Citizenship, the State, and American Jews

Catalog description

This course is a reading seminar on citizenship and the state through the lens of Jews in the United States. The historian Frederick Cooper proposes that citizenship serves as “a framework in which people ponder the structure of society,” yet in the modern period citizenship is just as clearly the state’s tool to structure society. Grappling with central historical tensions between structures and agents of power, the seminar moves in multiple directions. It examines how state policies and actors slotted Jews in and out of categories of American membership and, in the process, redefined American statecraft. It also draws attention to Jews’ active participation in and sometimes resistance to regimes of statecraft and citizenship. Finally, it seeks to trace the coalitions made and broken among Jews and others in the face of ever-changing orders of state power. Readings explore the changing ideologies, technologies, and bureaucracies that produced American citizenship and situated Jews within this state-based framework of bbelonging (and unbelonging). Students will be encouraged to bring their specific areas of iinterest into the class through discussion, book reviews, and a final review essay.