The Life and Thought of Hillel Zeitlin

Tuition: $480 | YIVO members: $375**
Students: $240 (Must register with valid university email address)
 

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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:
This course will offer an introduction to the life and thought of Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942). The patriarch of a famed Warsaw Yiddish literary family, Zeitlin was at once a journalist, philosopher, religious thinker, mystic, dreamer, scholar of Hasidism and Kabbalah, and political activist. An impassioned writer in Hebrew and Yiddish, his works span the worlds of religious tradition and secular Jewish modernity. A complex and at times misunderstood figure, Zeitlin has long been overlooked in the canon of modern Jewish thinkers.

We will utilize translated selections from Zeitlin’s writings alongside secondary literature to explore Zeitlin’s Warsaw context and his engagement with topics including neo-Hasidism; Jewish literature; Jewish nationalism; philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and William James; occult and eastern religious traditions; dreams and religious experience; and Zeitlin’s many attempts to establish elite Jewish spiritual fraternities. All texts will be provided in English translation; Hebrew and Yiddish originals will be made available upon request.

Course Materials:
All course materials will be provided digitally on Canvas.

Samuel Glauber is the Miriam Barr Librarian for Jewish & Near Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A scholar of modern Judaism specializing in East European Jewry and its diaspora communities, he is currently completing a PhD 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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