JWST 315 - Jews, Jewish Identity, and the Arts

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

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 Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep and Dara Horn’s A Guide for the Perplexed), plays (Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance), stories (by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, 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), comics and graphic novels (Superman, Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman), and films (The Plot Against Harry). 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 possibilities and limitations of a diaspora poetics, and contemporary representations of the Holocaust. Mr. Antelyes.

Two 75-minute periods.