Modern Jewish & Cult Th

Catalog description

GTU/Center for Jewish Studies This course will investigate major themes in the intellectual and cultural history of the Jews from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It will take some of the key thinkers of this period as the lens through which to view cultural developments. The course will start with Shabbatai Zvi and Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century and Moses Mendelssohn and Israel Baal Shem Tov in the eighteenth. Other Jewish writers and thinkers we will study include Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Graetz, Hermann Cohen, Emma Lazarus, Yehuda Leib Gordon, Theodor Herzl, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. We will use the third volume of the Culture of the Jews as a background text.