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.

Major 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 as well as contemporary Feminist perspectives.

Second semester of introductory course.

Post-biblical Jews and Judaism; their adaptation to Greco-Roman life; rise of Jewish sectarianism; writing of the Talmud. How to critically read ancient texts in comparative contexts.

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

Historical context and causes of the rise of the Chassidic movement and specific Chassidic sects in modern Eastern Europe. Basic concepts and practices as revised and interpreted by Chassidic leaders.

Woman's role in classical Jewish literature, from the Five Books of Moses to the Chronicles, Song of Songs, and the books of Ruth and Esther. Women as portrayed in Talmud and Midrash.

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.

Jewish poets, philosophers, mathematicians, bankers, traders in medieval Christian and Islamic contexts.

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, Jewish identity and other current topics in Hebrew literature.

Examination of ethical interpretations of key biblical events: "fall" of Adam; fratricide (Cain and Abel), Tower of Babel, Flood, the lives of the Patriarchs/Matriarchs, Golden Calf, etc., with a view to understanding the meaning of good and evil, sin and faithfulness, the permitted and the forbidden, justice and injustice. What is "prophetic morality"? What is the ethical dialectic between the Oral and Written Torah?

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.

Survey of the Responsa literature through which authoritative rabbis answer every day life questions and that began in the post-Talmudic period and has continued to flourish until the present. On what basis are answers formulated? What gives authority to the answers? Selected examples to be examined in detail.

Readings of selected biblical literature in original Hebrew.

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 certain precedent-setting decisions set down in the Responsa literature.

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

Historical, sociological, and legal concerns in early and later rabbinic literature; how Jewish life and thought relate to trends in legal interpretation though 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 the larger context of civil and ritual law in Judaism.

Close reading of Maimonides’s most philosophical text to examine fundamental issues of Judaism and religion more generally.

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

Selected topics in American Jewish history, from colonial to mid-nineteenth century German-Jewish immigration to later East European immigration; formation of American Judaisms; impact of America on Jews and Jews on America.