Brown University

Secular Jewish Identities is the core course for 2006-07 with Film and American Jewish Life: A Study in Secular Values the peripheral course. Next year Brown will offer a core course on Towards the Future: Secular Messianism and Utopian Hope in 20th Century Jewish Thought and Heidegger and 20th Century Jewish Thought will be the secondary course.

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.

Required texts:

Caryn Aviv and David Schneer, New Jews
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy
Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States
Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America
Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World 2nd edition
Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl
Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics
Marc Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism

Course Outline:

1. Introduction

I. THE BEGINNINGS OF SECULARIZATION

2. P. Berger, THE SACRED CANOPY
Read Part 1

3. European Beginnings of Secularization
Goldscheider and Zuckerman, pp. 11-62
In MFR:
Toland, pp. 13-17
Dohm, pp. 28-36
Abbe Gregoire pp. 49-53
Gotthold Lessing pp. 62-63
French National Assembly 114-118

4. Jewishness as ONLY religion
In MFR:
Mendelssohn pp. 68-70; 96-9
Kant p. 68
Search for Right and Light pp. 91-95
Moerschel pp. 95-6

5. The Emergence of Reform in Europe
Goldscheider and Zuckerman, chap 5
IN MFR: PART IV

6. Immigration and the Rise of Reform in the US
Diner, pp. 71-154
*Selections from Jonathan Sarna on OCRA

II. JUDAISM AS POLITICS
7. Overview of US and Europe: Bund and Zionism
Ezra Mendelsohn, ON MODERN JEWISH POLITICS

8. Jewish Labor Movements in the US
Glenn, DAUGHTERS OF THE SHTETL

9. Zionism in Europe
Herzl, OCRA
A. D. Gordon, OCRA
Nordau, OCRA
Ahad Ha’am, OCRA
Ber Borokhov, OCRA
IN MFR: PP. 529-597

10. Zionism in the US

11. Marc Raider, THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICAN ZIONISM

12. The end of Zionism as we Knew It?
Aviv and Schneer, NEW JEWS

III ECONOMIC MOBILILTY AND AMERICAN ASSIMILATION
13. The Second Generation
Dash Moore, AT HOME IN AMERICA

14. Judaism as Material Culture
Jenna Weismann Joselit, THE WONDERS OF AMERICA

15. Jewish Arts
Screening: Klezmer Music
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS


Films and Jewish American LIfe: A Study in Secular Values

This course will examine the rise of Jewish themes and Jewish personnel in the Hollywood Film, the decisive connections of Jewish secularism with liberal political views and artistic objectives. It will suggest the cinematic connections of many phenomena including Hollywood unionization and antifascism, the Holocaust, the Hollywood Blacklist, the civil rights movement, Zionism, the Vietnam War, the Counter-Culture, feminism, neoconservatism and the Imperial dilemmas of the present. Throughout, we will examine the ways in which the secularization of Jewish Americans interacted with popular culture at large and films in particular.

Assigned Texts:

Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Radical Hollywood
Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hiding in Plain Sight: the Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002
Gerda Lerner, Fireweed
Neal Gabler, How The Jews Invented Hollywood

Course Outline:

1. Introduction, Why are films "the Jewish art"? Why are they (mostly) liberal and secular?
Film Excerpts in class: variety of silent and early sound films

Evening Showing: The Jazz Singer
Cartoon: Down the Inkwell (Koko the Clown)

2. Yiddishkayt, the Bohemian Intellectual and the Secular Jew from Europe to Hollywood
Gerda Lerner, Fireweed, Chapters 1-8
How The Jews Invented Hollywood, Chapter selection
e-reserves, Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised
Film Excerpts in class: Frankenstein and Million Dollar Legs

Evening Showing: Monkey Business
Cartoon: Betty Boop

3. The Radical Jewish Screenwriter/Director and the New Deal
Buhle and Wagner, Radical Hollywood, Chapters One Though Three
Isaac Deutscher, "The Non-Jewish Jew," WebCT
Film excerpts in class: Success Story; The Man Who Reclaimed His Head; The President's Mystery

Evening Showing: All Quiet On the Western Front
Cartoon: Fleischer color drama with political overtones

4. The Hollywood Drama Takes Shape
How the Jews Invented Hollywood
"John Wexley," interview in Tender Comrades, e-reserves
Excerpts: Marked Woman, Golden Boy, Holiday

Evening Showing: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Cartoon: Excerpt from Mister Bug Goes to Town

5. The Yiddish Cinema and Edgar G. Ulmer
"Edgar G. Ulmer" essays, e-reserves
J.Hoberman, Bridge of Light excerpt, e-reserves
Film Excerpts in Class: The Black Cat, The Singing Blacksmith, Di Klyatsche, Moon Over Harlem

Evening showing: Green Fields
Cartoon: 1930s selection with Semitic undertones

6. AntiFascism and Jewish consciousness
Radical Hollywood, Chapters 4-5
Film Excerpts in Class: Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Four Sons, Hangmen Also Die, Sahara

Evening Showing: Action In the North Atlantic
Cartoon: selection from wartime animation

7. The Costs of War
Radical Hollywood, Chapter 6
Film Excerpts: A Walk in the Sun, GI Joe
Fireweed, Chapters 9-10

Evening Showing: Pride of the Marines
Cartoon: FDR 1944 re-election cartoon, "Victory Train"

8. The Postwar Social Theme
Fireweed, Chapters 11-15
Excerpts in class: Crossfire, Body and Soul, The Search, Intruder in the Dust, Abbott and Costello Clips

