JEWISH STUDIES COURSES IN THE 2026–2027 ACADEMIC YEAR
FALL TERM
Mandatory Courses
JEWS5024 – Grand Debates in Jewish History
JEWS4023 – Grand Debates in Jewish History: Sources and Texts
Instructors: Carsten Wilke, Michael L. Miller
CEU credits: 2 + 2 (=4 + 4 ECTS)
This “grand debates” seminar introduces students to the place of Jewish history within broader historiographical discussions. On the one hand, Jewish traditions have served as universal points of reference in both Christianity and Islam; on the other, Jews have often been constructed as the paradigmatic “other” throughout their long history as a marginalized diaspora minority. As David Nirenberg has argued, modernity still “thinks with Judaism”: ideas about Jews have repeatedly been invoked as foils and, at times, as models for thinking about history and society more broadly. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel have profoundly reshaped the field, bringing questions of collective vulnerability, agency, and power to the center of historiographical reflection.
Jewish history thus offers both a prism into majority cultures and a comparative framework for conceptualizing minority histories. Yet, however productive these approaches may be, the semi nar also insists on attending to the internal dynamics of Jewish historical processes. Do outsiders have a history of their own, and how should that history be written in relation to the histories of others? We will examine theoretical and historiographical texts by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars who have variously conceptualized Jewishness in terms of religious norms, cultural identity, eco nomic antagonism, racial difference, national continuity, and, in some cases, the absence of any permanent or stable framework of identity. These “grand debates” raise a fundamental doubt: how should the field itself be defined? Conventional categories such as religion, nation, and civi lization often fail to capture the complexity of a dispersed, non-state collectivity. Likewise, familiar analytical concepts—including modernity, secularization, spatial and temporal continuity, cul tural embeddedness, social and symbolic power—must be applied critically and historically.
The first part of the seminar, comprising two sessions, examines two contrasting ways of framing the Jewish condition: first, as an excluded minority in opposition to dominant forms of power; and second, as a cohesive tradition characterized by extraordinary continuity, longevity, and cultural impact. The following five sessions introduce major historiographical traditions, from the emer gence of academic Jewish Studies in the nineteenth century to contemporary debates over Zion ism and the very meaning of Jewish peoplehood. The final five sessions turn to current research in five selected areas: gender, power, colonialism, East-West entanglements, and secular/religious identities. Together, we will read key texts, assess their theoretical assumptions, and discuss their practical implications for research.
Grand Debates in Jewish History 1 is designed for all students in the historical and social sci ences. The companion course, Grand Debates in Jewish History 2: Sources and Texts, focuses on close readings and discussions of key primary sources in modern Jewish historiography.
Elective Courses
JEWS5005 – Jews and the City
Instructor: Michael Miller
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS)
Jews have been identified with the city to such an extent that they are often described as the quin tessential urban dwellers. This course examines the multifaceted and multivalent relationships between Jews and the city, from medieval Europe and North Africa to modern Europe, America and the Middle East. It explores various forms of Jewish urban settlement, from the Venetian ghetto and Moroccan mellah to the Eastern European shtetl and the cosmopolitan metropolis. Jews were not always a predominantly urban people, but they underwent mass urbanization in the nineteenth century, especially in Europe and America. Using documentary sources, belles-lettres and film, this course explores the impact of this urbanization on religious practice, social rela tions, and patterns of assimilation, paying particular attention to the growing identification of Jews with the charms and vices of the big city. Three cities will be examined in greater detail: Budapest, New York and Tel Aviv. We will also reflect on “cities without Jews,” probing the perceived rela tionships between Jews and the city that come into sharper focus only with the Jews’ real or imag ined absence.
