Temple University

Temple University is introducing a new track in Secular Jewish Studies, with a two-semester core course entitled Jewish Civilization. Two other peripheral courses Secular Approaches to Ancient Jewish History and Jews and Sports will be offered.

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?

Course Outline:

Introduction
Emancipation
Secular Jewish Philosophy
Zionisms
Socialisms
Zionism and Socialism
Secularism and Science
Coming to America
Yiddish Language and Culture
Jewish Humor
Jewish Secularism Today
Secular Jewish Celebrations

Readings will include:

Spinoza, Theologico-Political Tractatus
Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom, and Other Tales from Yiddish New York
Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Diner, A New Promised Land
Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch
Douglas Rushkoff, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism


Jewish Civilization II

Jews in the modern world have dreamed of a perfect society. In the 20th century, many Jews aligned themselves to one (or more) four major versions of utopia: Jewish Nationalism (Zionism), Universalist Socialism (Communism), Individual Freedom (Psychoanalysis), and Liberal Democracy (America). Jews migrated to the rough terrain of Palestine, to the cities of the Soviet Union, to non-Nazi Europe, and to the shores of America. Jewish idealists created new ways of being Jewish and, so they thought, new ways of being human beings. By the end of the century, one of those dreams seemingly dissolved (Communism), another finds itself in peril (Zionism), a third finds itself marginalized (Psychoanalysis), and the third brings with it new dangers and new possibilities (America). All three movements sought to create a life free of traditional religious influence by forging a separate secular culture, ethos, and politics and by doing so, helped create the contemporary West. This course will explore the intersections of religious forms, personal ethos, and political content by examining some major texts of idealism and disillusionment with the project of utopia-building. What leads to utopian projects? Do they always fail? Is (a Jewish) particularism compatible with (a cosmopolitan) universalism? Can one consider oneself “chosen” and advocate radical egalitarianism? The idea of Jewish secularism raises problems about the nature and viability of “traditions”, “faith”, “belief”, and “practice” in the modern world.

Readings will include:

Marx, Selected Writings
Isaac Babel, Complete Works
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State
Tom Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Hasia Diner, A Promised Land
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution
Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Course Outline:

I. Introduction: What is Secularism, How might it be Jewish, and What are its Utopias?

1. Introduction
The Promised Land

II. Communism

2. The New Sacred Writings
3. Communist Jewish Utopia
4. Communist Dystopia

III. Zionism

5. The Zionist Idea
6. Zion for Whom
7. Post-Zionism

IV. Psychoanalysis

8. Dream a Little Dream
9.Freudian Midrash
10.Psychoanalysis Interminable

V. Liberalism

11. The New Zion
12. Exodus Politics
13. Post-Utopian Jewish Identity
14. Jewish in Christian America


Secular Approaches to Ancient Jewish History

Ancient Jewish history is usually narrated as if Jew went directly from Torah to Talmud, with nothing in between. Such an account privileges the authoritative religious developments and the leadership first, of the priests who collated the core of the Torah, and second, of the early Rabbis, who collated the Mishnah, the earliest strata of the Talmud. This course explores the explosive and intriguing history between these two religious moments, and in doing so, rejects the religious chronology as the basis of historiography.

The history and textual materials from these periods in Jewish History raise many of the perennial themes that have come to inform Jewish social life over the centuries. In fact, during this period in which Jews first become Jews, these issues arise for the first time: exile, political decentralization, disagreements between Jews about what constitutes the parameters of the Jewish community; peoplehood, nation, and the boundaries of group identity, intermarriage, conversion, and the movement of Jewish identity from a territory-based definition to an ethnic definition, to a definition based in piety. These themes will be discussed through a close examination of primary texts (in translation) having to deal with: 1. The political history of Jews in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods; 2. The expansion and development of literature; 3. Josephus and his historical project; and 4. What non-Jewish authors write about the Jews.

Readings will include:

Milton Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf
Miriam Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies
Martin Jaffe, Early Judaism
Lawrence Schiffman, Texts and Traditions: A Source Reader for the Study of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism
Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society

Course Outline

Section A: History and Chronology
1. Introduction
In class text reading.
In-class viewing and discussion of Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, episode 3, “The Shaping of Traditions, 30-732 ce. See www.pbs.org/wnet/heritage. Note the timeline offered at www.pbs.org/wnet/heritage/timeline3.html

