Fall 2024 Courses
Gender, Religion, and Law: The Case of Israel
LEGALST 190 011 & JEWISH 122 001
Masua Sagiv
The course will explore the intersection of gender, religion, and law in Israel, as manifested in social movement activism through law and society. The course will incorporate existing law and current discourse, focusing on issues surrounding suggested legal reforms and the fragility of Israeli democracy. It will illustrate and reflect upon various strategies and spheres for promoting social change. Core topics will include gender, religion, and law in Israel, covering issues such as religious marriage and divorce, gender equality within the religious establishment, and the free exercise of religion at the Western Wall and Temple Mount. Additionally, the course will examine gender segregation in public spaces and academia. Spheres of activism to be covered include parliament, state courts, alternative private initiatives and courts, and social protests.
Introduction to Comparative Literature: Crossing Borders, or, How to Translate Hebrew Literature
COMLIT 100D 001 & JEWISH 120A 001
Yael Segalovitz
At first glance, translation may seem straightforward—merely transferring words from one language to another. Yet, beneath this surface simplicity lies a labyrinth of challenges: How do we translate idioms unique to one language, or convey rhythm and rhyme, or handle culturally specific humor and slang? When we read a work in translation, are we truly engaging with any “original,” or are we encountering something entirely different?
This course engages these complex questions, using Hebrew Literature and its translations into English as our primary lens. We'll explore the nature of translation by following the same Hebrew text in different English forms, by reading translators' reflections, by unpacking theoretical texts on translation, by analyzing works by Palestinian writers that navigate the spaces between languages and cultures, and through hands-on experiences with “translation” between different registers of English.
Translation, many practitioners claim, is the most rigorous form of reading. By the end of this course, then, you will not only gain insight into the complexities of translation and broaden your knowledge of Modern Hebrew and Israeli literature but will also—perhaps mostly—sharpen your analytical skills applicable far beyond the material of this specific course. Join me in this transnational, translinguistic, and transcultural journey!
Learning from Jerusalem: Society and Space in a Shared City
ARCH 139 002
Noah Hysler Rubin
This seminar will explore the urban design of Jerusalem as a shared space: a sacred site and a national emblem for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It will rely on the reciprocal relationship between society and space, i.e., how different cultures produce different urban settings. We will explore how a city reflects its living societies and examine the tools and tactics different societies employ to shape their living spaces through urban design, architecture, and urban planning. Furthermore, we will ask: What does the shape of a city reveal about space and urban community? How does the urban landscape transmit hidden meanings? Finally, we will ask what happens when society changes, bringing with it its goals and means of design, and explore changes to the urban landscape that occur when cultures change and, with them, values, notions of holiness, and spatial design. Shaped by different cultures over 3000 years, Jerusalem will serve us as a unique laboratory through which we will trace the relationship between culture, architecture, and design as they are reflected on the ground and in various cultural media. A major source for the course will be a newly established database of Jerusalem Architectural Archives, which reveals new collections about the modern development of Jerusalem during the Ottoman, British Mandate, and Israeli periods.
In Search of Lost Time: Memory in Legal Principle and Practice
LEGALST 190 010
Daniel Levy
Human memory plays a key role in legal thought, institutions, and procedures. In a wide range of circumstances – evaluating the reliability of testimony, appreciating challenges to judges and jurors in learning and retaining information presented during a trial, assessing intent and culpability for plagiarism, or considering the admissibility of a plaintiff’s repressed memories – assumptions about the nature of memory play a vital role. For each topic, the relevant basic cognitive psychology and neuroscience information will be introduced in non-specialist terms. We will then consider the implications of those insights for philosophical attitudes, legal processes, and societal institutions, including memory in restorative justice, and collective memory in public spaces and monuments.
Israel: Politics and Society
POLSCI 191 004
Junior Seminar
Eran Kaplan
Lectures dedicated to the craft of research and writing will be interspersed with lectures about theoretical and empirical issues relating to the history and contemporary politics of Israel. We will discuss the formation of the state, its geography and history, its political system, and its demographics. Several sessions will be dedicated to Israel’s social and political challenges, to economic opportunities and obstacles, to U.S.-Israel relations, and to the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not a focus of this class (it is a focus of another class of mine, PS124B, “War in the Middle East”) but students are free to address topics of international and national security in their papers for this class if they wish.
History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to Our Time
HISTORY 175E 001Ethan Katz
The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the standpoint of Jewish, Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these topics and more.
Spring 2025 Courses
Comparative Constitutional Law: The Case of Israel
Legal Studies (LS 174 001)
Masua Sagiv
This course will provide an introduction to constitutional law using Israel as a case study. Topics include: Constitutionalism and judicial review, state neutrality and self-determination, minority rights, state and religion, Human Rights Law, the concept of “defensive democracy" and ban of non-democratic political parties, legal aspects of the fight on terror, freedom of expression, equality and anti-discrimination, social rights, and constitutional limitations on privatization.
