Religion: Jewish Creativity

Focus on the diversity of Jewish Traditions in the US and elsewhere, exploring subjects such as lived Jewish traditions, stories told in Jewish communities, and the diversity of Jewish experiences. May repeat for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisite: Three hours in Religion or Jewish Studies.

Pre reqs: 3 hours in Religion or Jewish Studies PACE students with permission and override

Religions are never static entities, and Judaism is no exception. In fact the long history of Judaism as a diasporic religion means that Jewish people have been constantly on the move, encountering other religions, cultures, and landscapes, and adapting their spiritual lives to embrace and resist changes and new contexts. As rituals are practices that engage our bodies individually and collectively with the material world around us; the conceptual worlds of our ancestors, sacred beings, and future; and the social world of our identities and relationships, they are rich sources of information for the study of religion. They often incorporate forms that in other contexts are identified as “art”: songs, dances, images, architecture, and even food. This course examines how Jewish creativity has flowed through ritual and the arts to shape distinctive Jewish cultures and individual artists’ identities. We’ll look at the seasons of the festivals and holidays as sources of creative expression and community strength, and how Jewish communities have reimagined rituals to embody the values they see as important and relevant to their particular situations. We’ll look at how musicians and artists have drawn on the narratives and ethical questions that are embedded and inherited from Jewish texts and oral traditions. We’ll see how artists like Ben Shahn and Bob Dylan have drawn on Jewish themes to express political yearnings and the struggle for justice. All these case studies will be framed by theories of ritual studies and ethnography that we examine at the beginning of the semester.

The class will be lectures and discussions, as well as a possible field trip to local synagogues and guest speakers in person or on Teams. Students will have opportunities to look at examples both online and in person of different forms of Jewish creativity and respond in writing and in class discussions. Students may have the option to use participant observation outside of class as a method of gathering data for class materials.

The assignments will include readings and a group jigsaw project (a group reads a scholarly article and then presents the article to the other groups). There will be a choice of writing an academic essay or producing a creative work with an artist’s statement as a final project. Students will write brief and focused reviews of events or objects that they observe outside of class using concepts from ritual studies to analyze what they see, hear, and experience. There may be brief in-class writing responses to assess students’ understanding of the concepts.