2. From Judea to Palestina, Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, Second Temple and After: Apocalypse/Fear/Destruction
Texts and Traditions, 429-434 (overview), 434-452 and 457-469 (war and siege-- scan to get the sense of doom), 453--457 (Gittin 56a-b, rabbinic account of the siege), 469-472 (aftermath).
Handout: 2 Baruch (= Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch), chapters 1-12; 4 Ezra, chapters 1-3.; 3rd vision (6.35-9.25) and 4th vision (9.26-10.59); mPeah 1.1; mHallah 1.1, Sanders, Epilogue, 491-494; Josephus, excerpts from Jewish War, Book 7, chapter 5; 6.6; 10 and 11 (the Roman triumph, the poll tax for Jews, and the end of the Onias Temple. Full text at www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-7.htm); Josephus, Against Apion, I, chapter 15 to end, at www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/apion-2.htm.
Marty Jaffee, Early Judaism, 78-82.
“The Great Revolt,” in Ben Sasson, A History of the Jewish People, 296-303.

3. Chronology: Historical Overview of Jews under Roman and Byzantine Control, the Sassanian Empire, to the Muslim Conquest.
Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, “Rabbis and Patriarchs on the Margins,” 104-128.
Robert Seltzer, Chapter 6, “The Efflorescence of Rabbinic Judaism, Second to Seventh Centuries” from Jewish People, Jewish Thought, 243-260, 310-314. See timelines, pages 166-170, 316-319.
Texts and Traditions, 487-495, 561-565, 568-570 (Roman and Jewish sources on the 2d century revolts), 597-605 (Babylonian Jews and Tannaim)

Section B: Putting the Rabbis Back into Time and Space: the New Religious Movement of the Tannaim
In general parlance it is assumed that after the Revolts, the Jews and the rabbis leave the narrative of political time and space. In this reading, based on contemporary forms of nationalism (i.e., what makes a people present in the world, what gives them coordinates of time and place, is their control of nation and territory and without this, they are not present, not actual, not located in time and space). This reading of the rabbis and ancient Jews as unconnected to a material world means that we miss much texture and nuance when we read their texts. In this class we want to put them back into time and space, Jews and Rabbis both, and see how it makes a difference, to see what new, and hopefully more helpful stories might emerge. In this section, we put the early Rabbis in general, and the Tannaim in particular, back into the Roman Empire and the flourishing of law as a category in the second century. We also put the Rabbis back into their households, the state of marriage, and their arguments against women and femininity.

4. Who’s in Charge and Who’s Doing What? The Tannaim and the Nasi/Patriarchate: Political Power/Magical Desires.
Texts and Traditions 475-479 (rabbinic authority), 497-559 (Mishnah: the New Scripture), 571-574 (patriarchate, Antoninus), 715-719 (kashrut) and 735-748 (Maaseh Markavah, and Magic Bowls, and Rabbinic responses to them. (Recommended site for more on early mysticism, www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Rels463/TalmudicMysticism.html. For more context on magic traditions, see www.lib.umich.edu/pap/magic/intro.html)
Jaffee, Early Judaism, 176-200.

5. Mishnah and its Development
For a minimum of one hour, read through the Mishnah in English. Try to get a sense of the whole.
In class, discussion of Mishnah, and comparison of mishnah/tosefta/yerushalmi/bavli Taanit.
Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon (handout)

6. History, Gender, and Ordinary Jews
Spinning Fantasies: Introduction, chapters 1, 2, 3. (See handout with Ketubot 8.1-2; Qiddushin 4.12-14/tQiddushin 5, mQiddushin 1.7).
Texts and Traditions, 682-698, 732-734.
Women’s status in Roman law, including twelve tables. www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-romanlegal.shtml

7. Home and Family Life.
Spinning Fantasies, chapters 4, 5, 6, epilogue.
Texts and Traditions, 719-732
Jaffee, Early Judaism, 200-212

Section C: The development of the synagogue, the Amoraim, the emergence of the Sassanian Talmudic academies, and adjacent religious traditions (250 ce to 600 ce)

Another consequence of the imagined removal of ancient rabbis and Jews from real time and place is that we tend to study them outside the development of other and adjacent religious and religio-legal traditions. In this extended section, we reverse this trend and examine the development of Judaism in the 2nd-7th centuries amid other developing and ongoing traditions, such as Christianity, Gnosticism, the decline of pagan traditions, the revival of Persian Zoroastrianism in the Parthian and Sassanian Empire, the Hindu and Buddhist traditions circulating at the eastern edge of the Parthian/Sassanian Empire, and the emergence of Islam in the seventh century as it adopts Jewish traditions to combat encroaching Byzantine settlement in Arabia. In this section, we will use the emerging synagogue as a lens to think through Jew’s engagements with other traditions, and also read several of Shaye Cohen’s essays on how the Rabbis created specific kinds of legal boundaries to quantify and acknowledge their notions of true Jewishness.

