REL 2409 - Jewish Secularism/Jewish Civilization II

Institution:

Temple University

Subject:

Description:

Judaism is most often studied as a religious entity, despite the fact that much of Jewish experience does not fit into the rubric and discourse of religion. This course will consider the history of the concept “secularism” and its development in modernity, and will then consider what secularism has meant for Jews in particular. This is the second course of a two-semester sequence. It covers the development of Jewish thought and community life of the 20th century, starting with the massive wave of Eastern European Jewish immigration that has defined contemporary Judaism in America. We will discuss issues such as: the presumption of religious pluralism in America to the exclusion of other forms of cultural and social identification; and the roots of Yiddish Jewish Secularism in Eastern Europe and how this secular form of modern Jewish identification was unable to adapt itself to American cultural expectations about Jewishness as a religion. Through a careful reading of this particular secular Jewish movement and its demise in America, students will be asked to reconsider how contemporary notions of Jewishness as an ethnicity, a culture, a politics and a way of life continue to challenge dominant U.S. cultural definitions of Judaism as a religion, definitions that rely on Protestantism as the true model of “religion.” Students will be asked to reconsider how assimilation was played out in the West, in the U.S. as well as Western Europe in terms of religious toleration and the implications of this failed assimilation for contemporary Jewish practices of identification.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

WWW.TEMPLE.EDU

Phone Number:

(215) 204-7000

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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