REL 249
Antisemitism Fall 2024
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed JWST 249

In this course students will investigate intellectual traditions, political movements, and cultural objects that construct Jews, Jewishness, or Judaism as a negative principle. Where is Judaism portrayed as the darkness by contrast to the light? When are Jews depicted as a pernicious force that explains the presence of evil in the world? How is Jewishness used as a critical category to identify what is retrograde, deracinating, or base? We will interpret materials from a variety of times and places, including the ancient world, the medieval period, and the present day. We will also explore prominent theoretical approaches to the interpretation of these materials. Is there a continuous phenomenon that connects every assertion of Jewish malevolence for over two thousand years of human history? Or should claims about Jewish malevolence be presumed to have an entirely distinct meaning, origin, and purpose in each historical context? Which particular threats are Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness typically alleged to pose? How does the idea of a Jewish threat fit with ideas about race, gender, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, and nationality? This is a course about negative meaning-making. Our primary goal throughout the course is to study how shadows of thought, symbolism, and story are cast. It is a course about how language, images, structures, and institutions are used to constitute an antagonist: villainy, the demonic, the enemy, the conspiratorial cabal, the exploitative interloper, “the Jew.” And it is a course about the tragic consequences for real people — for Jews and for all humanity — when negative principles and fantasies are not contained by realism, reasonableness, and compassion.