2016 Winter Program

Course List · January 4 – March 29, 2016

Stalin's Doctors' Plot and the Fate of Soviet Jewry

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

In these three classes, we will discuss the origins and development of Stalin's last great criminal enterprise: the culmination of his so-called postwar Anti-Cosmopolitan/Anti-Semitic Campaign in The Doctors' Plot of 1953, which ended only with his death on March 5 of that year. We will examine Stalin's anti-Semitism, the conditions of Soviet leadership in the wake of WW II and victory over Germany, his declining health, the role of the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The course will address many myths and clichés that grew up around The Doctors' Plot. We examine top secret KGB (MGB) documents and others from the Central Committee and Stalin's archive, including the medical report on his death which in the eyes of reliable medical specialists in the U.S. suggests he may have been poisoned.

Cinema of the Holocaust

Instructor: Olga Gershenson

What is the function of narrative in shaping our historical knowledge? In many ways, cinema today defines how we perceive and interpret our past, including the Holocaust. Narrative films, in particular, dominate our understanding and memorialization of the Shoah.

In this course, we will examine the tensions between narrative and history as they play out in a number of seminal international films concerning the Holocaust. We will progress historically as well as geographically: from the earliest depictions of Nazi anti-Semitism, to the plethora of genres and styles in recent films; and from the perspective Hollywood to that of the Eastern Bloc.

Our discussions will address modes of representation, dramaturgy, cinematography, style, and languages. We will also be attentive to circumstances of films’ production and circulation, including censorship, funding, distribution, audience and critical reception. All films are with English subtitles.

Jews, Communism, and Espionage

Instructor: Harvey Klehr

The Jewish role in the Communist movement has been fodder for anti-Semites and a source of concern for the Jewish community for decades. In this course we will examine the impact and significance of Jews in the American Communist movement from the Party’s founding in 1919 through the 1970s and then look at those American Jews who spied for the Soviet Union. What were their motivations?  Why were so many Jews attracted to communism? What finally drove so many of them out of the CPUSA?

In the first session, among the questions we will consider are: how extensive was Jewish involvement in the CPUSA, how did it change over time, what problems did it cause the CPUSA, what was the Jewish role in Party leadership, what impact did Soviet positions on Jewish issues have on Jewish members of the party?

In the second session, we will discuss the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. To what extent was Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade based on reality? How reliable is the evidence about Soviet espionage?

In the third session, we will focus on the Rosenberg Case. Was the conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs driven by anti-Semitism? What new evidence about the case has emerged from American and Russian archives in recent years?

Memoir, Autobiography, or Fiction? Life Writing in Modern Jewish Literature

Instructor: Agi Legutko

The difficulty in providing a satisfying definition of the genre involving personal narratives about the vicissitudes of the self has been the subject of heated scholarly debates in the autobiography studies, an increasingly popular and a relatively recent field. Is autobiography a literary representation of "the impossible quest for self-knowledge" (Marcus Moseley)? Is it "an individual's presumably truthful, rational exposition of his or her own life story"? Or, is it a "capricious genre ranging from works of fiction, through traditional autobiography, to various forms of [memoirs,] diaries, journals, and even scholarly writing" (Sarah Pratt)?

The course will explore the borderlands between memoir, autobiography and fiction in Jewish life writing through the lens of the Eastern European Jewish experience. Employing gender and comparative approach as analytical lenses, we will read several autobiographical works and address the following questions: how to deal with problems of memory in personal narratives? How to distinguish between truth, self-fashioning, and fiction in autobiographical writing? What role does the immigrant experience play in Jewish autobiographical narratives?

The texts and class discussion will be in English.

