JWST 315 - Jews, Jewish Identity and the Arts

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2022/23a: American Jewish Literature. This course is an exploration of the American Jewish literary imagination from historical, topical, and theoretical perspectives. Among the genres we cover are novels (such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Judith Katz’s Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound); plays (Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance” and Paula Vogel’s “Indecent”), stories (by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, and others), poems (by Celia Dropkin, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Irena Klepfisz, and others), essays (Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root”), graphic novels (Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn), and TV/films (“Unorthodox”). Topics include the lineages of Talmudic hermeneutics and Midrash, the development of Yiddish American modernism, Jewish feminisms, the (anti)conventions of queer Jewish literatures and the intersections of Jewishness and queerness, the assumptions and strategies of diaspora poetics, and contemporary representations of the Holocaust. Peter Antelyes.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS