JWST 350 - Confronting Modernity

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as AMST 350) Topic for 2013/14a: Intersections in American Jewish Thought: Politics, Religion, Culture. The course begins with three thinkers from the generations of Jewish immigrants to America. The speeches and writings of anarchist Emma Goldman, including her contributions to the journal Mother Earth, which she founded in 1906, chart the left turn from the Eastern European shtetl to internationalist politics, and eventually, to feminist issues. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan articulates a sociological perspective in propounding a program for Jewish community organization and the reconstruction of ritual observance as a response to the specific conditions of Jewish life in early twentieth-century America. And Rabbi Abraham Heschel, arriving in the US at the outset of World War II, presents what he called a philosophy of Judaism, but what we might now call a renewed spirituality. From that base in distinct experiences, projects and perspectives, and their associated disciplines, the course focuses on an intersection between politics, religion and culture in later twentieth-century Jewish feminism, in such writings as Rabbi Rachel Adler’s work on feminist theology, the activist poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and the art installations of Judy Chicago. Thereafter, recent developments will be considered, such as the Jewish Renewal movement, the Second Diasporist Manifesto of painter R. B. Kitaj, the philosophy of Judith Butler, and the diverse social, political and cultural programs enunciated in contemporary periodicals like Lilith (“independent, Jewish and frankly feminist”) and Tikkun (“to heal, repair and transform the world”) as well as the battles of liberals and new-cons in ongoing, older magazines like Commentary and Dissent. Mr. Bush.

Two 75-minute periods.