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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course surveys the historical development of Zen Buddhism as it unfolds in India, China, and Japan, and focuses on the examination of the nature of satori experience. It analyzes its existential meaning from perspectives of therapy, Zen practice, and philosophy.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore the religion of the pre-Biblical Near East. We will read texts from Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Mesopotamian cultures and civilizations. Special emphasis will be put on the differences and competing aspects of these religions with Israelite religion.
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3.00 Credits
In this course students will explore Judaism from a variety of perspectives: historical, religious, literary, artistic, and cultural. What constitutes “Judaism” in a variety of contemporary expressions will be an organizing question for the class.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the variety of rituals, customs, and practices of the Jewish people in a historical context. Compares and contrasts liberal and traditional Jewish religion with Zionism. Contemporary Jewish novels, poetry, and drama.
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3.00 Credits
This course will introduce students to the study of African and African-Diaspora Jews. Students will examine and critically assess the various past and present methods used to study Africana Jewish communities. The research and readings will provide students with a basic introduction to Afro-Jewish history, culture and religion. It will also analyze the effects of race and racism on the construction of Afro-Jewish identities.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). What is the Bible? Where did it come from? How can there be so many different interpretations of the Bible? This course provides an examination of the historical, archeological, literary, and religious backgrounds of the Old Testament.
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3.00 Credits
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 first course of a two-semester sequence. It treats the emergence of Judaism and Jewishness in the modern world, up to the 20th century. Students will be introduced to recent critical work on the construction of “Religion” in the Enlightenment and with it, the “secular/religious” binary. The course will historicize and contextualize the ways that despite Jewish adherence to the notion of Judaism as a religion in the West in the modern period, Jewishness has always exceeded the bounds of this definition. Building on recent work by Baird, Pellegrini and Jakobsen as they rethink “secularism” for the 21st century, students will be asked to rethink Jewish history in other than religious terms. This new conceptual material will provide the framework for reading the classic texts of modern Jewish thought produced up to the end of the 19th century.
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3.00 Credits
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.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the basic concepts, worldview and psychology of the Kabbalah. Mystical experiences and spiritual practices of the Kabbalists are situated within the context of comparative mysticism.
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). What is the Bible? Where did it come from? How can there be so many different interpretations of the Bible? This course provides an examination of the historical, archeological, literary, and religious backgrounds of the Old Testament. This course is designed as a Writing Course for the University, so the assignments will reflect the writing requirements.
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