University of Cincinnati

The University of Cincinnati is offering two new courses, the core course, The Emergence of Secular Jewish Identity and Culture and Modernity and the Jewish Intellectual Tradition with an additional course for 2007-08, The Mind of the Secular Jew.

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.

The course generally follows a chronological and thematic order. Part I of the course will be
devoted to an exploration and overview of Jewish history, including a close look at: 1) the
status of the Jewish diaspora on the eve of the modern period; 2) significant shifts in the
attitudes of Jews toward religious tradition and the outside world in the 17th and 18th
centuries; 3) the central figures whose ideas and writings swayed and ultimately transformed
the Jewish scene on the eve of the modern period.

In part II of the course, we will investigate the swift secularization of Jewish consciousness
and concomitant disengagement of the community as whole from the authority of religious
tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Next, part III of the course will examine the evolution
of a secular Jewish outlook spanning a range of geographic, intellectual, social, cultural, and
political contexts – key examples of which will be investigated in a series of discreet case
studies. The course will conclude with an opportunity to reflect on the place and significance
of secular forms in contemporary Jewish life.

This course emphasizes a non-specialized historical and cultural studies approach to the
study of Jewish secularism. It explores a range of issues including changing attitudes to
religious tradition, Jewish approaches to rationalism, the impact of Westernization and
acculturation on Jewish ethnic and national group identity, etc. It utilizes inter-disciplinary
materials in order to underscore multiple intellectual and methodological approaches to the
subject. The main themes and issues of the course are covered through a series of lectures,
discussions, reading and writing assignments, films, and occasional guest speakers.

Required Materials:

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
Chaim Potok, The Chosen (novel)
Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought

Recommended Supplementary Reading:

Annuals and journals: American Jewish Year Book, Jewish Social Studies, Modern
Judaism, Studies in Contemporary Jewry
Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin
David Biale, Cultures of the Jews: A New History
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility
The Faith of Secular Jews, ed. Saul Goodman
Eliezer Don-Yehiya and Charles Liebman, Civil Religion in Israel
The Golden Tradition, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz
Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830
The Quest for Utopia: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages, ed.
Zvi Gitelman
Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers
Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics
The Jewish Political Tradition, eds. Michael Walzer, et al
Sydney Stahl Weinberg, World of Our Mothers
Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa

Abbreviation Author and Title
JPJT * Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought
Chosen Chaim Potok, The Chosen
G&A * Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
(B/E) Denotes document posted on Blackboard and/or E-Reserve

Course Schedule:

I. The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness

1. Course Introduction

2. From Text to Context
Chosen, part 1, pp. 9-90; JPJT, pp. 547-557; Baruch Spinoza (B/E)

3. The Clash Between Tradition and Enlightenment
Chosen, part 2, pp. 93-192; JPJT, pp. 557-570; Moses Mendelssohn (B/E)
Optional: Neusner, “Varieties of Judaism in the Formative Age” (B/E)

4. Secularism and the Turn to Modernity
Chosen, part 3, pp. 195-271; JPJT, pp. 513-521; Christian Wilhelm Von Dohm (B/E)

II. Jewish Identity Challenged and Redefined in the West

5. Emancipation and Acculturation
JPJT, pp. 521-546, American Revolution (B/E); French National Assembly (B/E); George Washington and the Jews of Newport (B/E); Heinrich Heine (B/E); Rahel Levin Varnhagen (B/E); Rosa Luxemburg (B/E)
Optional: Mendes-Flohr, “Secular Forms of Jewishness” (B/E)

6. Between Adaptation and Alienation
G&A, ch. 1, pp. 10-49; Franz Kafka (B/E)

7. The Genius of Kafka
Kafka, Metamorphosis

III. The East European Jewish Milieu

8. The Crucible of Tsarist Russia
JPJT, 626-665; (B/E); Solomon Maimon (B/E); Bund (B/E); Manya Shohat (B/E)
Optional: Boyarin, “Feminization and Its Discontents: Torah Study as a System for the Domination of Women”

