Four Strategies for Jewish Survival

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: Amos Morris-Reich

At the beginning of the twentieth century, roughly nine out of ten Jews lived in Europe, and Jewish collective life was embedded in imperial systems, nation-states, local communities, and networks of migration. By the century’s end, the demographic, cultural, and political centers of Jewish life were divided more or less evenly between Israel and the United States. In the course of a single century, the structure of Jewish existence underwent a profound transformation. At the heart of this seminar is the question of historical contingency: to what extent was the transformation from the beginning of the twentieth century to its end historically contingent? Within this wider frame, the course asks which principal strategies of Jewish survival were imagined at the outset of the twentieth century and what kind of future each envisioned. 

The course takes as its organizing term Judentum, a German word that can mean Judaism, Jewishness, or Jewry (or all three), and therefore leaves open the identity of the entity whose future is at stake. The four principal alternatives imagined for Judentum will be studied through texts by four seminal Jewish authors. Leo Baeck located the continuity of Judentum in religion and ethical vocation; Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer understood the Jews as a political nation whose exile must end with the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel; Simon Dubnow imagined a nonterritorial cultural nation secured by collective autonomy within a multinational imperial polity; and Franz Boas’s rejection of Jewish collectivity cast assimilation as a fourth possibility—the survival of individuals through the gradual dissolution of inherited group boundaries into surrounding national societies. 

Each meeting combines close reading with historical reconstruction. We will ask: What, precisely, is meant to survive—religion, nation, culture, or individuals? Which political orders and arrangements does each conception of Judentum assume are necessary to carry it into the future? What does each strategy make possible, and what does it foreclose? 

The first meeting will establish a framework for identifying the principal strategies of Jewish survival within a broader inquiry into historical contingency in twentieth-century Jewish history. Each of the following four meetings will center on one of the four texts. The sixth and concluding meeting will test the four strategies from the perspective of historical contingency. 

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

Amos Morris-Reich holds the Geza Roth Chair in Modern Jewish History and is a professor in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. His research intersects the history of science and Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His last two books are Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth-Century Cases (2022) and Nazi Fantasy: Vilém Flusser and History as Site of Experiment (2025).

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