8. A History of the Early Church, the emerging Byzantine Empire, and how it affects the Jews.
Texts and Traditions: 414-427 (Jewish-Christian separation, Justin Martyr, Aphrahat, Epiphanius) 574-595 (Byzantine sources and restrictions), 605-617 (Amoraim, Exilarchate, Savoraim), 619-632 (Yerushalmi), 650-656 (Targum); 656-670 (liturgy)
Schwartz, Chapters 4 and 5 (129-176)
Recommended websites to look at: Edict of Milan: www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/edict-milan.html, and Ptolemy and his solar system mapped in Christian terms campus.northpark.edu/history/Classes/Sources/Ptolemaic.html

9. The Synagogue (Samaritans, Gnostics, Manicheans).
Schwartz, chapter 6 “Christianization” (179-202); skim 7 “Landscape Transformed” (203-214); read chapter 8 “Origins and Diffusion of the Synagogue, (215-239). chapter 9 “Judaization” (240-274), chapter 10 (The Synagogue and the Ideology of Community” (275-289), and Conclusion (291-292).
Texts and Traditions: 472-474 (synagogue inscriptions), 633-650 (Babylonian Talmud)

10. Setting Boundaries
Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Chapter 8 “The Prohibition of Intermarriage,” and Chapter 9 “The Matrilineal Principle.” Recommended (book on reserve): Chapter 10, “Israelite Mothers/Israelite Fathers,” and Epilogue, “Jews, Judaism and Jewishness: Us and Them.”

Section D: Talmudic Judaism Triumphant?

11. Different Theories about Rabbinic Judaism, Islam and the Muslim/Arabian conquests.
Texts and Traditions, 595-596 (Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614); 610-617 (tension between Palestine and Babylon), 671-682 (theology) and 749-761 (Hegemony of the Babylonian Talmud).
Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Chapter 8 “The Prohibition of Intermarriage,” chapter 9 “The Matrilineal Principle.”

12. Final Discussion:
Milton Steinberg, As a Driven Leaf (Behrman House, 1996). Steinberg was enthralled by Mordechai Kaplan, and wrote this novel as his proto-Reconstructionist vision of the early rabbis. It has since become one of the few popular/literary introductions to the Rabbinic period. What images and stories, what sensibilities of the rabbis does his novel offer? What are the images of this period presented by popular culture, the images most likely to be familiar to contemporary Jews?

13. Review: From the Post-Exile, to the Second Exile, to the Eve of the Medieval Period.
Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization, 362-381.
Review Jaffee, Cohen, and Schwartz.


Jews and Sports

While Jews are often seen as “the people of the book” they are also a “people of the body.” This course will encourage students to think in new ways about the Jewish connection to sports, locating sports in the history and sociology of American Jewish life. We’ll start with a look at the history of Jews in relationship to athletics and body image. Then we’ll focus on the American Jewish experience, examining not only the major sports that Jews have been involved with (baseball, boxing, and basketball) but also how immigration, urbanization, gambling, assimilation, and anti-Semitism have influenced Jewish involvement in sports. We will examine questions about ethnicity and race, gender (both masculinity and women’s participation) and class. We will also examine international affairs, especially the 1936 Olympics, the role of sports in Israel, and Israel-America relations as experienced through U.S. participation in the Maccabiah games. We will close with a look at sports in the life of contemporary Jews as participants, writers and spectators.

Readings will include:

Jeffrey Gurock, Judaism's Encounter with American Sports
Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience
Steven Riess, ed., Sports and the American Jew
Eric Rolfe Greenberg, The Celebrant

Other recommended texts:

George Eien, "Jewish History and the Ideology of Modern Sport: Approaches and Interpretations," Journal of Sport History 25:3
Paul Taylor, Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash Between Sports and Politics
Allen Bodner, When Boxing was a Jewish Sport
Douglas Century, Barney Ross
David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis, Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink
Alan Pollock, Barnstorming to Heaven
Jack Kugelmass, ed. Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship

Course Outline:

1. Introduction: Why Sports?

2. Sport in Jewish History and Tradition
Gurock, pp. 15-35

“Body Matters: Race, Gender and Perceptions of Physical Ability from Goethe to Weininger” by Patricia Vertinsky in Identity and Intolerance: Nationalism, Racism and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States, ed. Norbert Finzsch and Dietmar Schirmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 331-370

3. Sports and the American Jewish Experience
Immigration and leisure

Riess:
Chapter 5, “The Rise of Sport at a Jewish Settlement House” Gerald Gems (146-159)
Chapter 6, “‘Our Crowd’ at Play: The Elite Jewish Country Club in the 1920s, Peter Levine (160-185)
Gurock, 35-74, 91-120

