The Jewish Nineteenth Century

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

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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 Google Classroom. Students will be granted access to the class on Google Classroom 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: Ofer Dynes and Alex Valdman

Understanding the nineteenth century, this class argues, is essential to understanding the fundamental categories that continue to shape Jewish society today. Urbanization and mass emigration, secular education and Orthodoxy, Jewish national movements and socialist activism–these and other key phenomena emerged during the nineteenth century and made Jewish life in Eastern Europe by 1900 profoundly different from what it had been in 1800. Drawing on Hebrew and Yiddish literary classics alongside primary documents, we will survey the history of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization during this era of transformation, with its tragedies and upheavals, cultural creativity, and ideological ferment.

The course traces the making of Jewish modernity, exploring the rise of Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish responses to antisemitism, the formation of Jewish imperial identities, and the rise of modern Jewish politics. The texts we will read and discuss range from the deeply religious writings of Nahman of Bratslav to accounts of assimilation and alienation by Pauline Wengeroff and Osip Mandelstam. We will also read classic works of literature by Joseph Perl, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and Sholem Aleichem, and address the political writings of Ahad Ha'am and Simon Dubnow. Throughout the course, we will consider how Jewish literature not only reflected social and historical change but also shaped Jewish society and its emerging forms of modernity. 

Course Materials:
The instructors will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Google Classroom.

Ofer Dynes is Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish Studies at Harvard University (September 2016) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at McGill University (2016-2018). Before coming to Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he taught classes in eastern European Jewish literature and history and served as the head of the Program in Yiddish Studies. Dynes specializes in the literature and cultural history of Eastern European Jewry from the 18th to 21st centuries. He has a particular interest in the nexus of literature and political thought. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Fiction of the State: The Polish Partitions and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature (1772–1848). He has also recently co-edited a special volume of Prooftexts, entitled The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Literature in Europe, with Naomi Seidman (University of Toronto). Dynes is a co-founder and organizer of the Hebrew Lab Faculty Seminar, a New-York based workgroup for scholars in Hebrew Literature.

Alex Valdman is a social historian of modern Eastern Europe, focusing on questions of social and geographical mobility, patterns of imperial socialization, the history of the Russian-speaking Jews, and history of education. His first monograph, Problems of Discipline Secondary Education, Activism, and the Origins of the Jewish Intelligentsia in the Russian Empire, published by Magnes Press, won the Shazar Prize for Research in Jewish History. His articles have been published in Jewish Social Studies, The Russian Review, East European Jewish Affairs, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, Zion and other periodicals and collective volumes. He also took part in the publication of Zionist Organizations in Soviet Russia, 1917–1922. A Documentary History, a two-volume collection of archival sources published by an international group of scholars led by Prof. Ziva Galili. His current research project, titled “Soviet Jews After Stalin: Local Experiences and Foreign Interpretations,” focuses on the history of Soviet Jews after 1953 and its representations in Israel and North America. 

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