JWST 350 - Confronting Modernity

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Advanced study in selected aspects of religion and contemporary philosophical and political theory. May be taken more than once for credit when content changes.

Topic for 2022/23a: The Americanization of Jewish Culture: Word-and-Image. The course investigates the formation of American Jewish culture from the period of massive immigration around the turn of the twentieth century to the present through the lens of the interrelationship of word and image in American Jewish cultural production. Among the topics to explore: the filmic trajectory from immigrant labor on the Lower East Side in an early Yiddish-talkie, Uncle Moses, to labor organizing in the gender and racial context of the American South in the 1970s in Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae; the contest between the representations of Anne Frank and the Warsaw Ghetto in creating the framework of an American imaginary of the Holocaust in popular fiction, film and television; the sustained commentaries on European photos and paintings) from an American Jewish perspective by poets Adam Kirsch and Jacqueline Osherow,; and the contrast between art as a means of escape from a parochial Jewish culture in the popular fiction of Chaim Potok, The G-D Project of visual artist Helèn Aylon, and the TV miniseries, Unorthodox, on the one hand; and on the other, Benjamin Zucker’s Talmudic novels and R. B. Kitaj’s Jewish turn and return through his painting as theorized in his Diasporist Manifestos. Andrew Bush.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS