Binghamton University

The core course is Secular Jewish Ideologies and Identities and the peripheral courses will be The Secularization of Religion in American Judaic Thought and Contemporary Israeli Literature in Translation.

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.

Reading:

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza
Selected Essays of Ahad Ha'am
Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem
Esther Schorr, Emma Lazarus
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution

Course Outline

1. Introduction

Spinoza

2. Betraying Spinoza, 1-123

3. Betraying Spinoza, 124-263; Allan Nadler, Romancing Spinoza (Blackboard)

Moses Hess/ The Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah

4. Isaiah Berlin, The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess; Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, Author’s Preface, Letters 1-5, 7, 9, 11, Epilogue; Israel Bartal, from My Heart is in the West: The Haskalah Movement in Eastern Europe; Y.L. Gordon, Tip of a Yud; M. Lilienblum, Rebel and Penitent (Blackboard)

Ahad Ha’am and his Opponents

5. Laurence Silberstein, Judaism as a Secular System of Meaning: The Writings of Ahad Haam (Blackboard); Ahad Ha’am, The National Morality,
(handout), Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, 67-90, 107-158, 306-329

6. Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am, 171-194, 205-241, 253-305; Berdichevsky, The World and the Spirit (Blackboard)

A Secularized Bible

7. A. Arkush, Biblical Criticism and Cultural Zionism Prior to World War I;
T. Shimony, Teaching the Bible as a Common Culture; A. Shapira, The Bible and Israeli Identity; (Blackboard)

8. Midterm followed by showing of Hester Street

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America

9. A.B. Cahan, Yekl (Blackboard); Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus, 3-117

10. Emma Lazarus, 118-260

Voices from The Left

11. Yosef Gorny, Selections from Converging Alternatives, The Bund; Decisions on the Nationality Question; A. Brumberg, Anniversaries in Conflict; Haim Zhitlovsky, Yid und Mensch; The Jewish Factor in My Socialism (All on Blackboard)

12. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, “Universalism and Jewish Values” (Blackboard)

13. B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Sounds of Sensibility; Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, Diaspora; Selections from M. Kaye/Kantrowitz, Toward a New Diasporism (Blackboard)

Final Considerations

14. Interview with Amos Oz (shown in class); Amos Oz, A Full Wagon, An Empty Wagon; Jonathan Sarna, The Rise and Fall of Secular Judaism; Leo Strauss, Why We Remain Jews (Blackboard)


The Secularization of Religion in American Judaic Thought

Kaplan's groundbreaking work in modern Judaic thought sought to reorient Judaism much in the same way that Dewey sought to challenge and redirect philosophy, and at least in A Common Faith, to reconstruct certain categories of religion, and to do away with the category of the supernatural altogether. Kaplan and Dewey share a belief in the value and function of the community at the heart of a pluralistic society. And both appreciate the function of the values of a religious tradition, freed from the weight of supernaturalism, mythology, and dogma. Kaplan's philosophy of religion is pragmatic in the Deweyan sense of judging beliefs as true by looking to their value in and through experience (which is shaped by and which shapes the life of the community). Kaplan also shares with Dewey a functionalist pragmatism, which emphasizes the utility of certain beliefs and ideals at the level of commmunity. Following Dewey, he understands truths to be more akin to hypotheses than fixed principles whose authority lies beyond the horizon of the past, and so beyond reconstruction. Both thinkers offer a philosophy of religion which serves to strike a balance between orthodoxy and nihilism.

This course will work toward a renewed understanding of the role of religion in Emerson, James, and Dewey, as well as original and creative analysis of Kaplan's religious and philosophical work, and his connection with classical American thought. Topics will include: belief, experience, definitions of God/divine, rival versions of secularism, naturalism/supernaturalism, and the relationship between ethics and metaphysics.

Primary Readings:

John Dewey, A Common Faith, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Mordechai Kaplan, Judaism as a Civlization, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion, Judaism Without Supernaturalism


Contemporary Israeli Literature in Translation

This course surveys some of the latest products of Israeli fiction writing, but with a historical twist. Students will examine the emergence of a Postmodern style in Hebrew, and other experiments with form, including the first graphic novel. The loss of idealism, religious tradition and social cohesion are all key themes for discussion in this class, as are the issues of war and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Beginning with a novel set in the aftermath of the first Intifada (Castel-Bloom's Human Parts), and a poetic mediation on exile by a masterful exponent of Hebrew prose, Anton Shammas, students will move backwards in time to the early twentieth century and the beginnings of the modern Hebrew novel (Y.H. Brenner's Out of the Depths).

A recurring figure throughout this body of fiction is the image of the anti-hero troubled by a search for meaning in a world shorn of tradition and ideology. Yaacov Shabtai's Past Continuous, so central to the emergence of Israeli Postmodernism, centers around the figure of the Jewish shlemiel, wandering aimlessly around the streets of a modern day Tel Aviv. Anton Shammas' alter ego in Arabesques leads a similarly peripatetic existence as a "rootless cosmopolitan" on the streets of Paris, Ohio and the Gaza Strip.

With the newest generation of writers set free from any constraints of national ideology or religious tradition, the stage is set for a highly avant garde, thoroughly secularized and often bitingly satirical take on modernity and Israeli culture.

Required Texts:

Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City and Human Parts
Y.H. Brenner, Out of the Depths
David Grossman, See Under: Love
Etgar Keret, Pizzeria Kamikaze
Ronit Matalon, The One Facing Us
Yaakov Shabtai, Past Continuous
Anton Shammas, Arabesques

Class Schedule:

1. Introductory class
2. Human Parts, Orly Castel-Bloom
3. Castel-Bloom
4. Castel-Bloom
5. My Michael (The movie)
6. Arabesques, Anton Shammas
7. Shammas
8. Shammas
9. Past Continuous, Yaakov Shabtai
10. Yaakov Shabtai
11. Yaakov Shabtai
12. Out of the Depths, Y. H. Brenner
13. Y. H. Brenner
14. Y. H. Brenner
15. Dolly City, Orly Castel-Bloom
16. Castel-Bloom
17. Castel-Bloom
18. The One Facing Us, Ronit Matalon
19. Matalon
20. Matalon
21. See Under: Love, David Grossman
22. David Grossman
23. David Grossman
24. Pizzeria Kamikazi, Etgar Keret
25. Etgar Keret
26. Etgar Keret
27. Review, discussion

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