SPECIAL TOPICS
In this course, we will explore the history of love, sexuality, and desire within Judaism, with a particular focus on twentieth-century American Jewish history and American Jewish cultures. For each major topic, we will briefly discuss key Biblical and rabbinic texts through which Jews have commonly related to the topic at hand. We will then dive in to the history of twentieth-century Jews and sexuality in the U.S. Topics include: marriage and the family; gender diversity; homosexuality; abortion and contraception; anti-semitic discourses of Jewish sexual deviance; the erotic in Jewish sacred and secular literature; Jews, pornography, and obscenity; prostitution and human trafficking in historical perspective; sexual violence in Biblical texts; feminist activism around sexual abuse and the #MeToo movement’s impact on the Jewish communal world.