The Tragedy of Europe‘s Jerusalem: Lithuania‘s Jews and the Holocaust

Instructor: Saulius Sužiedėlis

Vilna is often referred to as “Europe’s Jerusalem,” largely because of the Lithuanian capital’s celebrated history as a hub of Litvak culture and for its rich intellectual and religious Jewish traditions. This course will examine several critical aspects of the history of Lithuania’s Jews during the twentieth century and will consist of three sessions, which examine the transformation of the region after the Great War; the Holocaust, which resulted in the destruction of more than 90% of Lithuania’s Jews; and a survey of topics specific to the Holocaust in Lithuania with an emphasis on local history and case studies of selected locales and personal histories.

Saulius Sužiedėlis examines the history of Lithuania‘s Jews in the 20th century, including the destruction of 90% of the region‘s Jews during the Holocaust.

European Nationalisms and the Writing of Jewish History

Instructor: Magda Teter

Scholar David Lowethal has argued that “the past is integral to our sense of identity.”  Jewish history as a scholarly discipline emerged at a time when Jewish identity was being challenged. The narratives it produced to provide tools for shaping Jewish identity in the modern era.  But Jewish history as it was being written was also part of something larger—the rise of new national identities, and the rise of new nation states. This course will explore how the writing of Jewish history has been linked to the larger questions of national identity, and nationalism.  We will read the early Jewish historians from Germany, Poland, and Palestine/Israel and explore how their visions of Jewish history were shaped by larger questions that were also occupying other European historians and intellectuals.

“More Catholic than the Pope”

Instructor: Miriam Udel

Since at least the publication of the Mayse bukh in 1602 (but with antecedents stretching back centuries further), Jewish authors and their readers have been fascinated with the motif of the Jewish Pope. That is to say, a Jew who converts to Catholicism—often in childhood, and often under duress—and then rises to prominence within the Church hierarchy. Unraveling a dense knot of folklore, fiction, and history, this three-session course will examine the strands that made this narrative arc so compelling. Particular attention will be paid to the resurgence of this trope in Yiddish literature in the 1940’s. The course will include both well-known texts, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Zeidlus the Pope” (1943) and an important lesser-known Young Adult novella newly available in original translation, Yudl Mark’s The Jewish Pope (1947).

Heidegger and the Jews

Instructor: Richard Wolin

According to his acolytes, of whom there are many, Martin Heidegger is the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. His 1927 masterpiece, Being and Time, is generally viewed as the foundational text of modern existentialism – a movement that was responsible for some of the most challenging and original contributions to midcentury thought and culture.

By the same token, Heidegger was an ardent Nazi, and for a brief time, in his capacity as Rector –Führer of Freiburg University (his official title), aspired to the intellectual leadership of the National Socialist movement. “Let not propositions and “ideas” be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Führer is the future German Reality and its law. Heil Hitler!” Heidegger declaimed in support of the regime in 1933. Four years earlier, in a letter to the state education ministry, he complained vociferously about the increasing “Jewification” (Verjudung) of German universities.

Two years ago, Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks were published: his philosophical diaries from the 1930s and 1940s. So disturbing and extreme is the anti-Semitic invective that many commentators have seen fit to write Heidegger’s philosophical obituary. After all, how can someone who glibly referred to the Holocaust as an act of “Jewish self annihilation” – Heidegger maintained, perversely, that since Jews were the main carriers of modern technology, in the gas chambers, they had died by their own hand, as it were – retain the title of ”great thinker”?

Thus, in recent months, the long-standing debate over “Heidegger and National Socialism” has accelerated into high gear.

However, an additional obstacle or wrinkle to resolving this enigma is the well known fact that, during the 1920s, Heidegger had a plethora of extremely gifted Jewish students, many of whom went on to become outstanding philosophers in their own right. Here, the names of Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, Herbert Marcuse, and Emanuel Levinas immediately leap to mind. In her impassioned defense of Heidegger on the occasion of his 80th birthday (1969), Hannah Arendt argued that Nazism is a “gutter-born phenomenon” and, as such, has nothing to do with the life of the mind.

Hence, in this and other respects, the plot thickens. The problem of “Heidegger and the Jews” seems to be, as Churchill once said of Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

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