Evening Showing: Gentlemen's Agreement
Cartoon: The Brotherhood of Man

9. Disillusionment, Noir, and the Film Art
Radical Hollywood, Chapter Seven and Eight
Film Excerpts: Detour, The Big Clock, Naked City

Evening Showing: Force of Evil
Cartoon: Bugs Bunny satire on Noir

10. The Fifties, McCarthyism and the Holocaust (Finally) Remembered
Hide in Plain Sight Chapters 1-5
Film Excerpts in Class: I can Get It for You Wholesale, The Defiant Ones,
Odds Against Tomorrow, Never On Sunday

Evening Showing: The Diary of Anne Frank
Cartoon: Gerald McBoing Boing

11. Celebration and Anxiety
Hide in Plain Sight, Chapters 6-7
E-Resource essays from forthcoming reference volumes
Film Excerpts in Class: Enemies, A Love Story; Top Banana; A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to the Forum

Evening Showing: Fiddler On the Roof
Cartoon: The Two Thousand Year Old Man

12. Progressive/Secular Jewry in 1970s Hollywood
Hide in Plain Sight, Chapter 9
E-Reserve essays from forthcoming reference volumes
Film Excerpts in Class: Norma Rae, The Front, Dog Day Afternoon

Evening showing: The Way We Were
Cartoon: TBA

13. The Art of Sidney Lumet
Film Excerpts in Class: Bye Bye Braverman; Daniel: Running on Empty
E-reserve selections from Frank R. Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and
Literary Vision

Evening Showing: The Pawnbroker
Cartoon: TBA

14. The Art of Sidney Lumet/Beyond Assimilation
E-reserve readings from Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood's Images of the Jew
E-reserve readings from Jews and American Popular Culture
Film Excerpts in class: Schindler's List, The Producers, The Apprenticeship
of Duddy Kravitz, Tell Me a Riddle, Crimes and Misdemeanors

Evening Showing: Avalon/Romance of a Horsethief (excerpt)
Cartoon: Excerpt from Who Killed Roger Rabbit?


Towards the Future: Secular Messianism and Utopian Hope in 20th Century Jewish Thought

“Apocalyptic, catastrophic, utopian, and pessimistic, messianism captured a
generation of Jewish intellectuals before the First World War. The messianic impulse
appears in many forms in the Jewish generation of 1914... as a modern form of
Jewish thought – secular and theological – as a tradition that stands opposed to both
secular rationalism and what has been called “normative Judaism.” (Anson
Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse
and Enlightenment, p. 29)

In an era in which the dominant voices counsel political realism and warn against the utopian
demand for perfect justice, this course will explore the post-traditional, Jewish ideas of radical
social transformation that emerged among European Jewish thinkers in the first third of the
20th century, ideas which also inspired the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and which
arguably retain their critical power as wellsprings of secular and religious hope, and as an
impetus to socio-political activism, into the new century. In our study of the genealogy of this
radical and critical hope and commitment, we will consider, in turn, the thought of Hermann
Cohen, Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem,
Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Inasmuch as this radical Jewish
current also becomes quite influential upon non-Jewish contemporaries as well, we will also
attend to the most influential members of this wider circle.

Sessions/Topics:

I. Introduction: Weimar Jewishness Beyond Judaism
II. The Messianic Idea in Judaism
III. The Messianic in Hermann Cohen & Franz Rosenzweig
IV. Eschatological Authenticity: Martin Buber’s Prague Lectures
V. Gustav Landauer’s Mystical Utopia
VI. Walter Benjamin & Gershom Scholem
VII. The Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno & Herbert Marcuse
VIII. Ernst Bloch: The Spirit of Utopia, the Philosophy of Hope
IX. Jewish Anti-Utopians: Popper, Arendt, Talmon, Berlin
X. Levinas: Messianic Immanence and the Eschatology of the Face to Face
XI. Derrida: the Messianic as the Impossible Possibility
XII. The Recovery of Messianic Utopianism: Jewishness for our Time?


Heidegger and 20th Century Jewish Thought

One of the most significant philosophers of the last century, Martin Heidegger exerted a
profound, and continuing influence upon many of the century’s leading Jewish thinkers, an
influence which was especially significant in the case of his Jewish students, among whom
were Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Lowith, Herbert Marcuse and
Leo Strauss. In this seminar we will explore Heidegger’s thought in relation to the maturing
thought of these students,’ gauging the relationship between their respective projects,
comparing the works of these significant Jewish thinkers among themselves and with regard
to their influence upon contemporary Jewish thought.

After introducing our problematic, and after attending to Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being
and Time, we will turn in succession to the writings of his most illustrious Jewish students,
attending in each case to the relation between their work and that of Heidegger which we will
address both by attending to affinities in their respective bodies of work and by attending to
their own explicit commentaries on (or critiques of) Heidegger’s work. We will also be
attentive to the images, conceptions and analyses of Judaism and of Jewishness which
emerge in the writings of Heidegger’s students, and will pursue the question of whether there
is anything specifically Heideggerean in these formulations. We will also consider the works
of Heidegger’s Jewish students in relation to one another and Heidegger’s continuing
significance for contemporary understandings of Jewishness as a manner of being-in-the-
world.

Sessions/Topics:

1. Introduction
2. The German-Jewish Symbiosis
3. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time/Time and Being
4. Elective Affinities: Heidegger, Rosenzweig and Buber
5. Karl Lowith
6. Hans Jonas
7. Hannah Arendt
8. Herbert Marcuse
9. Leo Strauss
10. Emmanuel Levinas
11. Jacques Derrida
12. Heidegger and the Future of Jewish Thought and Existence

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