Jewish Warsaw
Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)
This is a live, online course held weekly on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 15 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, assignments, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English.
Instructor: Samuel Glauber
Course Description:
Warsaw was the undisputed capital of Jewish life in early 20th century Eastern Europe. Home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, Warsaw played host to merchants, peddlers, and writers; Hasidic courts and prayer rooms; Zionist, Bundist, and Communist political activists; countless synagogues and houses of Jewish learning; and was a leading center of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing, literature, journalism, and theater—all crammed into a few square miles of tenement buildings and narrow courtyards. It was here that the vibrant modern culture of East European Jewry found perhaps its fullest expression in the first decades of the 20th century, prior to its destruction in the Holocaust.
This course takes Jewish Warsaw as a lens by which to study the larger movements that characterized Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We will utilize primary, secondary, and digital sources to uncover the history of Jewish settlement in Warsaw; the city’s development into an urban Jewish metropolis at the end of the 19th century; Warsaw’s role as a center of Jewish publishing, press, literature, theater, religious life, and politics; the Warsaw Ghetto; and the afterlives of Jewish Warsaw. This tour through Jewish Warsaw will introduce students to the rich culture of Jewish Eastern Europe it developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Course Materials:
All course materials will be provided digitally on Canvas with English translation.
Samuel Glauber is a scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is writing a dissertation exploring Jewish engagement with modern occult currents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Eastern Europe. His research develops an interdisciplinary approach to processes of religious and social change with a focus on the religious landscape of Eastern Europe; particular research interests include Jewish occultism, modern religious thought, and Yiddish press culture. His work has appeared in, among other journals, Nashim, Jewish Historical Studies, In geveb, Tradition, and Kabbalah, and he is co-editor of Hillel Zeitlin, In the Secret Place of the Soul: Three Essays (Jerusalem–Berlin: Blima Books, 2021). In 2021–2022, he held the Fellowship in American Jewish Studies at YIVO, where he worked on the archive of Yiddish writer and occultist B. Rivkin.
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