Graduate Courses Fall '26

Caroline Rody | TR 2:00PM – 3:15PM | Bryan 330 | Seminar (3)

This course for 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduates and graduate students explores a literature positioned between tradition and modern invention, between the spiritual and the mundane, and—as novelist Saul Bellow once put it—between laughter and trembling. We will read mainly Jewish American texts but also some by Jewish writers from other countries, taking up short stories, essays, poems, jokes, Broadway lyrics, and a few novels, as well as short videos clips and a film. 

Glenn Dynner | TR 9:30AM – 10:45AM | Dell 2 103 | Lecture (3)

This course takes us through 900 years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, from the arrival in medieval Poland, through the golden age of extensive Jewish self-government in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, down to the crises and catastrophes of the twentieth century. 

Elizabeth Alexander | T 3:30PM – 6PM | Gibson Hall 241 | Seminar (3)

An examination of religion and culture of the rabbinic movement (c. 70-600 CE) in the social and cultural contexts of Greco-Roman antiquity. Among the issues to be examined: rituals and institutions of the rabbis, social organizations within the rabbinic movement, engagement with other sectors of Jewish and gentile society.

Asher Biemann | Independent Study (3)

This graduate course is a sequence of three independent tutorials on theopolitical thought in Modern Judaism: I. Spinoza, II. Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, III. Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Each tutorial lasts one semester and can be taken outside the sequence. The focus of the course lies on the alliance and confrontation of religion and politics in Modern Jewish thought and its immediate intellectual historical context.

Asher Biemann | Independent Study (3)

This graduate course is a sequence of three independent tutorials on theopolitical thought in Modern Judaism: I. Spinoza, II. Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, III. Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Each tutorial lasts one semester and can be taken outside the sequence. The focus of the course lies on the alliance and confrontation of religion and politics in Modern Jewish thought and its immediate intellectual historical context.

Elizabeth Alexander | Seminar (3)

Students learn to analyze and interpret ancient rabbinic texts (c. 200-600 CE) in order to discern theological commitments and ethical instructions. The task is complicated by the fact that rabbinic texts are neither theological treatises nor ethical manuals. They are composed as biblical commentary and as codes, commentary and argumentation on legal topics.