Political Thinkers of East European Jewry
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6 sessions, Tuesdays
February 28; March 7, 14, 21, 28; April 4 Tuition: $325 Registration is closed. Sign up for YIVO's email list to receive announcements of upcoming classes. For inquiries about this course, contact: Ben Kaplan |
Instructor: Jack Jacobs
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the world of East European Jewry was transformed by sweeping changes. Political thought has often been sparked by such change – and this was certainly true on the Jewish street. This course will focus on the ideas of Dubnow, Zhitlowsky, Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Syrkin, Borochov, Scherer, and Jabotinsky. We will analyze and debate both the positions taken by these writers on questions of the day – including such issues as the role of the diaspora, the desirability of creating a Jewish homeland or state, the significance of language, the appropriate response to political antisemitism, and the relationships of secular Jews to Judaism – and our own, contemporary, attitudes towards the matters with which these writers were concerned. We will, in other words, devote sustained attention both to exploring the positions of earlier generations of thinkers, and to discussing the degree, if any, to which the approaches of these thinkers have continued resonance.
Jack Jacobs is a professor of political science at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of On Socialists and “the Jewish Question” after Marx (1992), Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (2009), and The Frankfurt School, Jewish Lives, and Antisemitism (2015), and is the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001). He has recently completed editing Jews and Leftist Politics, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Jacobs was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University in 1996-1997, a Fulbright Scholar at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute in 2009, and was the Louis and Helen Padnos Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan during the Fall 2016 semester. He is YIVO’s 2017 Jacob Kronhill Visiting Scholar in East European Jewish History.
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