ANTHR 7810 - [East European Jewish Culture]

(crosslisted) JWST 7910, NES 7910

Spring. Next Offered: 2020-2021. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ANTHR 4810/JWST 4910/NES 4910.

J. Boyarin.

An autonomous, diasporic Jewish culture flourished in Eastern Europe from the early modern period through the mid-twentieth century and beyond. It is the ancestral culture of the vast majority of American Jews today, and thus a major source of American culture more generally. Its productions span the range of the religious and the secular, and trouble those very categories. Its reford constitutes a treasure trove of reflections on universality and particularity, self-determination and domination, the search for individual expression and the call of collective solidarity. This course will draw on a wide range of disciplines (especially anthropology, history, and literary studies) and a wide range of genres (fiction, historiography, autobiography, film) to recapture some sense of the living, dynamic cultural world of East European Jews.