JEWISHST 224: Jew Theory

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JEWISHST 224: Jew Theory

also listed as COMPLIT 224

El Lissitzky. Anxious Ones.png

El Lissitzky, "Anxious Ones" (1923), MoMA 

Schedule: Tuesdays, 9:45am–11:45am
Instructor: Professor Saul Noam Zaritt (zaritt@fas.harvard.edu)
Office hours: https://calendly.com/zaritt/30min 
Course format: Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment, by instructor's approval only.

This seminar will discuss the possibility of "Jew theory" as a method for theorizing the modern. The course begins with an examination of how the figure of the Jew, as symbol and stereotype, enters the work of important thinkers of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century—from Marx to Slezkine, from Rosenzweig to Arendt and Derrida. We then shift to the history of Jewish studies in the academy and how many of these same figurations recur in the construction of this field/discipline/association. In parallel, we will explore the potential of new modes of "Jewish cultural studies'' emerging over the last three decades.

The course will take place in two different modes. The first is a weekly 2 hour meeting in seminar format, in which we will together discuss a group of texts and focus on a set of thematically linked questions. This will include student-led discussions and/or short presentations. The second mode will be individualized: throughout the semester each student will work on their own project, developing a reading list and research question that will provide the basis for the seminar paper due at the end of the semester. Students will meet with me one-on-one for 30 minute sessions every two weeks to explore possible topics, present initial research, and talk through the stages of the project. There will be a number of opportunities throughout the semester to present your work to your peers so that we can learn from each other and also provide feedback and critique. The final seminar paper is due at the end of the semester and should be between 7,000–10,000 words.

Grading is 40% participation in the seminar and 60% the seminar paper.

 

Proposed Topics and Readings (subject to change)

Week 1 – Introduction: What is a Jew, What is Jewish Studies?

  • Cynthia Baker, Jew (2017), 1–46.
  • Aaron Hughes, The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship (2013), 1–15.

Further reading: Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (2019), http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/99153859602203941/catalog

 

Week 2 – Jew as Other, Jew as Absent

  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), 7–58.
  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), 54–88.

 

Week 3 – Jew as Merchant

 

Week 4 – Jew as Translator

  • Franz Rosenzweig, “Preface” to Ninety-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi (1927), xliii–lx.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1921)

 

Week 5 – The Secret Language of the Jews

  • Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (1986), 68–86
  • Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or the Prosthesis of Origin (1996)

Optional reading: Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 318-21.

Optional Reading: Jacques Derrida, "The Eyes of Language" in Acts of Religion (2002), 189–227.

 

Week 6 – Jew as Feminized

  • Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997), 1–23 and 33–73.
  • Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003): intro and chapter by Janet Jakobsen

 

Week 7 – Jew as Witness

  • Yosef Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982)
  • Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), 1–32.

Optional reading: Samuel Moyn, “Bearing Witness: Theological Roots of a New Secular Morality,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (2012), 127–42.

 

Week 8 – Jew as Exile

  • Emmanual Levinas, “The Trace of the Other” (1963), translation from Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (1986), 345–359.
  • Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora (2002), 1–34.

 

Week 9 – Wissenschaft des Judentums

  • Selections from early Wissenschaft des Judentums documents, as found in The Jew in the Modern World (1980/1995)
  • Ismar Schorsch, “Breakthrough into the Past: The Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33, no. 1 (January 1988): 3–28.
  • Amos Funkenstein, selection from Perceptions of Jewish History (1993)

Optional reading: Samuel Moyn, "Amos Funkenstein on the Theological Origins of Historicism," Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (2003): 639-57.

 

Week 10 – Jewish Studies Without Jews

  • Lila Corwin Berman, “Jewish History beyond the Jewish People,” AJS Review 42, no. 2 (2018): 269–92.
  • Benjamin Schreier, The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (2020), 1–36.

 

Week 11 – Jew as Race: Jewishness and Blackness

Optional reading: Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love (2017), 53–72; Shaul Maggid, “Judeopessimism: On Antisemitism and Afropessimism,” https://ayinpress.org/on-antisemitism-and-anti-blackness/.

 

Week 12 – Jew as Race: Semitism

  • Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003), preface and intro
  • Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (2008) chapter 1 (optional: chapter 2)
  • Joseph Massad, “Forget Semitism” (2013)

 

Week 13 – The Ends of Jew Theory

 

 

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due