Near East Studies

The intention of this course is to build upon students’ knowledge and understanding of Modern Hebrew through regular in-class practice with reading, writing, grammar, and conversation skills. In addition to the completion of homework assignments included in the text and unseen. Students must have taken an elementary Hebrew class or equivalent.

This reading, field-trip, and discussion course exposes a range of contemporary geographic narratives, and then works to apply the narratives while exploring daily life in Jerusalem with and for diverse populations. The course examines a series of readings introducing frameworks including the ordinary city; the global, world and capital city; the Zionist city; and the city as shaped by history and religion. The course also weaves a set of four field trips in Jerusalem, three guided and one self-guided. It provides a platform for informed, critical, and multi-perspective discussion about contemporary spatial practices in Jerusalem. The course also encourages challenging values and perspectives while exploring the impact of ideology on the built environment and on the range of Jerusalemites.

In this course, students examine the development of Jewish life across Europe. Topics include emancipation and integration; Jewish life in the Russian empire and in Eastern Europe; the emergence of different forms of Judaism; antisemitism; mass migration; and radical politics, gender issues, and varieties of Jewish national politics.

This course is an introduction to the political, economic, social and cultural history of the Middle East from 1950 to the present. It covers the coming to independence of nation-states in the region after the Second World War and examines the subsequent domestic and regional conflicts, ranging from nationalism, statism and socialism to Islamism and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This course focuses on the meaning of "peace" as a classical Jewish value demonstrating the significant differences between it and the modern Western secular model. The course starts with an analysis of the politics of peace in western philosophy, tracing this discourse from the work of Kant to that of contemporary post-critical political philosophers. Students trace similarities between contemporary critiques of Kant and the alternative strategies for peace-making offered in the Jewish tradition. The course studies the meaning of peace in both classical and modern Jewish literature, examining the connection between peace and Messianism and exploring the implications of this connection for Zionist and religious Zionist political thought. Finally, the course examines the different ways in which alternative articulations of peace might suggest entirely new approaches to the challenge of accomplishing peace in today's Middle East after a fashion that enables us to tackle such loaded questions as the sanctity of the holy land, the Temple Mount, etc. This course requires students have completed one course in Jewish Studies, Political Philosophy, Middle East Studies, or International Relations as a prerequisite.

This course provides basic reading knowledge of Middle Egyptian and its hieroglyphic script. After coverage of the basics in the first few weeks, most of the course is devoted to reading and understanding "set texts," which students prepare in advance of each session. The set texts, which form the basis of the exam, includes the Story of the SHIPWRECKED SAILOR ("Papyrus Leningrad") and extracts from funerary stelae and other works in Middle Egyptian - among these, the Story of Sinuhe.