Making and Unmaking Jews in our Post-Pandemic Age of Antisemitism
Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.
Instructor: Sander Gilman
In 1986, Sander Gilman published Jewish Self-Hatred, one of the first studies of the cultural phenomenon of self-hatred among European Jews from the medieval period to the 20th century. By the beginning of 2024, new anxieties about the world and about Jewishness arose as the decades-long struggle for regional power and existence in the Middle East had begun to take on new, yet vaguely familiar contours, and Jews, not matter how defined, came (again, still?) to be the global focus of attention, and yes, even among Jews themselves. Suddenly, the term, “Jewish Self-Hatred,” which had been marginal in the debates about who is “authentically” Jewish, had again become central.
In this course, Gilman will continue his discussion of the ever-shifting meaning of being a Jew in our contemporary debates about antisemitism, looking at the continuities and discontinuities both among those who define themselves as Jewish and those who seek to define Jews, both from within and without. The sessions will reflect the depth of his scholarship on these topics, which he has been writing about for more than half a century, as well as what he feels there is still to learn about a range of topics, from The Jew’s Body (1991) to Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews (2017) and beyond.
Course Materials:
Students should purchase the following texts:
- Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews by Sander L. Gilman (Purchase)
All other materials provided by the instructor digitally on Canvas.
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over one hundred books. His “Gebannt in diesem magischen Judenkreis”: Essays appeared with Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen) in 2022; his most recent edited volume is Readers for Life: How Reading and Listening in Childhood Shape Us (London, 2024). He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996 and 2014) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986, which remains in print. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago. For four years he was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he created the ‘Humanities Laboratory.’ During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University; 2007 to 2012 as Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College; 2010 to 2013 as a Visiting Research Professor at The University of Hong Kong; and as the Alliance Professor of History at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (2017-18). He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin (2000), an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007), and made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016).
**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.