JWST 270 - Diasporas

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as INTL 270) Topic for 2018/19b: Jews of German-Speaking Lands. The course concentrates on two moments in the formation of Jewish modernity in the Diaspora of German-speaking lands: the era of Emancipation and the creation of a modern historical consciousness in the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century; and the remarkable burgeoning of literature and philosophy in the early twentieth century in which quite modern Jews departed from, returned to and transformed the old traditions. Hannah Arendt offers a hinge between the two topics in her twentieth-century study of the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century literary salon of Rahel Varnagen. Other authors under consideration include: Mendelssohn, Hess, Freud, Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem and the recent scholarship of Olga Litvak. Andrew Bush.

Two 75-minute periods.