20 courses with the subject JUD, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
JUD 101Elementary Modern Hebrew I5
The first half of a two-semester sequence introducing modern Hebrew language and culture, with a focus on equal development of the four language skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Learning is amplified by use of online resources (YouTube, Facebook, newspapers) and examples from Hebrew song, television and film. No previous knowledge of modern Hebrew is necessary. This course is available to Mount Holyoke College students through a simultaneous video-conferencing option. Enrollment limited to 18.
The second half of a two-semester sequence introducing modern Hebrew language and culture, with a focus on equal development of the four language skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. By the end of the year, students are able to comprehend short and adapted literary and journalistic texts, describe themselves and their environment, and express their thoughts and opinions. Learning is amplified by use of online resources (YouTube, Facebook, newspapers) and examples from Hebrew song and television/film. Prerequisite: JUD 101 or equivalent. This course is available to Mount Holyoke College students through a simultaneous video-conferencing option. Enrollment limited to 18. {F}
Topics course. Explores pressing questions at the heart of Jewish Studies from multiple theoretical, historical, political, cultural and artistic perspectives. S/U only. JUD 115 may be repeated with a different topic.
Members of the Program in Jewish Studies and invited guests talk with students about forms of Jew-hatred. Analysis and criticism of related concepts, including peoplehood, religion, nationality, ethnicity, race, anti-Judaism, Aryan racism, Judaeophobia, White Supremacy and anti-Zionism. S/U only. JUD 115 may be repeated with a different topic. {H}{L}
JUD 115TTTopics in What Matters- Thinking Through Jewish Studies1
Members of the Program in Jewish Studies talk with students about how their research and teaching animates not only their interpretation of Jewish histories and cultures but also their understanding of contemporary events and their role as global citizens. S/U only. {H}{L}
When and how did New York become a major center for Jewish life? This course explores the history, cultural expression, and social dynamics of one of the world’s most influential Jewish communities. The course examines Jewish immigration waves, life in tenement housing, neighborhoods including the Lower East Side, Boro Park, and Brighton Beach, as well as Jewish contributions to the city’s artistic life. This course culminates in a field trip to Jewish sites in New York including the Museum at Eldridge St., Tenement Museum, The Jewish Museum, and YIVO, as well as walking tours of Boro Park and Brighton Beach. Course materials—historical primary sources, literary texts, historical scholarship, and art by Jewish artists—are designed to deepen understanding of these sites before students visit them. S/U only. (E) {H}{L}
A thematic survey of Jewish history and thought from the 18th century to the present, examining Jews as a minority in the global diaspora. The course analyzes changing dynamics of integration and exclusion of Jews in various societies as well as diverse forms of Jewish religion, culture, and identity among Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi Jews. Readings include major philosophic, mystical, and political works in addition to primary sources on the lives of Jewish women and men, families and communities, and messianic and popular movements. The course also explores tensions between assimilation and cohesion, tradition and renewal, and history and memory. {H}
Previously REL 227. An exploration of Jewish women’s changing social roles, religious stances and cultural expressions in a variety of historical settings from ancient to modern times. How did Jewish women negotiate religious tradition, gender and cultural norms to fashion lives for themselves as individuals and as family and community members in diverse societies? Readings from a wide range of historical, religious, theoretical and literary works in order to address examples drawn from Biblical and rabbinic Judaism, medieval Islamic and Christian lands, modern Europe, America and the Middle East. Students' final projects involve archival work in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History. {H}{S}
In 1939 there were approximately a million Jews living across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), from Morocco to Iran. Today, most countries in the MENA region have Jewish populations ranging from the single digits to a couple thousand. This course explores why this dissolution of MENA Jewish communities happened and proposes that the history of Middle Eastern and North African Jews in the modern period can be a point of departure for students interested in investigating other major areas of study: Jewish studies, Middle East studies, and Israel/Palestine studies. {H}
Magic is often considered incompatible with normative religious practice. However, a close examination of Jewish experience reveals a lively magical tradition which understands the world to be teeming with supernatural and semi-divine forces that could be controlled through magical objects, rituals, and incantations. This course explores a wide variety of sources, from canonical religious texts to spells, recipes, magic manuals, folk beliefs, material artifacts, and faith healers and mystics. Careful attention is paid to the role of gender in the practice of and attitudes towards magic. Students learn about the diversity of magic practiced by Jews in different cultural contexts, the contested relationship between magical and mainstream Jewish practice, and magic as a point of interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. (E) {H}{L}
