Teaching

Courses

My courses at Portland State University, many of which are cross-listed with the History Department, explore various aspects of Jewish history and civilization.

JST/HST 318U Jewish History II: From the Middle Ages to the Present

How do you tell the story of a people dispersed over much of the world with no obvious political, economic, or military history? Dive into a rich world of religious, cultural, and social developments, and understand how a tiny minority not only survived centuries of sometimes hostile environments but even found places for incredible flourishing and creativity. This survey of Jewish history explores (among many other topics) Jewish-Muslim-Christian relations in the “Golden Age” of medieval Spain, medieval Jewish philosophy, the Crusader massacres of German Jewish communities, the many factors leading to the expulsions of Jews from Spain and other western European countries, the rich and flourishing Jewish cultures that emerged in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the struggle for equal rights in 19th-century Europe, intercontinental migrations on a massive scale, the emergence of a Jewish community in the U.S., the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel.

JST/HST 381U / HST 381U | Kabbalah: The Jewish Mystical Tradition

Kabbalah, the mystical tradition in Judaism, seeks to understand the inner nature of the divine and the reciprocal relationship between God and humanity. Kabbalistic thought is imaginative, innovative, sometimes weird, and often mind-bending, offering a vision of the divine highly inflected by gender and sexuality. In this course, we will study central works and expressions of Kabbalah, including the mystical-erotic "Book of Splendor" (The Zohar) of medieval Spain; a 17th-century mystical messianic movement that originated in the Ottoman Empire and took Europe by storm; 19th-century Hasidism in Eastern Europe; and contemporary uses of Kabbalah. 

HST 491/591-492/592 Reading Colloquium and Research Seminar in Jewish History: The Shtetl of Eastern Europe

This two-term course sequence explores the reality and image of the shtetl, the “Jewish town” of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe immortalized in the Broadway classic “Fiddler on the Roof.” Eastern Europe was one of the great centers of Jewish civilization in the early modern and modern periods, and its hundreds of Yiddish-speaking shtetls were one of the only settings in the history of the Jewish diaspora where Jews could feel like the dominant ethnic group. Drawing primarily on the methods of social and cultural history, our exploration of the unique landscape of the shtetl will include folklore, religious life, language, gender, sexuality, social class, and Jewish-Christian relations.