Graduate Theological Union

The Graduate Theological Union will be offering three classes: an interdisciplinary M.A. level core course in Secular Jewish Thought, a doctoral level course on Haskalah Literature: Secularization and Sexuality and an M.A.. level course on Introduction to Jewish Folklore.

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.

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, many of which highlighted the national and/or cultural character of the Jewish people; this category is broad enough to include Zionism and Yiddishism, Diaspora Nationalism and Labor Bundism. 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 based on re-readings and transvaluations of traditional Judaism and some emerging from the new conditions of modernity. We will begin by exploring the concept of secularization and secularism with sociological tools, especially that of the “secularization thesis,” which has recently been coming under considerable fire. We will then set the historical background necessary for understanding the emergence of Jewish secularism, first in central Europe and then throughout the Jewish world. A major portion of this course will be devoted to surveying the major thinkers and philosophies of Jewish secularism from its beginnings in the early modern period to its contemporary manifestations.

Course books:

David Biale, ed. The Cultures of the Jews
Benedict Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise
George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism
Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women
Robert Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought

Course Schedule:

1. Introduction and Clarification of Terms

2. Sociological approaches to secularization and Jewish secularization
This session will introduce the theories and debates of secularization that have shaped the academic understanding of the break with religious tradition. Beginning with Durkheim and Weber, we will explore the modern period as characterized by a break with religious beliefs and traditions and trace the underlying continuities as well as ruptures between traditional and modern-secular societies. We will also ask about what secularist philosophies affirm, beyond their critiques of religion.

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
Berger, “Modernization as the Universalization of Heresy,” in The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation
Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics
Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, “Secularization: The Orthodox Model,” in Religion and Modernization
Vincent P. Pecora, “Introduction,” in Secularization and Cultural Criticism

Study Questions:
1. What are the major components of what sociologists have called “the secularization thesis’? What are the major variations, qualifications, and critiques of that thesis, as far as you can glean from the week’s readings?
2. The essays we have read often discuss Jews and Jewish history, but it widely varying and perhaps even contradictory ways: discuss the ways in which Jewish experience is either exemplary or a special case of secularization.
3. Pecora suggests that “cultural criticism” is implicated in the ambivalences of secularization. How do you understand this insight and how does it bear on our work in this class?

3. Spinoza
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Introduction, Preface, chapters 1-8 and 13-30
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

Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632-1677) was born in Amsterdam to a family of former conversos or Marranos, Jews who had converted to Christianity but secretly continued some form of Jewish practice or belief. The former Marranos who had returned to their Jewish ancestral faith in Amsterdam (often after centuries of Christianity), were both reestablishing its connection to Judaism and negotiating a number of radical challenges to traditional religion, most famously Uriel Acosta’s denial of rabbinic authority. In 1656, Spinoza was questioned by the rabbinic authorities about certain unorthodox beliefs he apparently espoused and he was eventually excommunicated. Spinoza spent the rest of his life working as an optician and refining his philosophical thought. Being outside the Jewish community and within the relatively liberal environment of seventeenth-century Holland did not spell the end of his struggle for freedom of conscience. Whereas his earlier thought was condemned by the Jewish authorities, his later work was greeted with resistance and opposition to its alleged atheism by Christian theologians and politicians. It is no surprise, then, that his philosophical works are characterized by indirection and caution; reading Spinoza often feels like an attempt to decode what he really meant, and his work has been subjected to a wide range of interpretations. In this session we will assess his role as precursor to what would become a prototypically Jewish position outside of religious affiliations and discuss 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!

Study Questions:
1. How do you understand the organizational logic of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise? What is he arguing for in the preface, and why does he begin the book proper with a discussion of prophecy? What are the basic points of the TPT and why are they sometimes hard to discern?
2. Compare and contrast Spinoza’s discussions of Christianity and Judaism.
3. How does Yuval explain and historically contextualize the emergence of the radical new thought of Spinoza?

4. Lecture
David Biale, “Heresy, Apostasy, and the Beginnings of Jewish Secularism”

5. In this session we will read and critically engage two chapters of David Biale’s forthcoming history of Jewish secularism, “Self-Portraits,” which examines the autobiographical writings of five Jewish thinkers concerning their break with the Jewish tradition, and “God,” which explores the medieval roots of Jewish pantheism (or panentheism) and atheism and the evolution of modern Jewish secularist thought on God.