From matchmaking to interfaith entanglements, from revolutionaries’ refashioning of desire to queer romances—Jewish writers and directors have long explored love and sex to understand shifting social values, family dynamics, and the evolving role of Jewish tradition. This course examines how these intimate themes illuminate the complexities of identity, immigration, and global Jewish life. Through novels, film, and television from North and South America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe, the course examines how Jewish stories of love speak across borders and generations. (E)
JUD 253Colloquium: Queer Jewish Lives and Culture4
What does it mean to be Jewish and queer? What does Jewish tradition have to say about gender and sexuality? How do those ideas continue to impact queer Jewish lives today? How have artists--particularly literary writers and film directors--represented the intersections between Jewishness and queerness? These are just a few of the questions this course explores through Biblical texts and their commentaries, memoirs, biographies, documentaries, films, literature, and theoretically engaged scholarly works. Students also attend a Pride Tour at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA. These sources introduce multidisciplinary approaches to the intersections between queerness and Jewishness, queer Jews’ lived experiences, and cultural representations of queer Jews. (E) {H}{L}
JUD 260Colloquium: Yiddish Literature and Culture4
Why did Yiddish, the everyday language of Jews in east Europe and beyond, so often find itself at the bloody crossroads of art and politics? From dybbuks and shlemiels to radicals and revolutionaries, the course explores Yiddish stories, drama, and film as sites for social activism, ethnic and gender performance, and artistic experimentation in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Americas. How did post-Holocaust engagements with Yiddish memorialize a lost civilization and forge an imagined homeland defined by language and culture rather than borders? All texts in translation. No prerequisites. Enrollment limited to 18. {L}
Traces the history of major antecedents to the graphic novel and related works, including illustrated books, journalistic cartoons, and comics and sequential art. Topics include Jewish secularism; Yiddish theatre and literature; comic strips; comic books; editorial and magazine cartoons; book, magazine, and other forms of illustration; and a range of Jewish graphic novels, primarily from the United States, Canada, and Israel, with some consideration of creators and publications from Europe and the Middle East. {A}{L}
JUD 284Colloquium: The Lost World of East European Jewry, 1750-19454
The modern history of the largest Jewish community in the world, from life under the Russian tsars until its extermination in World War II. Topics include Jewish political autonomy under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the shifting effects on Jews in Russian, Soviet and Polish society of Partition, tsarist legislation, Revolution, Sovietization and the emergence of the modern nation-state; the folkways and domestic culture of Ashkenaz; competition between new forms of ecstatic religious expression and Jewish Enlightenment thought; the rise of mass politics (Zionism, Socialism, Diaspora Nationalism, Yiddishism) and the role of language (Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Polish) in the creation of secular Jewish identity; and the tension between memory and nostalgia in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Concludes with an analysis of the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}
Focusing on the developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course provides foundational knowledge of the region, as well as some of the major debates among historians about topics like the emergence and trajectories of Jewish and Palestinian nationalism, Zionist settlement and Arab resistance, the British mandate and colonialism, and the politics of memory. Concluding with some of the present challenges facing the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, this course prepares students to analyze contemporary reports and journalism using historical context. {H}
JUD 362JFSeminar: Topics in Jewish Studies-Judaism and Feminism4
How did the feminist movement impact Judaism and Jewish self-identity, and how and why did Jews play a formative role at key moments in feminist history? Discussions include feminist midrash, ritual innovation and contested issues such as divorce, women's religious leadership and LGBTQ Jews in religious law and practice. Experiential learning is emphasized through lectures from guest speakers, work in the Smith archives which houses the papers of several groundbreaking American (Jewish) feminists and visits to local sites. A prior course in Jewish Studies is helpful, but not required. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only; JUD 362 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {H}{S}
JUD 362YLSeminar: Topics in Jewish Studies-Yiddishland4
Explores the relationship between East European Jewish history and post-Holocaust and post-Communist memory through the prism of Yiddishland, the dream of a transnational homeland defined by language and culture rather than borders. The seminar includes a course field trip to Poland over March break. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only; JUD 362 may be repeated once with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {H}{L}