4. Oral History: an introduction
Boxing

Riess, chapter 2, “Tough Jews: the Jewish American Boxing Experience” (60-104)
Levine, chapters 8-9
Film clips: “Body and Soul”

Oral History: picking your subject, writing the questions, conducting an interview

5. 1936 Olympics
Levine, chapter 11

www.ushmm.org/ search “Olympics”
Allen Guttmann, Heather Kestner, George Eisen, “Jewish Athletes and the Nazi Olympics,” in The Olympics at the Millenium: Power, Politics and the Games, ed. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) 51-62

Moshe Gottlieb, “The American Controversy Over the Olympic Games,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 61:3 (March 1972) 181-213

6. Basketball
Levine, chapters 2-4
Guest speaker: Rich Westcott, sportswriter, on “Eddie Gottlieb”

7. Women Athletes
Riess chapter 3, “Jewish American Women, Jewish Organizations, and Sports, 1880-1940, Linda Borish (105-131)
Linda Borish, “`The Cradle of American Champions, Women Champions … Swim Champions’: Charlotte Epstein, Gender and Jewish Identity, and the Physical Emancipation of Women in Aquatic Sports,” by The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 21, 2 (March 2004): 197-235

Film: “Jewish Women in American Sport: Settlement Houses to the Olympics” (Borish, US, 2006)

8. Baseball
Levine, 87-132

9. Hank Greenberg
Riess chapter 7, “Hank Greenberg: The Jewish American Sports Hero” William Simons (185-207)
Levine, 132-143

Film: “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”

Oral history excerpt: www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=4310

Oral History: how to use oral history as a primary source

10. Sports and the American Jewish Imagination
Gamblers and Entrepreneurs

“Biznez is Biznez: The Arnold Rothstein Story” by Michael Alexander in Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 48-64
Riess, chapter 8, “Lester Harrison and the Rochester Royals, 1945-1957” Donald Fisher (208-240)
Levine, 103-108

Guest Speaker: Michael Alexander, Associate Professor of History, Temple University

11. Literature
Eric Rolfe Greenberg, The Celebrant
Riess chapter 10, “Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant,” Eric Solomon, 256-286

12. Sports in Israel
Moshe Sasson and Barbara Schrodt, “The Maccabi Sport Movement and the Establishment of the First Maccabiah Games, 1932,” Canadian Journal of History of Sport 16 (1985) 67-90

Yair Galily, “Playing Hoops in Palestine: the Early Development of Basketball in the Land of Israel, 1935-56” International Journal of the History of Sport, 20:1 (March 2003) 143-151

Yoram Carmeli and Ronit Grossman, “‘It’s a Game between Jews and Arabs’: Soccer Journalism, Otherness and Abjection in the Israeli Context,” Culture, Sport, Society, 3:2 (Summer 2000) 23-43

13. Jewish Fans and Sports Today
Gurock, 154-191
Allen Salkin, “Where Have You Gone Sandy Koufax?” Heeb Magazine 5 (February 2004)
Jane Leavy, “King of the Jews” in Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (New York: Harpercollins, 2003) 167-194
www.jewishsportsreview.com
jewishmajorleaguers.org/

14. Closing Session
Oral History: class presentations


Secular Jewish Feminists

This course uses the experiences of Jewish women and Jewish feminists as a way to think through questions about secular identity. We will focus on the second wave of US feminist movement beginning in the 1960s, but will look briefly, too, at the 19th century feminist movement in the US and Western Europe. The course will look at the women in these movements who identify as culturally or ethically or politically Jewish. It will also look at women who assume that their Jewishness is not significant, or for whom a Jewish identity becomes salient over the course of their engagement in feminist movement. Jewish feminism has increasingly, throughout the 1990's, been defined as primarily focused on religion, its reform, its texts, and its potential innovations. In sharp contrast to this trend, and to many courses on Jewish feminism, this class will highlight the role of women who do not define their Jewishness in religious terms. Without assuming a religious definition of Jewishness, this course will pose some of the following questions:

What constitutes Jewish identity?

How and in what ways do cultural, political, and ethnic notions of Jewishness shape specific women's engagement in the politics of feminism?

How is lack of affiliation different from more overt forms of "secular" Jewish identification?

What are the factors that lead some women who insisted initially on the insignificance of their Jewishness to their feminist activism to rethink their positions?

How did anti-Semitism in the women's movement affect these women?

How were the works of these often more politically radical women figured in more mainstream Jewish feminist writing?

Readings will include:

Pam Nadel, ed., American Jewish Women's History: A Reader
Evelyn Beck, ed., Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology
Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader
Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, eds., Judaism Since Gender

Back to Sample Course Descriptions