6. Emancipation, Secularization and Jewish Modernity
In this session, we will study Katz’s classic historical accounts of the beginnings European Jewish modernization, discussing it in the light of more recent historical views and the secularization thesis and its recent critics.

Jacob Katz, Chapters 1-4 in Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870
Katz, “Judaism and Christianity against the Background of Modern Secularism,” and “The Influence of Religion and Society on Each Other at the Time of Emancipation,” in Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “The Privilege of Liberty,” in The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present
Richard I. Cohen, “Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions: Jewish Cultures in Western and Central Europe in the Modern Age,” in Cultures of the Jews

7. Secularization, the Bible, and History
In this class session we will read another two chapters from David Biale’s forthcoming book, one on history and one on the Bible. These chapters will be delivered via email a week or two before we meet.

8. German Jews from the Enlightenment to Weimar
In this session we will discuss the rise of a German-Jewish intellectual culture following the Enlightenment and the emancipation of German Jews; this was a culture that prized Bildung as an integral part of German citizenship and which soon elevated Bildung to a peculiarly Jewish value, as well. We will explore the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in relation to the larger culture, focusing on what German-Jewish intellectuals shared with their non-Jewish counterparts and in what ways they differed, as never fully integrated individuals and groups. 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:
George Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism
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
Peter Gay, from A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis

9. Gender and Assimilation
Reading:
Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

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.

Although our topic here is secularism rather than assimilation, the two phenomena are clearly related. Hyman opens by exploring the distinction between assimilation as a process and as a project: as a process, assimilation could lead to the disappearance of Jewish communal structures and to conversion and intermarriage; as a project, Jewish proponents of assimilation often asserted both the necessity of Jewish modernization and cultural integration and the need to maintain Jewish identity and difference within a larger environment. Although contemporary scholars resist the term assimilation for its pejorative and judgmental qualities, preferring such terms as acculturation and integration, Hyman maintains the language in which so many of these issues have historically been debated. For our own purposes, assimilation can stand in for the anxiety that Jewish secularization inevitably leads to the disappearance of Jews into the dominant culture. The story of Jewish secularism can hardly be told without reference to this cultural anxiety. Nevertheless, that secularization is not equivalent to assimilation (in its pejorative sense) is part of the narrative Hyman unfolds.

Study Questions:
1. How has the process of modernization differed for Jewish men and Jewish women? How did the modernization process take different shapes in German and East European Jewish communities?
2. In what sense were Jewish women either buffers against or agents of assimilation? How did secularization support or limit Jewish women’s self-determination?
3. How did modern anti-Semitism manifest itself in the relations between Jewish men and women? Do you think it continues to influence these relations?
4. Paula Hyman discusses some of the differences between the assimilation of first and second generation East European Jewish women immigrants. How would you characterize the development of this story in third and fourth generation American-Jewish women? Are they more or less “domestic” than earlier generations?
5. I characterized assimilation as the anxiety that underlies discourses of Jewish secularism. Do you think this is accurate? How might Hyman’s book have looked different if she had focused on secularism rather than assimilation?

10. Enlightenment and Emancipation beyond Germany
In this session we will study the breakdown of tradition in Eastern Europe and beyond Europe, examining not only the ideological formulations of new forms of Jewish identity but also the cultural context in these new forms of identity arose.

Readings:
David Biale, “A Journey between Worlds: Eastern European Jewish Cultures from the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust,” in Cultures of the Jews
Aron Rodrigue, “The Ottoman Diaspora: The Rise and Fall of Ladino Literary Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews
Lucette Valensi, “Multicultural Visions: The Cultural Tapestry of the Jews of North Africa,” in Cultures of the Jews
Yosef Tobi, “Challenges to Tradition: Jewish Cultures in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Bukhara,” in Cultures of the Jews
Shmuel Werses, “Portrait of the Maskil as a Young Man,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah
Eli Lederhandler, “Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric in the Russian Haskalah and Early Zionism,” in Jewish Responses to Modernity

11. Jewish Nationalism I - Socialism, Yiddishism and Diaspora Jewish Nationalism
In this session we will focus on the varieties of Jewish nationalism that arose around the embrace of Yiddish and the positive value of the Jewish diaspora. We will explore how Jewish language and Jewish politics interacted to construct a notion of Jewish identity that overturned traditional categories of Jewish thinking that had privileged Hebrew over Yiddish, Israel over the diaspora, the rabbinic elite over the masses, and abstract intellectual achievements over embodied life experience. We will also explore the arguments that set these forms of Jewish nationalism against each other and analyze how each side mobilized different elements of the Jewish tradition and history.

