teaching

women in Judaism

Who is the “default” Jew? Is Judaism, in fact, a patriarchal tradition? What are some of the ways Jewish voices have constructed the categories of “woman,” “man,” and anything outside or in-between? And what happens when we deliberately foreground questions of gender, and the voices and experiences of Jewish women, and other Jews who aren’t cisgender men, for a whole semester? How, if we do that, might our responses to the question “what is Judaism?” change?

This semester, we’ll explore these questions through a series of loose themes. We’ll explore the way classical sources have constructed gender categories, and we’ll explore Jewish women’s—and other Jews who aren’t cisgender men’s— experiences and accounts of questions of belief, embodiment, selfhood, ritual, narrative, activism, and moral conviction. And we will come away with the awareness that we’ve only barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn in the realm toward which this very broad course title gestures.

Judaism: An Introduction

This course is an introduction to the vast and complex body of Jewish beliefs, practices, and rituals, as understood through three main conduits: Jewish texts and their interpretive tradition, Jewish practices throughout the ritual year, and Jewish people as embodied practitioners. In addition to primary texts and scholarly material, we will read popular literature and personal accounts of individuals’ experience of Jewish practice, in order to explore the similarities and differences between “official” accounts of Judaism (which are, in themselves, diverse) and Judaism as practiced by Jews today, and to paint a picture of Judaism as a complicated, vibrant, living tradition.

gender and ethics

What does it mean to live well? How ought one behave toward oneself, one’s fellows, and one’s community? How is one shaped as a moral actor—and what does gender have to do with any of that?

In this course we’ll explore how gender—very loosely, a range of social categories into which systems sort people, in ways that are at least narratively tied to some idea of sexuality and reproductive function—affects questions of ethics—very loosely, the study of how we ought to be in the world.

Our main guide for this adventure is going to be Sara Ahmed’s Living A Feminist Life. Through it, as well as through work by Emilie Townes, Kate Manne, Lisa Tessman, and Mara Benjamin, we’re going to explore topics like evil, choice, will, duty, control, and the ways our choices, circumstances, and experiences form us as ethical actors.

jewish sexual ethics

How have Jews engaged with questions of sex and sexuality? How do the various streams of Jewish tradition respond to contemporary questions of sexual ethics? What are the ways in which Jewish thought on matters of sex has interacted with non-Jewish thought, and how have sexual norms served to define the boundaries of Jewish identity and behavior?

This course will explore the above questions by engaging with primary texts and secondary literature through a series of broad themes. We’ll begin by asking some basic questions: what is sex? What’s it for? Where does it begin and end? How do we determine ethical sexual behavior—and what makes a given approach to that Jewish? We’ll then take a look at where the field’s currently standing, before moving into our themes: sources, risk, divergence, community, and labor, power, and violence.

jews and medicine

You’ve heard the joke about how your parents want you to marry “a nice Jewish doctor.” But what else is there to the relationships between Jews, Judaisms, medicine, healing, injury, and illness?  How have different streams of Judaism understood health and medicine? How have medical discourses understood and depicted Jews and Judaism? And how have present-day Jewish ethicists dealt with the increasingly fraught and complex moral questions raised in contemporary medical contexts?

sex and society

We live, depending on whom you ask, in a sex-saturated society—or a sexually repressive one. But what, exactly, do these things mean? When we talk about sex, what is it we’re talking about? Who controls and defines that? How does sex shape our discourse, and how does our discourse shape sex? What role does “religion” play in this? What are our culture’s regnant sexual norms? Who makes them? Which of these do we accept, which do we reject, and why? What are alternative possibilities for sexual norms? (Just what the heck is a norm, anyway?) How do questions of power, oppression, resistance, and identity shape our understandings and experiences of all of this? And just who is and is not included in the above-used “we?”

In this course, we will not, exactly, answer these questions, for none of them have one singular answer. But we will explore them in some significant depth. And, hopefully, we will leave with a fuller understanding of how some of these factors work in our lives on small and large scales.

jews and the body

This course will explore the body in Judaism as a subject of textual and ritual discourse, as a site of ethical problems and moral formation, as a marker of otherness, and as a site of conflict over questions of power and identity. We will examine the place of the body in ritual practice, Jewish thought on biomedical ethics, and the ways in which rhetorics of supposed Jewish physical difference have affected Jews’ relationships with non-Jews.

purity and pollution

The concepts of purity and impurity are important to much religious thought and affect the basics of daily life in profound ways, even as they can confound or even infuriate contemporary observers. In this course, we will focus on three sites of potential pollution: the body, food, and the land. We will also examine ways in which these concepts remain operative, both explicitly and implicitly, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the ways they translate to contemporary secular life.

two jews, three opinions:
argumentations in judaism

Jews’ supposed love of arguing is a widespread cultural trope. But what work does argumentation actually do in Jewish traditions and discourses? In this course, we will examine patterns of argument in the Jewish textual canon, contemporary debates over matters of Jewish identity and practice and the meaning of texts today, and cultural depictions of Jewish argumentation.