JWST 278 - Jewish/Jew-ish Literatures

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
This course examines the subject of “Jewish literature,” broadly defined and historicized. Students will read selections from the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh and Rabbinic commentaries, as well as historiographies, memoirs, travel tales, medieval wine poems, missives from the Cairo Genizah, Holocaust literature, and more. In doing so, we’ll cross time, place, and language, concerning ourselves with the development of themes (e.g., Jewish humor, suffering, neurosis) from their early iterations to contemporary reimaginings. Key writers include Josephus, Glückel of Hameln, Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, and Philip Roth.
This course is cross-listed with CMPL 278