Borns Jewish Studies Program

What’s more important, the individual or the group?  Is it the acceptance of the way the past sees things or deliberately doing them differently?  How is childhood affected by the past or how does it represent the future?  This course presents the forces affecting issues, topics, and forms of Israeli literature composed over the years since statehood.  Read about the fascination with minorities; find out about the dilemmas of choice made from personal or group expectations; follow stories of rites of personal and national passage.  Readings will be from the works of leading Israeli Hebrew authors, male and female, on issues of the group and individualism set in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and various villages.  Read about the “Death of the Little God” and how one can choose a career as bus driver or as God.

The survey course will bring before you the greatest and most talented Hebrew writers of the last decades.  We will read works by S.Y. Agnon, A. Appelfeld, Shulamit Hareven, Ruth Almog, Yehuda Amichai, A.B. Yehoshua, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, David Grossman and Amos Oz, to name but a few.  We will be reading short stories, novels, and some poetry.

This is an Intensive Writing (IW) class.  Students will submit five periodic essays on assigned topics, take a final exam and demonstrate an engagement with assigned readings.  Active participation is encouraged.  Grades will be determined based on attendance, quizzes, essays, and a final exam.  No knowledge of Hebrew is required.