Grant Background  ||  Grant Guidelines & Application  ||  Sample Course Descriptions  ||  Core Courses  ||  Adult Education  ||  Israeli Fellowships  ||  Message board

Adult Educational Program on Secular Jewish History and Cultures proposed by Lehrhaus Judaica
Berkeley, California

Meaning "house of learning" or Beth Midrash, Lehrhaus takes its name and inspiration from the school for adult Jewish education founded in 1920 by the eminent theologian and educator Franz Rosenzweig in Frankfurt, Germany. The school attracted scholars such as Martin Buber, S.Y.Agnon, A.J. Heschel, Gershom Scholem and Erich Fromm and, until its closure by the Nazis, was the focal point of a Jewish revival between the wars.

Like its predecessor, the Bay Area Lehrhaus is non-denominational and emphasizes the values of pluralism and open inquiry. Established by the historian Fred Rosenbaum in 1974, it now offers two hundred courses and workshops a year, at more than thirty sites throughout Northern California, with approximately four thousand students annually.

In the academic year 2008-09, Lehrhaus will offer a program on secularism in Jewish culture and identity consisting of an inaugural lecture by Professor David Biale, a core course Jewish Secularism from Spinoza to Seinfeld, and three mini-courses.

Jewish Secularism from Spinoza to Seinfeld

By nearly every demographic measure, most of the world’s Jews today can be described as secular, that is, as neither practicing halachah nor holding traditional Jewish beliefs. Nevertheless, the history and phenomenology of Jewish secular identities and cultures remains relatively unexplored - untaught in Jewish schools and often neglected in both popular and academic studies of Jewish experience. This course aims to provide participants with the tools to understood Jewish secularism from historical, philosophical and cultural perspectives.

The religious dimension of Judaism has never exhausted the meaning of Jewish identity and experience, which has always expressed itself as and through the culture of a particular people. The modern period saw the rise of a number of forms of self-consciously non-religious Judaism, including national and/or cultural definitions of Jewish identity. The massive upheavals of modernity, which included urbanization and immigration along with secularization, meant that large numbers of Jews began to lead secular lives, even if they did not consciously affiliate with one or another brand of ideological Jewish secularism. Nevertheless, secular Jews in the modern and contemporary world developed ways of maintaining recognizably Jewish identities, some of them reworking traditional Jewish patterns and some emerging from the new conditions of modernity.

We will begin by exploring the trajectory of secularization from a sociological angle, studying the “secularization thesis” and its ramifications for the Jewish experience. We will then study the historical background of the emergence of Jewish secularism, first in central Europe and then throughout the Jewish world. We will then survey the major philosophical, political and cultural manifestations of Jewish secularism from its beginnings in the early modern period to its contemporary manifestations in present-day United States.

Course Schedule:

Session One: Introduction and Clarification of Terms
In this session, we will introduce the notions of secularization, secularism, and secularity, distinguishing as well between political and metaphysical meanings of the term secularism. We will then read three poems that expressed various facets of the secularization of Ashkenazic Jewry: Y.L. Gordon’s “The Tip of the Yod,” which attacks rabbinical hair-splitting in the name of women’s rights; H.N. Bialik’s “Before the Bookcase,” which emerges from a more ambivalent attitude toward Jewish tradition, one that combines fierce antipathy with ambivalent nostalgia; and Kadya Molodowski’s “Women’s Songs,” in which the rejection of religion presents itself as well as a rejection of the women in the poetic speaker’s family.
Readings (to be distributed in class): Gordon, “Tip of the Yod”; Bialik, “Before the Bookcase,” and Molodowski, “Women’s Songs” in which the rejection of religion presents itself as well as a rejection of the women in the poetic speaker's family.

Readings: Gordon, "Tip of the Yod,"; Bialik, "Before the Bookcase," and Molodowski, "Women's Songs"

Session Two: Sociological approaches to secularization and Jewish secularization
This session will introduce the theories and debates about “the secularization thesis,” by which sociologists have understood the modern break with religious tradition. We will discuss the relevance of the secularization thesis (which was primarily modeled on Protestantism as a midway point between medieval religiosity and modern skepticism) for the Jewish experience of secularization.

Reading: Peter L. Berger, “The Process of Secularization,” and “Secularization and the Problem of Legitimation,” in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

Session Three: Spinoza
In this session we will study the groundbreaking thought of Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632-77), both as a philosopher and as a political champion of the freedom from religious compulsion. We will also read a few sections of Yovel’s analysis of Spinoza’s thought, assessing Yovel’s thesis that Jewish modernity, and religious skepticism, begins in the experience of the converso culture from which Spinoza’s family emerged. We will also address (but probably not resolve!) the question of whether Spinoza’s pantheism should be read as a variety of atheism or rather as a form of “God-drunkenness” - or perhaps both!

Readings: Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise: Introduction, Preface, chapters 1-3
Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Prologue: Heretic and Banned,” “Spinoza, the Marrano of Reason,” “Epilogue: Spinoza and His People: The First Secular Jew?” in Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason

Session Four: Emancipation, Secularization and Jewish Modernity
In this session, we will study Katz’s classic historical accounts of the beginnings European Jewish modernization, discussing the philosophical and more particularly the social transformations in European society that enabled the clearing of “semi-neutral” social spaces in which Jews could be integrated (though rarely fully) in the lives of their surrounding societies.

Reading: Jacob Katz, Chapters 1-3 in Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870

Session Five: Guest lecturer: David Biale, “Varieties of Jewish Secularism”
In this session our guest lecture will discuss a range of Jewish philosophical and political expressions of Jewish secularism, analyzing the ways they both rejected and translated traditional Jewish texts, beliefs, and social structures. Zionism, for example, both built on traditional religious messianism and adapted European nationalism. As background to this question we will also compare and contrast two classic statements on the distinctiveness and continued Jewishness of the secular, unaffiliated Jew, Arendt’s and Deutscher’s.