Readings:
Ezra Mendelsohn, “Varieties” and “Geography,” in On Modern Jewish Politics
Tony Michels, “Introduction,” and “The Politics of Yidishe Kultur: Chaim Zhitlovsky and the Challenge of Jewish Nationalism,” in A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
David Shneer, “Ideology and Jewish Language Politics: How Yiddish Became the National Language of Soviet Jewry,” in Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture

12. Jewish Nationalism II - Hebraism and Zionism
This session will focus on Zionism and Hebraism as forms of Jewish secularism, in which Jewish traditional values (as of land, or the “sacred tongue”) are recast in a secular mold, mirroring the European nationalisms that were such potent sources of the rejection of Jews as “alien.” We will read major literary and ideological expressions of these movements in order to discern “internal” and “external” influences in the construction of this important form of Jewish nationalism, the construction of Jewish identity through paradigms of language, territory and peoplehood rather than religious affiliation or theological superstructure.

Readings:
Arthur Herzberg, from the “Introduction,” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader
Benjamin Harshav, “The Modern Jewish Revolution: An Essay on the History of Culture and Consciousness” in Language in Time of Revolution
Robert Alter, “Hebrew and Modernity,” and “Secularity and the Tradition of Hebrew Verse,” in Hebrew and Modernity
Ariel Hirschfeld, “Locus and Language: Hebrew Culture in Israel, 1890-1990,” in Cultures of the Jews

13. Issues in Jewish Secularism Today
In this final session we will explore the contemporary shape of Jewish secularism, whether as a fully articulated philosophy or as a function of social forces. How is this contemporary Jewish secularism different from earlier manifestations of Jewish secularism and how does it build on these earlier expressions? How do we understand the differences between the fully articulated Jewish secularism of the prior two class sessions and the more “passive” secularism of large portions of the world’s Jews? Turning to the State of Israel, we confront the problem and paradox of a Jewish democracy, one which lays claims to certain secular principles while striving to maintain a “Jewish” character

Readings:
Ira Sharkansky, “Religion and State in Israel: Another Round of an Ancient Conflict among the Jews,” in The Secular and the Sacred: Nation, Religion and Politics
Azmi Bishara, “Religion and Democracy,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Israel: Proceedings on Secular Judaism and Democracy
Lucy Dawidowicz, “Jewish Identity: A Matter of Fate, A Matter of Choice,” in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History
Anita Schwartz, “The Secular Seder: Continuity and Change among Left-Wing Jews,” in Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry
Stuart Charme, “Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Social Studies 6 (2000). To be distributed through email.

14. Last class - Student Presentations


Haskalah Literature: Secularization and Sexuality

The Haskalah in Eastern Europe: In the decades after Moses Mendelssohn inaugurated what has become known as the Berlin Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment], a new and more variegated maskilic movement arose in Galicia, Poland and Russia that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. While the Berlin Haskalah generated a philosophical corpus, the Eastern European maskilim tended toward literary production - satire, romance, poetry and autobiography. The Eastern European maskilim, moreover, spanned a wider ideological framework, from conservative and “rationalist” reforms of traditional Judaism to a spectrum of radical secularisms. It is important to note that the history of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe overlaps with that of the urbanizing, modernizing and secularizing trends of the nineteenth century but it cannot be reduced to them. Maskilim both expressed and attempted to shape the course of Jewish history, providing both models of and models for Jewish modernity.

This course will focus on the literature of the Eastern European Haskalah in two of its major dimensions: the first of these is secularization, the motivation and shaping force of this literature throughout the nineteenth century; the second is gender and sexuality, as they impelled the break with Jewish tradition and were themselves transformed in the waves of Jewish modernization. In particular, we will explore the function played by marital and educational practices and gender roles in the Haskalah critique of the Jewish tradition, as expressed in maskilic manifestoes, autobiographies, novels and poetry. Among the principle effects of modernization was a revolution in the distinctive contours of Jewish femininity and masculinity: it is this revolution that we will also track in the literature of the Haskalah.

