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The following are examples of core courses of programs accepted as part of the Posen Project and taught at colleges in the U.S.

Bard College

Jewishness Beyond Religion: Defining Secular Jewish Culture

In the pre-modern world Jewish identity was centered on religion but expressed as well in how one made a living, what clothes one wore, and what language one spoke. In modern times, Jewish culture became more voluntary and more fractured. While some focused on Judaism as (only) a religion, both the most radical and the most typical way in which Jewishness was redefined was in secular terms. This course will explore the intellectual, social, and political movements that led to new secular definitions of Jewish culture and identity in the modern period, focusing on examples drawn from Western and Eastern Europe and the United States.

Click here for the complete Bard College syllabus


Binghamton University

Secular Jewish Ideologies and Identities

This course will focus on the emergence and development in modern times of essentially non-religious definitions of Jewish identity and strategies for maintaining Jewish survival. It will explore the principal writings of the most important modern Jewish secularists from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as well as the programs for action outlined and implemented by secularist leaders and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Click here for the complete Binghamton University syllabus


Brown University

Secular Jewish Identities

In Western Europe, as the Enlightenment value of Reason spread, it had its impact on
the Jewish community in the form of the Haskalah, a movement that called for more
intellectual, as opposed to religious, approaches to being Jewish. First in Eastern Europe,
Zionism emerged in both secular and religious forms and so did Jewish socialist movements.
Both were intended to offer alternative Jewish identities and meanings for European Jews
who had been largely tradition-bound for centuries. The class begins by exploring the
European visions of secular Jewish identities and continues, through immigration into the 20th century U.S. Here we explore and analyze the variety of ways Jews have established modes of secular Jewish identification.

Click here for the complete Brown University syllabus


Dickinson College

Secular Jews from Spinoza to Seinfeld

This course traces the development of secular Judaism through an analysis of key figures in Western Jewish thought and culture. We will seek to understand how these figures have
understood themselves and their place within the societies in which they lived.
We will examine the many forms that secular Judaism takes, and the many different ways that secular Jews have found to relate to their Jewish heritage. The course will conclude with a look of recent films and television episodes that explore secular Jewish themes.

Click here for the complete Dickinson College syllabus


Graduate Theological Union

Secular Jewish Thought

By nearly every demographic measure, most of the world’s Jews today can be described as secular, that is, as living outside of traditional Jewish belief or practice. (Because practice is so central to Judaism, it may be more reliable to define secularism as non-observance of Jewish law rather than by recourse to categories of belief, though certainly changes in belief have been important in Jewish secularization and secularism.) 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 Jewish adults with the tools to understand Jewish secularism from historical, philosophical and cultural perspectives.

Click here for the complete GTU syllabus


Hampshire College

The Rise of Secular Jewish Culture

Jewishness has always involved more than religion. Jewish identity, even in the pre-modern world, was expressed through language, work, music, food, and other cultural behaviors. Modernity brought with it even more possibilities, and a sense of radically different political, cultural, and artistic Jewish identities beyond religion began to emerge. This interdisciplinary course draws upon history, literature, political philosophy, and sociology in tracing the rise of a pluralistic, multifaceted modern Jewish culture in Europe and the U.S. between the seventeenth century and the Second World War. We begin with Spinoza, the most significant “heretical” Jewish thinker in the 17th century, and continue through the European Enlightenment, the rise of modern Jewish nationalist movements, and the emergence of secular Yiddish and Hebrew literature. Finally, we will address the crisis of Jewish modernity provoked by the Holocaust, and briefly survey secular Jewish identities today.

Click here for the complete Hampshire College syllabus


Miami University (Ohio)

Secular Jewish Culture from the Enlightenment to Zionism

The Jewish encounter with modernity saw traditional Jewish society as a socio-religious way of life bifurcate into a more narrowly circumscribed religion, on the one hand, and an ethnic culture, on the other. Coeval with this process, form the moment of their (partial) inclusion in the European nation state, Jews must negotiate their Jewish heritage and religious-cultural identity in relation to modern national identity. In this course we will survey some of the major developments in secular Jewish culture, thought and politics in Western and Eastern Europe, and to a lesser degree also in the United States and the British Mandate of Palestine, between the late 18th century and the founding of Israel in 1948. We wil study attempts to inscribe Jewish identity within various European nationalisms; the relationship between Jewish identity and various forms of (international) socialism; and competing Zionist projects that emerged against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle European antisemitism.

