JWST 7520 - Jewish Cities

(crosslisted) ANTHR 7620, NES 7520

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with ANTHR 4620/JWST 4520/NES 4520.

E. Sampson.

Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. Studying those interactions involves urbanism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and the idea of “the ghetto.” This course ranges through time and space as we examine those fruitful and sometimes painful interactions by looking at labor, “ethnicity” and the built environment. Topics include contemporary Brooklyn, where Hasidic areas bump into hipster and black Caribbean communities; the place of Jews in medieval European cities; North African Jewish spaces between French colonizers and Muslim neighbors; the formation of the shtetl and the industrial town in Eastern Europe; memoirs of the golden age of Berlin Jewry; and the immigrant “ghetto” of the Lower East Side. We will focus closely on the involvement of urban Jewish communities in modernization and colonialism. Course materials include visual resources as well as historical, ethnographic and literary materials.