Literature, Psychoanalysis and Human Relations
Comparative Literature (COMLIT 190 004) / Jewish Studies (JEWISH 120A 003)
Yael Segalovitz
Hebrew literature is a hybrid creature with no stable home. Historically developed in exile by people navigating between languages and cultures, it emerged from a “living-dead” language that experienced both death and resurrection. To this day, Hebrew literature exists in a constant state of in-betweenness, carrying the weight of historical trauma and an intensely contentious present.
This course examines Hebrew literature’s liminal status through a psychoanalytic lens, focusing particularly on the psychoanalytic school of object relations and its conception of intersubjectivity—the understanding that neither people nor texts exist as autonomous, self-sufficient entities, but rather in perpetual relation to others. We will explore the inter-relationality between Hebrew and its historical and contemporary linguistic encounters, from its ancient dialogue with Aramaic to its modern interactions with Yiddish, Arabic, and English, as well as its self-positioning between diaspora and homeland, exile and return, margins and center.
Our theoretical framework draws on psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, and Thomas Ogden, examining how therapeutic concepts like “the third,” “the unthought known,” “the transitional space,” and the “intermind” may help us in literary analysis. Through close readings of works by authors such as Amalia Kahana-Carmon, David Grossman, and Maya Arad—written both in Israel, where Hebrew serves as the official national language, and in the diaspora—we’ll investigate how Hebrew literature challenges our notion of self-contained individuality and explore the implications and practice of reading through an intersubjective lens.
Modern Urbanism: From Antiquities to New Towns, Israel/Palestine as a Case Study
Architecture (ARCH 119/219)
Noah (Esther) Hysler Rubin
Our focus on modern urbanism in this course allows us to delve into the study of large-scale architecture and urban design, which reflect modern concepts such as nationalism and colonialism, as well as the definition of urban heritage and urbanism itself. Moreover, modern urbanism addresses crucial social issues like social justice and gender. In this comparative course, we will specifically examine the cities of Israel/Palestine, which have been predominantly shaped over the past 150 years. We will rely on current research employing critical perspectives to shed new light on local modernization and examine Israeli/Palestinian cities as manifestations of universal urban development and design.
Game Theory, Law, and Politics
LEGALST 190.06
Adi Ayal
We will focus on social interaction in private and political life, with special emphasis on how laws and social norms shape our interaction. We’ll separate between methods of devising policy, and methods of devising ‘rules of the game’, such as representation, voting mechanisms, separation of powers, speech governance, and the like. A special emphasis will be placed on interactive learning through participating in games (both online and in-class) and discussion of the dynamics of decision-making present within each game.Towards this purpose, students will be asked to register to a course-specific website through which problem sets will be posted. Participation in games should facilitate learning – both in pushing students to tackle strategic questions within each game, and in requiring thought as to real-life situations in which similar dynamics arise. Students will be encouraged to tease out how people of opposing views might interpret and answer similar questions differently. Finally, students will be asked to devise conversational norms that would allow productive discussion of contentious issues they are familiar with. We’ll stress the difficulty of respecting opposing views and life experiences, while debating the issues and deepening understanding.
Religion and Spirituality in Education: Israeli and American Cases
EDUC 150/JEWISH 122
Hanan Alexander
This course will examine the roles of religion and spirituality in education from the perspective of liberal democratic society in two paradigm cases—Israel and the United States. It will review similarities and differences in the ways each school system conceives and practices such notions as secular and religious, initiation and indoctrination, diversity and inclusion, and public and private. For example, public schools do not offer religious instruction in the United States, due to the constitutional separation of religion and state, whereas religious schools receive state funding in Israel, as they do in many other countries that require no such separation. The course will also consider critiques of these concepts and practices based on gender, race, class, nationality, language, and the search for meaning, as well as similarities and differences between the roles of religious affiliation and nationalism and the influence of extremism in each educational system.
Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought: Faith, Culture, and Education
Jewish Studies (JEWISH 126)
Hanan Alexander
Jewish thought is a field of Jewish studies that analyzes the themes of Jewish tradition, culture, community, and education throughout the ages from a conceptual point of view. The field often deals with connections, parallels, influences, and tensions between Jewish ideas and those of the wider world through studies of Jewish philosophy, theology, and mysticism. Key topics that are considered in this field include the existence and nature of God, the rationale for religious observance, the purpose of the Jewish people, the demands of Jewish ethics, the connection between Israel and the Diaspora, the authority of revelation, the relation between faith and reason, and the transmission of Jewish culture across the generations. This course is an introduction to the field of Jewish thought in the modern period and its implications for the organizations of contemporary Jewish life--agencies, synagogues, schools, and other educational institutions--in both the Diaspora and the state of Israel.
The Politics of Trauma: Old Vulnerabilities and New Forms of Agency in Conflict Zones
Anthropology (ANTHRO 189 001)
Keren Friedman Peleg
What happens when psychological trauma is increasingly experienced, as well as promoted and embraced, as the defining characteristic of our daily life? What are the conditions that shape a specific mental disorder – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – as a marker of national identity and ubiquitous cultural construct, catalyzing new forms of meaning-making at the nexus of psychology, politics, religion, and ethno-national identities? Drawing upon several ethnographic case studies, the course sheds light on the introduction of a peculiar combination of individual psychopathology and collective markers of identity into conflict-ridden communities.