After setting the historical background for the rise of the Eastern European Haskalah, we will survey the geographical centers of the Haskalah and present its major genres - satire, poetry, autobiography and romance, each of which played a distinctive role in the Haskalah project. Among the questions we will explore are: How did the maskilim respond to the historical upheavals that characterized nineteenth-century Jewish life in Eastern Europe? In what ways did they view modernization as an opportunity for reformulating conceptions of Jewish identity? What in Jewish tradition did they consider worth salvaging and what did they jettison? How did they conceptualize Jewish and non-Jewish languages and literature (e.g. the Bible, the Talmud)? What were the new models of Jewish identity - particularly in its gendered and sexual dimensions - proposed by the maskilim?

Texts:
Joseph Perl, Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel
Joachim Neugroschel, ed., The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe

Course Schedule:

1. The Eastern European Haskalah
Lucy Davidowicz, “Introduction,” “Hasidism and Haskalah,” “Education Reform and Assimilation,” and “New Religions: Science, Progress and Humanity,” in The Golden Tradition
Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, ch. one.
David Biale, “A Journey between Worlds: Eastern European Jewish Cultures from the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust,” in Cultures of the Jews
Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews chs. 1 & 2
Eli Lederhandler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics, 58-157
Paula Hyman, “Two Models of Modernization: Jewish Women in the German and the Russian Empires,” in Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy
(Hebrew session: selections from Nahman Krochmal, More nevuhei hazman)

2. The Origins of Maskilic Autobiography and the Bridge between Berlin and Eastern Europe
Maimon, Autobiography
David Biale, “Eros and Enlightenment,” in Eros and the Jews
Bluma Goldstein, “Modernity and Abandonment: The Agunah in Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte”
(Hebrew session: selections from Isaac-Ber Levinson, Te’udah beyisrael)

3. The Origin of Modern Hebrew Satire in the Polemic against Hasidism
Joseph Perl, Revealer of Secrets
Dov Taylor, “Introduction,” Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets: The First Hebrew Novel
(Hebrew session: selections from Perl, Megale temirim)

4. Women, Piety, and the Maskilic Critique of the Traditional Jewish Economy
Yisroel Aksenfeld, “The Headband,” in The Shtetl
(Yiddish session: from Aksenfeld, Dos shterntikhl)

5. Sexuality, Corruption and the Hasidic Court
Isaac-Joel Linetski, The Polish Lad, chs. 1-14
Milton Hindus, “Introduction,” The Polish Lad
(Yiddish session: from Dos poylishe yingl)

6. Tradition and Jewish Masculinity: Hebrew Romance
Abraham Mapu, The Love of Zion (selections)
David Patterson, “Introduction,” Abraham Mapu
(Hebrew session: Mapu, Ahavat tsi’on)

7. Gutmann: The Berliner as Maskilic Hero
S.Y. Abramovitsch (Mendele Mokher Seforim), The Little Man
Dan Miron, “Language as Caliban,” from A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century
(Yiddish session: Dos kleyne mentshele)

8. Tradition, the Shrew and Wounded Jewish Masculinity: Yiddish satire
S.Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Mokher Sforim), The Travels of Benjamin the Third, in The Shtetl
David Aberbach, “Mendele and Abramowitz: Anatomy of Self-Caricature,” in Realism, Caricature and Bias: The Fiction of Mendele Mocher Seforim
Naomi Seidman, “Theorizing Jewish Patriarchy in extremis”
(Yiddish session: Mendele, Maso’es Binyomin hashlishi)

9. Jewish Men, Women, and the Quest for Education
Max Lilienthal, “My Educational Mission in Russia”
Lev Mandelstamm, “From Shtetl to the Capital”
Iris Parush, “Women Readers as Agents of Social Change among Eastern European Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century”

10. Loss of Faith and the Search for New Sexual Identities: Haskalah Autobiography
Alan Mintz, “The Turn toward Autobiography in Hebrew Literature,” and “The Haskalah Background: In the Toils of Authenticity,” from Banished from My Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography
Moses Leib Lilienblum, “The Sins of My Youth,”
S.Y. Ansky, “The Sins of Youth” and “Behind a Mask,” in Ansky, The Dybbuk and Other Writings
(Hebrew session: Readings from Abraham-Ber Gotlober, Zikhronot, and M.L. Lilienblum, Hat’ot ne’urim)

11. Modernization and Jewish Women
Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: Roles and Representations of Women, ch. 1.
Pauline Wengeroff, “First Changes” and “The Haskalah in Our Home and Beyond,” in Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century