Click here for the complete Miami University (Ohio) syllabus


Muhlenberg College

Jewish Experience in a Secular Age: A History of Modern Jewish Identity

This course will explore secular Jewish experiences in the modern west. We will examine how traditional Jewish society has been transformed by new ideas and new social realities by exploring the many and multifaceted ways that Jews have constructed modern, secular identities in the wake of those transformations. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, as well as film and literature, this course will consider the ways in which Jewish identity has been defined and redefined in the modern period across Europe and the United States. Particular attention will be paid to questions of gender and the ways that men and women each experienced processes of modernization and secularization.

Click here for the complete Muhlenberg College syllabus


Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Making Jews Modern: Varieties of Secular Judaism

This course will examine the many different ways Jews have engaged the challenges of
modernity through a wide array of new secular cultural activities--including
autobiography, theater, music, art, film, journalism, language use, architecture, modern
scholarship, political action, philanthropy, foodways, and tourism. Primary works and
secondary literature will be drawn from the Enlightenment era to contemporary times and
from an array of Jewish communities, focusing on Europe and North America.

Click here for the complete Rutgers syllabus


Temple University

Jewish Civilization I: Secular Judaisms from Spinoza to Salami

What is it about Jerry Stiller's humor that is quintessentially Jewish? What makes a corned beef special "Jewish food"? Can atheist Jews “believe” in Judaism? How is the ex-communicated philosopher Spinoza a “Jewish” thinker? This course is a survey of modern Jewish secularism. Jewish secularism raises problems about the nature and viability of “traditions,” “faith,” “belief,” and “practice” in the modern world. We will focus on how Jews have critiqued Jewish religious traditions, and in turn created new sorts of Jewish traditions, politics, and cultures, as we try to answer the question: What is secular Judaism?

Click here for the complete Temple University syllabus


Tulane University

Building Jewish Identity: Secular Judaism in Historical Perspective

The starting point for our investigation of a distinctively secular Jewish conception of the world will be the fact that roughly one half of the American Jewish population possesses a secular non-religious orientation (American Jewish Identity Survey, 2001). How did this non-religious orientation arise amongst what many people consider to be a religious community? We will explore how certain non- religious features, such as shared culture, language, customs, dress, and education played an integral role in the definition of Jews and Judaism from their inception, and the role played by these features in the constitution of variant secular forms of Judaism and secular Jewish orientations in the modern period.

Click here for the complete Tulane University syllabus


University at Albany

Secular Jewish Identity and Culture

This course is an exploration of the creation of a secularized Judaism. Since the onset of the Enlightenment (if not earlier), many Jews have sought to construct expressions of Judaism that are not contingent upon religious obligations and practices. After an introduction in which we will discuss some of the tensions between secular and religious Judaism in contemporary times, we will explore several ancient and medieval challenges to normative Judaism (Hellenism, messianism, and historical consciousness) that helped to set the foundation for the shaping of modern secular Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will then looks at several "snapshots" of secular Judaism in the ninenteenth, twentieth, and twenty first centuries in the regions of Europe, Russia, the United States, and Israel. At the end of the course, we will consider the possibility of a "post-secular" Judaism.

Click here for the complete University at Albany syllabus


University of California - Davis

Introduction to Religious and Secular Jewish Cultures

There is no one Jewish culture. As Jews have lived all over the world in many and varied environments their cultures have differed. Jewish cultures have developed both by adapting to and resisting the cultures around them. In these many Jewish cultures, religious teaching was just one important component. This course will examine the wide variety of Jewish cultures in the modern world, and then survey the history of Jewish cultures from Late Antiquity to the modern period.

Click here for the complete UC Davis syllabus


University of California, Los Angeles

The Spirit of Secularism: Jewish Cultures in a Secular Age

This course examines the emergence of distinct forms of Jewish culture in the modern age that challenge or depart from traditional Jewish sources and authority. The subject is the rise of a secular Jewish culture, or more accurately, series of secular Jewish cultures over the past two centuries. It begins with a discussion of key definitional questions: What is secularity? Can we trace roots of a secular impulse Jewish culture prior to modern times? The course will explore diverse cultural expressions beginning in early modern times and extending up to the present. In the process, students will take note of the substantial degree of intellectual and cultural creativity produced by modern Jews as they have sought to refashion their identities beyond traditional religious categories.