9. Modern Jewish Social, Cultural and Political Trends
JPJT, 684-696; Theodor Herzl (B/E); Julia Richman (B/E); Sigmund Freud (B/E); Karl Marx (B/E); Chaim Zhitlowsky (B/E)
Optional: Ohrbach, “The Modern Character of Nineteenth-Century Russian Antisemitism” (B/E)

IV. American Exceptionalism

10. Secular Forms of Jewishness
G&A, ch. 3, pp. 93-133, Philip Roth, “Eli the Fanatic” (B/E)
Optional: Smith, “The Question of Jewish Identity”

11. Reserved for Final Projects & Presentations


Modernity and the Jewish Intellectual Tradition

This course follows some of the major historical developments of the modern Jewish
intellectual tradition since the seventeenth century and the emergence of secular forms of
Jewish thought through the work of some of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the
era. The course explores how these different thinkers attempted to reconcile a tradition
of 3,000 years with the scientific, ethical, and cultural tenets of modern Western
civilization. The course examines how some of the major currents of modern Western
thought—the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, Idealism, Marxism, Nationalism,
Feminism, Post-Modernism and others—influenced modern Jewish thought and
contributed to the emergence of secular interpretations of Jewish identity and thought.


Required Readings:

Baruch Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise
Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, Or On Religious Power and Judaism
Course Reader

Schedule of Classes and Readings

Week 1 Introduction: The Historical Background
Michael Meyer, “Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?”
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto, 9-27

Week 2 Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Jewish Secular Identity
Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, 9-20, 48-70, 86-104, 158- 164, 173-184, 212-230
Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity, 1-26

Week 3 Mendelssohn and the Jewish Enlightenment
Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 33-139
Paul Mendes-Flohr & Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World, 90-91, 105-110

Week 4 Kant and the Secularization of Modern Judaism
Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Herman Cohen, 90-101, 132-155
Sven-Erik Rose, “Lazarus Bendavid and J. G. Fichte’s Kantian Fantasies of Jewish Decapitation in 1793”

Week 5 Judaism and Dialectics
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”
Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews”

Week 6 Judaism, Sexuality and the Fin de Siecle
Otto Weininger, “The Jew Must Free Himself from Jewishness”
Max Nordau, “Address before the Second Zionist Congress”
Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siecle, 74-115
Ritchie Robertson, “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew”
Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 187-220

Week 7 Judaism as Secular Nationalism
Readings from Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea
Hess, “What is Judaism”
Gordon, “People and Labor”
Nordau, “Zionism”
Klatzkin, “Judaism is Nationalism”
Yael Zerubavel, “The Zionist Reconstruction of the Past.”
Shlomo Avineri, “Zionism as a Revolution”

Week 8 Canaanism: Judaism as Secular Ethnicity
James Diamond, “Homeland or Holy Land? The ‘Canaanite’ Critique of Israel”
Eran Kaplan, “A Rebel with a Cause: Hillel Kook, Begin, and Jabotinsky’s Ideological Legacy”

Week 9 Judaism and Feminism
Laura S. Levitt, “Rethinking Jewish Feminist Identity/ies: What Difference Can Feminist Theory Make?”
Rachel Adler, “A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others”
Judith Plaskow, “Facing the Ambiguity of God”

Week 10 Judaism in the Post-Modern Condition: Anti-Modern Secularism?
Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book”
Max Silverman, “Re-Figuring ‘the Jew’ in France,” 197- 210
Geoffrey Bennington, “Lyotard and ‘the Jews’”
Laurence J. Silberstein, “Cultural Criticism, Ideology, and the Interpretation of Zionism: Toward a Post-Zionist Discourse”


The Mind of the Secular Jew: Jewish Autobiographies in Historical Context

Judaism, it has been aruged, 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. For example, 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.

This course examines the phenomenon of secular Jewish identity through the prism of
autobiography and memoir. We will investigate the works we are reading against the
backdrop of the scholarly study of autobiography. The course pays close attention to the
historical contexts in which each work was written and analyzes how individual authors
have shaped the events of their lives into a narrative pattern. We will consider how
culture, religion, politics, gender, and minority status shape experience, and explore the
ways in which an author does or does not position himself/herself as part of a larger
community of Jews.