12. Maskilic Hebrew Poetry and the Jewish National Revival
Michael Stanislawski, “Awake, My People!” and “Religious Reform,” For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry
Rachel Morpurgo, selected poems in The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems
(Hebrew session: Gordon, Hakitsah ami, and Kotso shel yod)

13. 1881 and After: The Transvaluation of the Jewish Tradition
I.L. Peretz, “If Not Higher”
Ansky, The Dybbuk
Kadya Molodowsky, “Women Songs”
Katherine Hellerstein, “Introduction,” A Paper Bridge
Naomi Seidman, “S.Y. Ansky and the Sexual Transformation of Ashkenaz,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question
David Roskies, from The Jewish Search for a Usable Past
(Yiddish session: Readings from Peretz, Ansky, and Molodowsky)


Introduction to Jewish Folklore

This course has two main objectives. The first goal is to present a survey of what have been considered "folkloristic texts" within the Jewish (primarily Hebrew) literary tradition, from the Bible until modern-day Israel. In this context students will read passages of the Jewish literary tradition from the Bible to modern Israeli literature as well as viewing films and reading essays on folk cultures and practices.

The second objective is to subject the notion of folklore and the assumptions by which phenomena are deemed "folkloristic," to critical analysis. Folklorists have traditionally delineated the material they study based on a variety of criteria: "folkloristic" motifs or genres, reconstructed modes of communication or the presumed "oral" origins of a text, or attestation in multiple forms and across a range of geographic locations. The romantic notions underlying "folklore" from its inception as a discipline in the nineteenth century until most recently have implied a certain cultural hierarchical map in which "folklore" occupies the margins. A set of binary oppositions is often implicated in that notion, such as written/oral, elite/folk, center/periphery, tradition/innovation, particular/universal, Jewish/"foreign" and hegemonic/subversive - in all these dichotomies, folklore is assumed to belong more fully to the second and "lower" item than the first, "higher" one. Within the tradition of both Jewish sources and Jewish scholarship the issue of folk vs. elite/institutionalized religion plays a particularly key role students will explore, and deconstruct.

Syllabus:

1. Aspects of Folklore: General Overview
R. M. Dorson, "Concepts of Folklore and Folklife Studies" in Folklore and Folklife
A. Dundes, "Who are the Folk?" Interpreting Folklore
B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Folklore's Crisis," Journal of American Folklore

2. Aspects of Jewish Folklore: General Overview
D. Ben-Amos, "Jewish Studies and Jewish Folklore," Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies
D. Stein, "'Let the People Go,': on the Use of 'Folk" and 'Folklore' in the Reconstruction of Rabbinic Culture"

3. Anthropological Perspectives
P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power
V. Crapanzano, 'Hermes Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description,' in Writing Culture
C. Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures
C. Levi-Strauss, "The Story of Asdiwal" in Sacred Narrative

4. Folklore in the Bible
R. Alter, "Samson without Folklore," Text and Tradition
C. V. Camp and Carole Fontaine, "The Words of the Wise and their Riddles," in Text and Tradition
Y. Zakovitch, "Humor and Theology or the Successful Faillure of Israelite Intelligence: A Literary-Folkloric Approach to Joshua 2," Text and Tradition

5. Folklore of the Bible
Y. Sabar, The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology
H. Bar-Itzhak and A. Shenhar, Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel

6. Folklore in Rabbinic Literature
G. Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature

7. Folklore in Medieval and Early Modern Texts
I. G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood - Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe
E. Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale - History, Genre, Meaning
D. Ben-Amos and J. R. Mintz, In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov - The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism

8. Folklore in Israeli Narratives
E. Ben Ari and Y. Bilu, "Saints Sanctuaries in Israelli Development Towns: On a Mechanism of Urban Transformation," in Grasping Land - Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse
E. Yassif, "The 'Other' Israel: Folk Cultures in the Modern State of Israel," Cultures of the Jews

9. Folklore in Israeli Cinema
Sallah Shabati

10. Folklore and the Contemporary Israeli Novel
H. Bar-Itzhak, Jewish Poland - Legends of Origin: Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles
H. Be'er, The Pure Element of Time
S. Sabar, "Childbirth and Magic - Jewish Folklore and Material Culture," Cultures of the Jews: A New History

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