Undergraduate Catalog 2008-2009

Encourages improvement of reading and writing skills, and conversation. Studies complex verbal patterns and daily use of the language in an Israeli setting.

Concentrates on review and mastery of material learned in HEB 201. Continuation of irregular verbs and verbal patterns. Stresses oral comprehension and speech, reading, and discussion of newspaper articles.

Six issues in Jewish history and their impact on the development of Judaism and the Jewish community; analyzes the resilience and adaptability of a people under stress.

Comparative contemporary social and psychological studies of women intermingle with rabbinic ones in an endeavor to bring into sharper focus women's status, social roles, behavior, and impact on Jewish life; the Jewish woman in historical perspective, drawing upon oriental, European, and modern American societies.

Second semester of introductory course.

Post-biblical Jews and Judaism; their adaptation to Greco-Roman life; rise of Jewish sectarianism; writing of the Talmud.

Ethical principles of Judaism: love, justice, holiness, freedom of will, dignity of humans, purpose of life, imitatio dei, family life, education, social welfare, race, and ecology.

Unity of God; purpose of life; love and fear of God; significance of Jewish ritual holidays according to the various Chassidic groups.

Woman's role in classical Jewish literature; Pentateuchal narrative, Chronicles, Song of Songs, and the books of Ruth and Esther.

Relationships and conflicts that shaped the identity of the American Jewish woman: Jewish women and the American women's rights movement; immigrant Jewish women and labor activism; impact of feminism on Judaism.

Poets, philosophers, mathematicians, bankers, traders: how they and their families lived within and outside the ghettos of the Middle East and Europe.

American Jewish life from colonial beginnings to the present: immigration; assimilation; social mobility; education and the family; group identity.

Readings of the major Hebrew authors from the Haskalah (nineteenth-century Hebrew language renaissance) until today's writers in Israel and America. Themes emphasize cultural survival and other current topics in Hebrew literature.

An in-depth look at key biblical events, including the creation, humans' first sin, the sin of the golden calf. What do these events mean? What is their symbolic significance?

Jewish folklore elements as presented in the Talmud, Midrash, and later rabbinic literature: stories, riddles, parables, homilies, proverbs, songs, and aphorisms about and of the rabbis.

Surveys the Responsa literature that answers every day life questions and that began in the post-Talmudic period and has continued to flourish until the present.

Readings of selected literature in the Hebrew Bible.

Selections from the books of Proverbs and Psalms in Hebrew illustrating the styles of this type of didactic literature, Hebrew Bible, and poetry.

Full range of legal and ethical problems posed during the Holocaust and the precedent-setting decisions set down in the Responsa literature.

Introduces various processes, synthetic and analytic, out of which Jewish law developed its intricate legal systems.

Historical, sociological, and legal concerns in early and later rabbinic literature that led to an understanding of the trends of Jewish legal history through the centuries.

The history and development of ancient Assyrian culture; focuses on how individual strains of different cultures in the variegated peoples that make up the ancestry and contemporaries of the historical Assyrians can be reworked by these ancient peoples to create a sense of common heritage; the relationship between ancient Assyria and biblical history.

Specialized studies of how specific Jewish laws developed and their relationship to intricate legal systems, including civil and ritual law in Judaism.

Uses the actual text as a foundation for this course as fundamental issues of Judaism are viewed through the eyes of Maimonides.

Jewish moral, ethical, and religious principles in medical practice: use of Jewish legal response to abortion; definition of death; euthanasia; contraception; sterilization; semen testing; artificial insemination; circumcision; organ transplants; sex changes; religious observations in the hospital.

Selected topics in American Jewish history emphasizing the period since the East European migration (1890s); reciprocal impact of America on Jews and that of Jews on the cultural development of the United States.