CTSJ 128 Theories of Antisemitism
This class interrogates significant theoretical approaches to conceptualizing and critiquing antisemitism. While the neologism “antisemitism” refers most directly to reactionary political movements mobilized in Germany and France in the late nineteenth century, scholars and critics have long debated if and how antisemitism changes across time and place, antisemitism’s relationship to other forms of racial exclusion and gendered hierarchy, and the persistence (or displacement) of theological anti-Judaism in Western modernity. We will begin with a brief examination of the history of Jewish emancipation in Europe and ensuing debates about the “Jewish Question” before surveying how antisemitism has been understood from various historical, theological, political, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and postcolonial perspectives. Some of the theorists we may engage include Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Frantz Fanon, and Shulamit Volkov.
Credits
3 hours in class 9-12 hours of reading and writing