FYSP 156 - Jewish Identity and American Politics

FC SSCI WINT

4 credits
This course explores the diversity of ways in which Jews in the United States have expressed their identities and perceived group interests in the political and civic arenas since 1776. Through both first-person accounts and secondary scholarship, we will explore major developments in American and world history as they impacted the self-understandings of Jewish citizens, including American settler colonialism and slavery, Jewish mass migration, the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The course also engages with current hot-button issues, from debates over the Israel/Palestine conflict to the question of American Jewish “whiteness” and the place of antisemitism in “intersectional” analyses of political oppression.