English

This course examines issues of gender and sexuality in either the Greek or the Roman world. Students study contrastive portrayals of women and men, ideals of masculinity and femininity, sexual norms and codes, theories about the male and female body, views on marriage, rape, adultery and prostitution, and the relation between art and ‘real life’: what we may deduce from texts and visual sources about the gender roles men and women were expected to play within family and state.

This course explores the shaping of Jewish identity and the formation of border lines between Jews and non-Jews in the rabbinic period. Through critical readings of Talmudic texts from the second to sixth centuries CE, it investigates how rabbinic laws and ideas inform the contemporary understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The course begins by delving into texts which highlight the shift of defining Judaism as a religion rather than an ethnicity. It then focus on the challenge of integrating into a non-Jewish society while protecting Jewish separateness from the other. The course also studies texts which reveal the deep influence that non-Jewish cultural context had on rabbinic practice. The final unit of the course explores the essential question of how the rabbis see the role of Judaism in the world at large.

This course is an introduction to propositional logic and predicate logic. It acquaints students with the notions of logical consistency and logical validity, syllogisms, the languages of propositional logic and predicate logic, truth-tables for propositional, logic, and introduces the truth-tree method to check for logical validity of arguments and consistency of sets of sentences in both logics.

The course teaches risk management practices for students aiming to advance their careers in the competitive world of global finance, in fields such as asset management, hedge funds, investment analysis, or risk management.

The topics covered on this course include dimensional analysis, the mass-conservation and momentum-balance principles applied to a fluid particle, the differential form of the governing equations (Navier-Stokes), compressible flows (speed of sound, Mach cone, isentropic-flow relations and converging-diverging nozzles), as well as incompressible flows with exact (Couette-Poiseuille flows) and approximate (boundary layers, Blasius solution, lubrication) solutions, and an introduction to turbulence.

This course surveys and analyzes the interaction between Europe and America since 1945 in the fields of politics, economics, and culture. Special emphasis is placed on the roles of the United States, Germany, and the European Union. The first part has a time-line approach, discussing cooperation and divergence of  interests before, during, and after the Cold War and after 9/11. During the second part, the course focus on issues of common concern for the U.S. and Europe today and on challenges facing the transatlantic partnership during the era of globalization with its challenges to the common values of the “West.” Current events are discussed whenever they become relevant. The course includes a guest speaker and a visit to the German Foreign Ministry for a talk on German-American relations.