This Honors FIG explores modern Jewish identity with attention to a variety of transformations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, across the Atlantic, as Jews left Europe for North America, across generations, and across the history of the Holocaust. Using historical and literary approaches, these classes together investigate the complexities of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. This is the core course the new FIG seminar offering titled, "Translating Jewishness Across Time and Place," and linked to History 219, "The American Jewish Experience: from Shtetl to Suburb," and to Jewish Studies 201, "Jewish Identity Across Atrocity." This course considers different ways of "ranslating" or understanding the Jewish diaspora from the nineteenth century. We will read fiction, drama, poetry, memoir, as well as essays. This course investigates the meanings of "Jewishness" in terms of the transnational and the transhistorical, and we’ll consider "Jewishness" as a model for the complexities of modern subjectivity, with attention to debates about gender, racial, and religious differences.

Just as current trends in literary studies explore literature across national and hemispheric boundaries, this course investigates a transatlantic diasporic Jewish dialogue through authors who wrote about Jews across different continents. The first half of the course focuses on the work of four Anglo-Jewish writers from London, Grace Aguilar, Amy Levy, Leonard Woolf, and Israel Zangwill, including his play "The Melting Pot," first performed exactly a century ago. Then we turn to turn-of-the century immigrants in New York in fiction by Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. Post-Holocaust literature includes Lost in Translation, The Shawl, and The History of Love.

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