JEWS5523 – Research Seminar/Collaborative Research Project: Habsburg after the Holocaust I
Instructor: Jan Rybak
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS)
This is the first part of a two-part research seminar. This will be a joint research project conducted by students together with the instructor. It will ask how Jews from the former Habsburg Empire remembered that state and its society after the Holocaust. It aims to make a contribution to this scholarly discussion with the publication of a jointly authored article and a presentation at a major international conference. To explore this, we will closely study personal memories and accounts in Yizkor memory books. These were produced from the 1940s by survivors of the Holocaust and by former residents of the region to commemorate the communities destroyed by the Nazis. Many of them contain personal memories of life under Habsburg rule. We will ask how this life was re membered, what narratives emerge, and how they can be understood in their specific context. Published in multiple languages, many of them have been translated into English and are publicly accessible. They represent a unique source and a productive approach to study how life before 1918 was remembered in a context that was shaped by the destruction of 1939–1945. In this first part (fall term), students will learn about the Jewish history of the region, the discus sions over memory, the critical approach to the sources, and will learn about practical aspects of the historian’s profession, such as how to publish articles, how to submit conference proposals, and how to present one’s work. We will also start to work empirically with the sources. Students may choose to participate only in the first part of the course (fall) and receive only two credits. Participation in the first part (fall) is a precondition for participating in the second (winter).
WINTER TERM
Elective Courses
JEWS5026 – Research Seminar/Collaborative Research Project: Habsburg after the Holocaust II
Instructor: Jan Rybak
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS)
This is the second part of a two-part research seminar. It will ask how Jews from the former Habs burg Empire remembered that state and its society after the Holocaust. It aims to make a contri bution to this scholarly discussion with the publication of an article and a presentation at a major international conference. In this second part (winter term), students will form research groups, centered on the sources from different localities. Students are expected to conduct independent research into their case studies and regularly report their findings during our weekly meetings when we discuss them and bring them together into a jointly authored article and the paper for the conference. Participation in the first part (fall) is a precondition for participating in the second (winter). Every one who contributes to our joint research in the course’s second part may be listed as co-author of the article and participate in the conference if they so wish. As the publication process will un doubtedly be longer than the duration of the seminar, students are encouraged (but not required) to continue as part of the research group even after the formal end of the course.
JEWS5025 – Jewish Memory
Instructor: Carsten Wilke
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS)
The Jewish religious and cultural tradition invokes representations of collective history with such an intensity that Judaism has been called a "faith of memory." This observation recommends Jew ish memory as a particularly revealing example of premodern and modern engagement with the past. The class will explore both the sacralized form of remembrance shaped by the biblical im perative zakhor (remember!) and its ramifications in modern secular and non-Jewish contexts. The first half of the class encompasses the textual and ritual expression that Jewish religious practice has given to historical myths and narratives such as creation, revelation, election, and messianic redemption from collective catastrophe. The class program includes the reception of these mod els in other religious traditions, especially Christianity, and the second half of the class will study how in contemporary Jewry these religious traditions were transformed into secular rituals of com memoration. The contemporary Jewish world is marked by the rise of official memorial policies organized by communities, associations, and the Israeli state, in cooperation as well as in tension with the memories of individuals, families, and ethnic subgroups. A particular emphasis will be placed on the memory of the Holocaust, whose global reception led once again to an ambiguous universalization of the Jewish tradition of remembrance.