Readings: Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” in The Jew as Pariah
Isaac Deutscher, “Who is a Jew?” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays

Session Six: Gender and Secularization
The feminist analysis of Jewish secularization begins with Paula Hyman’s Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, which argues that gender is an important and neglected component in Jewish secularization, modernization, and assimilation. Earlier scholars of Jewish modernization tended to reduce the historical role of women in this process to a few comments on the German-Jewish “salon Jewesses,” whose early nineteenth-century salons frequently became the scene for both intermarriage and conversion to Christianity. As Hyman demonstrates, these figures do not represent the norm of Jewish women’s experience in modernity, which was far more likely to be characterized by a conservative approach to Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition, in some modern bourgeois formations, indeed became “feminized” along the model of Protestantism, with women considered the guardian of a tradition now located more centrally within the home rather than in the masculine public sphere. More generally, modernization drastically reformulated the Jewish gender order, imposing a domesticating and bourgeois gender model on Jewish women (where traditionally they had held a much more visible economic and public role) while subjecting traditional Jewish masculinity to new European norms of proper sexual and economic behavior. Marital practices, gender roles, economic behavior, the relationship between public and private sphere, all of these shifted in the process of Jewish modernization, urbanization, and migration. In this session we will examine Hyman’s thesis and discuss its continuing ramifications for understanding how Jewish secularism affected men and women in different ways.

Reading: Paula Hyman, “Paradoxes of Assimilation,” in Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

Session Seven: Guest Lecturer: Chana Kronfeld: “Modern Jewish Literature and the Transvaluation of Tradition”
In this session, we will study the ways that modern Jewish literature reworked traditional Jewish texts, especially the Bible, often for subversive purposes. Hebrew and Yiddish literature borrowed freely from the themes and the language of Jewish religious sources, often producing new readings and understandings of these sources in the process.

Readings: Itsik Manger, from Medresh Itsik
Yehuda Amichai, “Jacob and the Angel”
Yona Wallach, “Tefillin”

Session Eight: Contemporary Secular Jewish Culture
In this session we will study the rich Jewish cultural production in America today, particularly as it manifests itself in the field of entertainment. We will discuss “how the Jews invented Hollywood,” the subtitle of Gabler’s book on the subject, and how representations of Jews have evolved from the early days of “Jewish show business” to such contemporary manifestations as Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. We will watch and discuss the short film The Tribe, analyzing the new directions suggested by this film.

Reading: Neal Gabler, from An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood


“I Want to Confuse the Bible:” Yehuda Amichai's Secular Reworking of the Sacred

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), the major Hebrew poet of the Statehood Generation, often challenges the authority of the biblical text, turning God into a mere literary character or writing him out of the narrative altogether. In this course we will explore Yehuda Amichai's “counter-theology,” his critique of the Akeda (the binding of Isaac) and other radically secular revisions of sacred Jewish sources in his poetry as well as the poetry of his generation (esp. Dahlia Ravikovitch and Natan Zach.)


Wrestling with the Tradition: American Jewish Women Writers

American Jewish women writers have challenged some of the dominant assumptions - social, political, and religious - of their culture. In this course we will read fiction by two acclaimed short story writers who died last year, Tillie Olsen (1913-2007) and Grace Paley (1922-2007), both known for their innovative prose and their secular humanist perspective. We will also study the provocative work of contemporary American women poets who share their world-view, in particular Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) and Irena Klepfisz (b. 1941).


Searching for Jewish Secularism in the Ancient World

If we explore Biblical Israel and the Post-Biblical world of early Judaism, will we find Jews who neither fully practiced the halachah nor held traditional Jewish beliefs? In short, were there secular Israelites/Jews in the ancient world? This intriguing question will take students on a journey through both ancient texts and archaeological remains. Our key challenge will be to define what constituted observant Israelite/Jewish behavior in each period covered, then search for genuine examples of Jewish/Israelite actions that did not conform to these norms. We will also need to understand what constituted secularism within the context of the periods studied and avoid the understandable temptation to retroject our own notions of modern secularism into the past. Finally, we will be sensitive to the possibility that some behaviors may simply reflect the complex heterodoxy of the times, rather than genuine secular action.

Session 1: Historical Overview: In a richly illustrated digital presentation, we will survey the history, life ways, and religious-political trends of the Biblical and Post-Biblical eras, highlighting the specific periods, events and people on which we will focus in subsequent sessions.

Session 2: The Patriarchal and Heroic Foundation: Delving into the Joseph story cycle in Genesis and the adventures of Samson in Judges, we will examine how these characters both conformed to, and veered away from the accepted norms of religious observance of the period. We will also ponder how these legendary figures served as models for the potentially secular behaviors of later generations.

Session 3: The Israelite Kingdoms: Here, our interest will center on the outlook and actions of David and Solomon, considering such issues as intermarriage, international relations and the often brutal realpolitik that characterized this dysfunctional dynasty at its outset. Filtering out the judgmental retrojections of the later Deuteronomists who edited the narrative we possess today, we will attempt to define and discover what was genuinely secular in the reigns of David and Solomon while cognizant of useful data from other ancient texts and archaeology.

Session 4: The Post-Biblical World: We will briefly survey the complex and conflicting patterns of Jewish heterodoxy for the Second Temple era, then focus on the Book of Esther as an example of the essentially secular essence of Hellenistic ‘romance’ literature enjoyed by early Jewish readers of the time. We will also touch on evidence from other contemporary texts and archaeology, including the works of Flavius Josephus and Philo.

Top of page