three-quarter sequence designed to introduce students to the language of biblical Hebrew, with special emphasis on the fundamentals of its morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. The third quarter concludes the grammatical presentation of Hebrew and turns to guided readings of Hebrew Bible texts. At the conclusion of the sequence students will be prepared to take biblical Hebrew reading and exegesis courses.

The Babylonian conquest of Judah and the fall of the Jerusalem temple in the early 6th century bce are topics of significant reflection within the literature in the Hebrew Bible. Prophets, historians, and poets all sought to explain and come to terms with the dissolution of the Southern Kingdom. This period is also rich in contemporary sources from political actors relevant to the reconstruction of events, including Saite stelae from Lower Egypt, royal records from Babylon, and letters from Judean soldiers at Lachish. In this course we will apply a microhistorical approach to these materials to better understand the political circumstance that led to Jerusalem’s fall as well as the potential cultural influences that may have informed the world views present in the biblical literature.  

This seminar is designed for students engaged in the translation of texts for scholarly audiences and academic study. Through course readings and discussions, we will consider the art of translation and explore various views on the purpose and goal of translation. Representative case studies from the translation of biblical literature will allow us to understand the history of translation while comparing various translations. We will consider how translators grapple with issues of ambiguity and a multiplicity of meanings. To what extent can (or should) translators preserve literary and aesthetic features of source texts? What are the political stakes for translating authoritative religious texts? What are the key differences between translations crafted for academic study versus popular audiences? While shared readings and case studies will focus our seminar discussions, students will have the opportunity to apply the course to their own materials. 

This is a reading course in biblical texts that engage the notion of covenant (běrît). Covenant is a central religious idea in many biblical texts, even as different authors conceptualize it in very different ways. In this course, we will examine the ways that covenant (or, perhaps better, “covenant”) is understood in a selection of texts from the Hebrew Bible. All biblical texts will be read in Hebrew.  

Course note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.

In this course, we will read closely a selection of psalms, paying special attention to their genre and poetry. We will also consider the import of these psalms for understanding ancient Israelite religious thought. This course will serve as the third quarter of the Divinity School's first-year Hebrew sequence. All biblical texts will be read in Hebrew.  

Course Note: Undergraduates must petition to enroll. 

This workshop course introduces students to the theory and practice of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. The primary focus will be on analyzing and evaluating manuscript evidence in Hebrew and Greek, with Aramaic and Latin sources also consulted when relevant. We will concentrate on passages from the biblical book of Samuel, which offers rich opportunities for text-critical inquiry. By the end of the course, students will be able to: 
• find and navigate primary sources 
• identify text-critical variants 
• evaluate those variants, taking into account 1) the characteristics of the textual witnesses and 2) scribal and translational practices 
• articulate the limits of what we can know about the history of the biblical text 

How can testimony and witness be defined in a way that encapsulates its multiple meanings? How does bringing the different forms and discourses of testimony and witness together open new possibilities for research and practice? In this team-taught course, we create a dialogue between Holocaust studies, religious leadership, and the psychodynamic psychologies to interrogate the theories, institutions, and practice of testimony and witness in a variety of contexts and media. The materials for the course will include works such as Felman and Laub’s Testimony, Ricoeur’s work on memory and narrative, audiovisual testimonies from the Fortunoff Archive at Yale, and fictionalized testimonies such as those of Tim O’Brien. We will consider personal narratives of death and dying, such as those by Nina Riggs, Paul Kalanthi, Joan Didion, and C.S. Lewis. We will look at scriptural testimonies such as the Book of Ezekiel, and we will explore testimonies in courtrooms, and in places of worship. Students will create and present a research project at the end of the quarter. 

There is a stipend for admitted students. More information about Brauer Seminar classes can be found here: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/martin-marty-center/brauer-seminar. 

This is a reading and exegesis course on the prophetic texts of Haggai, Zechariah (chs. 1–8), and Malachi. All texts will be read in Hebrew. 

Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll. 

This is a reading and exegesis course on the prophetic texts of Haggai, Zechariah (chs. 1–8), and Malachi. All texts will be read in Hebrew.  

Course Note: Undergrads must petition to enroll.