Click here for the complete UCLA syllabus


University of Cincinnati

The Emergence of Secular Jewish Identity and Culture

Judaism, it has been argued, is both a venerable tradition of ideas and values as well as a
social and communal bond manifest in the form of Jewish peoplehood. That Jewish life has
evolved and changed over time is, perhaps, a commonplace observation. A recent report
titled the American Jewish Identity Survey (2001) indicates that roughly half of the American
Jewish population is not religious in its orientation. In other words, much of contemporary
Jewish life is in fact shaped by a distinctive secular sensibility. How did this phenomenon
arise and what are its origins? What historical conditions provided the scope and inducement
for the emergence of secular Jewish trends? What were the critical junctures and who were
the major personalities that drove forward the process of Jewish secularization? Finally, is it
possible to map the transformation of Jewish life over time, and what might such an reveal
about the nature of modern Jewish society? These are some of the key questions addressed in this course.

Click here for the complete University of Cincinnati syllabus


University of Denver

Jews on the Move: Culture, People and Ideas

Jews on the Move focuses on culture, people and ideas to think about how Jewish lives and communities have changed with the emergence of modernity, particularly in the United States. Jews have been characterized as people perpetually on the move, from early biblical stories of exodus and exile to contemporary narratives of global migration and tourism. Movement in this sense is both literal – in the case of Jews who pack up, pick up, and leave for other places – and metaphorical – in the case of Jews who traverse long distances to adopt new and different identities. We will focus on a specific group and period of time: European Jews and their descendants encountering the modern age of the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries in the United States.

Click here for the complete University of Denver syllabus


University of Kansas

Jewish Culture in a Secular Age: The Modern Jewish Revolution

Beginning in the nineteenth century largely in Western Europe, and continuing through the twentieth century in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Jews and Jewish communities have been part of a secularizing world, even as Jewish religion and law have likewise been transformed. Jews have responded through the invention of organizations and idioms inconceivable before this era, often both in spite of and in response to massive dislocation. In the past century, Jews became full participants and protagonists in their surrounding cultures and societies, and simultaneously developed new, contingent and flexible ways of identifying as Jews. This course will study how the invention of modern and secular Jewish cultures leaves the question of Jewishness and its boundaries perhaps more richly complex than ever before.

Click here for the complete University of Kansas syllabus


University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Negotiating Religion and State: Jewish Secularism and the Emergence of European Modernity

Hotly contested issues such as the "right" to wear the veil in French public schools and the "right" to exhibit a massive sculpture of the Ten Commandments in an American Court of Law are just two examples of the eruption of "fundamentalist" religious claims upon the state in the West. Although the relations of Religion and State have been negotiated differently across national boundaries, this course will focus on the distinctive role of Jews and Judaism in shaping some of the basic terms of these negotiations. First in the Napoleonic "Sanhedrin," and then in the development of the so-called, "Jewish question" in the emergence of the modern nation-states, this negotiation will be examined, followed by the negotiation of the question of Religion and State in early modern philosophy and political thought and then the emergence of new forms of Jewish nationalism, including Zionism. The final segment will deal with the question of the separation/relation between Religion and State in the modern State of Israel and its consequences for both religious and secular forms of Judaism.

Click here for the complete University of Massachusetts-Amherst syllabus


University of Toronto

Secularism and Strife: The Cultural History of Modern Jews

Modern Jewish culture is the product of a dynamic interaction between two sets of
opposed elements: religion versus secularism and the individual versus the collective.
This course will analyze the historical roots and development of the four possible
combinations of these elements: the religious collective, the secular individual, the
secular collective, and the religious individual. Our starting point will be the invention of
the modern Jewish self in the late 18th and 19th-century Jewish Enlightenment. We will
see how Jews reacted to new promises of personal freedom by reforming, reframing, and
abandoning Judaism. We will trace the connection between these developments and the
creation in the late 19th and 20th centuries of new forms of secular, collective Jewish
identity through movements such as communism, diaspora nationalism, and Zionism.

Click here for the complete University of Toronto syllabus

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