In emphasizing “the mind of the secular Jew,” this course seeks to address a discrete set of
concerns that illustrate the phenomenon of secular Jewish life and culture. What historical
conditions provided the scope and inducement for the emergence of secular Jewish trends?
What impact did critical historical junctures and episodes – e.g., the pogroms of eastern
Europe, World War I, the Holocaust and World War II, the rise of the State of Israel, the
Cold War era, the contemporary Israeli scene, etc. – have on the process of Jewish
secularization? Finally, is it possible to map the transformation of Jewish life over time, and
what might such an investigation reveal about the intersection of Jewish life and modern
society? These are some of the key questions addressed in this course.

The course generally follows a chronological trajectory and moves from the late nineteenth
century to the present. The reading list includes scholarly essays that help to frame the
historical context of each autobiography as well as analytic essays that examine the nature of
autobiographical writing and the literary enterprise.

This course emphasizes a non-specialized historical and cultural studies approach to the
study of Jewish autobiography and secular Jewish culture and history. It explores a range of
issues including changing attitudes to religious tradition, Jewish approaches to rationalism,
the impact of Westernization and acculturation on Jewish ethnic and national group identity,
etc. It utilizes inter-disciplinary materials in order to underscore multiple intellectual and
methodological approaches to the subject. The main themes and issues of the course are
covered through a series of lectures, discussions, reading and writing assignments, group
projects, films, and occasional guest speakers.

Required Materials:

The Plough Woman: Records of the Pioneer Women of Palestine. A Critical
Edition, eds. Mark A. Raider and Miriam B. Raider-Roth (2002)
Peter Gay, My German Question (1998)
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in
America (1991)
Philip Roth, The Facts (1988)
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004)
Course Packet

Recommended Supplementary Reading:

Annuals and journals: American Jewish Year Book, Jewish Social Studies, Modern
Judaism, Studies in Contemporary Jewry
Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin
David Biale, Cultures of the Jews: A New History
John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility
The Faith of Secular Jews, ed. Saul Goodman
Eliezer Don-Yehiya and Charles Liebman, Civil Religion in Israel
The Golden Tradition, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz
The Quest for Utopia: Jewish Political Ideas and Institutions Through the Ages, ed.
Zvi Gitelman
Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers
Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
Judaism in a Secular Age, eds. Renee Kogel and Zev Katz
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics
The Jewish Political Tradition, eds. Michael Walzer, et al
Sydney Stahl Weinberg, World of Our Mothers
** For more suggestions, see the bibliography appended to Paul Mendes-Flohr’s essay on
“Secular Forms of Jewishness” (see “Week 1” below).

Course Schedule:

I. The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness
Week 1
Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Secular Forms of Jewishness”
William Howarth, “Some Principles of Autobiography”
The Plough Woman, parts 1-2

Week 2
The Plough Woman, parts 3-4
Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Toward Conceptualizing a Diary”
Anita Shapira, “The Religious Motifs of the Labor Movement”

II. The Impact of the Holocaust on Modern Jewish Identity
Week 3
My German Question, chs. 1-5
Rita Steinhardt Botwinick, “German Jewish Life to 1939”
Thomas Smith, “The Objectivity of The Education of Henry Adams”
Week 4
My German Question, chs. 6-10
Allan Bloom, “The German Connection”
Wallace Fowlie, “On Writing Autobiography”

III. Postwar American Jewish Life
Week 5
Deborah, Golda, and Me, parts 1-2
Ellen M. Umansky, “Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women’s Religious Lives in the
United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”
Julia Watson, “Shadowed Presence”
** Midterm exam due
Week 6
Deborah, Golda, and Me, parts 3-4
Linda H. Peterson, “Gender and Autobiographical Form”
Week 7
The Facts (assignment tba)
Robert F. Sayre, “Autobiography and the Making of America”
Stephen J. Whitfield, “Value Added: Jews in Postwar American Culture”
Week 7
The Facts (assignment tba)
Anthony D. Smith, “The Question of Jewish Identity”
Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”

IV. Contemporary Israeli Society
Week 9
A Tale of Love and Darkness (assignment tba)
Alan Mintz, “Introduction” to The Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction
Week 10
A Tale of Love and Darkness (assignment tba)
Yosef Gorny, “Judaism and Zionism”
** Final exam due

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