Sepharad in Ashkenaz, Sepharad in the East: A Comparative Study of Jewish and Israeli Modernities

This seminar offers undergraduate students an 'East vs. West' cross-cultural account of the Modern Jewish, Zionist and subsequent Israeli experiences by utilizing the cultural myth of Sephardi supremacy. We will commence by reconsidering in this light such modern brands of Judaism as the Haskalah and subsequent Reform movements; critical Jewish scholarship and Zionist renewal. We will also pay attention to racial and anti-Semitic constructions of the non-Ashkenazi Jew as a convenient foil. Subsequently will consider how native Sephardi and Mizrahi intellectuals have wrestled for over a century with the motif of decline attributed to their own culture and outline  a typology of their various response which have run the gamut from Zionist affirmation of the need for cultural renewal to post-colonial Arab-Jewish symbiosis; from holistic notions of traditional Sephardi Judaism that can peacefully contain modernity to Mizrahi ultra-orthodox rebellion in the name of a once glorious Sephardi Rabbinic past.