JEWS5644 – Migration and Refugees in Modern Jewish History
Instructor: Susanne Korbel
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS)
At a moment when the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are increasingly invoked and contested in global debates about forced displacement, this course asks how histories of migration can illuminate the present. Since the final decades of the nineteenth century, mobility shaped Jewish life and the development of Jewish communities with unprecedented intensity: the mass migration movements from Eastern Europe and the Russian Pale of Settlement towards larger regional cities and the metropolises of Europe and the Ameri cas, waves of refugees during the First World War, successive emigration movements to Palestine and later Israel, flight from National Socialist persecution, and the painstaking reconstruction of Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Equally significant, yet long underrepre sented in mainstream historiography, are the mass displacements of Jewish communities from the MENA region after 1945 — from Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, or Yemen — as well as lesser-known migration trajectories across Asia, among them the intricate networks of Sephardic and Iraqi Jew ish communities that established themselves in India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, weaving trans national webs of trade, kinship, and belonging that rarely feature in conventional accounts of mod ern Jewish history. At the heart of this course lies the question of (in)visibility — whose migrations are counted, com memorated, and archived, and whose remain obscured. We pay particular attention to the gen dered and generational dimensions of forced mobility — the experiences of women, children, and unaccompanied minors — and to the ways in which these trajectories intersected with human trafficking and other forms of coerced movement, ensuring that such entangled and often si lenced histories are accorded the scholarly attention they deserve. Drawing on cutting-edge re search in migration and refugee studies, Jewish history, and global history, the course invites stu dents from across disciplines to engage with these questions through a range of primary sources and theoretical frameworks. While Jewish migration serves as the central lens, the course con sistently situates these histories within broader comparative and transnational contexts, making it equally relevant for students interested in refugee law, human rights, postcolonial mobilities, and the politics of memory.
SPRING TERM
Elective Courses
JEWS5028 – Kraków and its Surroundings (Excursion)
Instructors: Carsten Wilke, Jan Rybak, Susanne Korbel, Michael L. Miller
CEU credits: 1 (=2 ECTS), Elective Every year, the Jewish Studies Program organizes a field trip to a major Central European city for students enrolled in its courses. The 2027 field trip will explore Kraków, Poland’s historic royal capital and, for centuries, a major center of Jewish life, home to merchants, rabbinical scholars, political leaders, and cultural figures. Kraków has also become an important site of memory for the destruction of European Jewry, owing to its proximity to Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the tour, we will visit the exceptionally well-preserved ensemble of Jewish monuments in the former semi autonomous Jewish suburb of Kazimierz, as well as Holocaust memorial sites and countryside destinations in the surroundings. We will examine approaches to heritage preservation and en counter local academic colleagues. Kraków’s Jewish heritage will be considered within the broader historical context of the city: successively the residence of the medieval Polish kings, an independent republic, part of Habsburg Galicia, and a cultural center of the Second Polish Repub lic, Kraków is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose museums, festivals, and extensive tour ist infrastructure highlight the shared Polish-Jewish past in multiple ways.
JEWS5027 – Reading Modernity in Multilingual Jewish Literature
Instructor: Karolina Szymaniak (Sorbonne Université)
CEU credits: 1 (=2 ECTS)
This short block course offers an introduction to the history of modernism in the multilingual Jew ish literatures of East Central Europe. It explores what literary texts can tell us about the Jewish experience of modernity. We will combine an overview of the historical and literary context with close readings of texts originally written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and German. We will look at how writers responded to and represented a word in constant flux, including the shift from shtetl to metropolis, (re)invention of tradition, changing ideas about gender roles, projects of social and political emancipation, and the realities of anti-Jewish violence, war and revolution. The course introduces students to authors from different generations and backgrounds, as well as texts written in a variety of genres and shaped by diverse cultural contexts. Readings will in clude works by Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, Hayim Nahman Bialik, Dvora Baron, David Bergel son, David Fogel, Franz Kafka, Moshe Kulbak, Peretz Markish, Kadia Molodowsky, Bruno Schulz, Fradl Shtok, and Debora Vogel. We will also draw on modernist visual art that is in conversation with the literary works we will be reading.
LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION
Source languages are offered by the Source Language Teaching Group at CEU. They are open to and free of charge for all CEU students, faculty, and staff. They are subject to the regular registra tion procedure as part of the university curriculum.
The following courses/credits count towards the Jewish Studies Specialization:
HISU5034 Modern Hebrew Beginner (Source Language) I (Fall term)
Instructor: Asaf Doron
CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS), Elective
HISU5035 Modern Hebrew Beginner (Source Language) II (Winter term)
Instructor: Asaf Doron CEU credits: 2 (=4 ECTS), Elective
