Comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels have throughout their history in the United States had a complex relationship with members of minority groups, who have often been represented in racist and dehumanizing ways. Meanwhile, though, American Jews played influential roles in the development of the medium, and African-American, Latinx, Asian-American, and LGBTQ artists have more recently found innovative ways to use this medium to tell their stories. In this course, we will survey the history of comics in the U.S., focusing on the problems and opportunities they present for the representation of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. Comics we may read include Abie the Agent, Krazy Kat, Torchy Brown, Superman, and Love & Rockets, as well as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Mira Jacob’s Good Talk.

The roles played by Jews in the development of modern American literature are complex and contradictory. Influential American authors expressed anti-Semitic views in their correspondence and work, and prejudice excluded Jews from many literary and cultural opportunities well into the 20th century. Nonetheless Jewish publishers, editors, critics, and writers were extraordinarily influential in the development of the field, founding leading publishing houses, supporting freedom of expression and movements like modernism and postmodernism, and writing some of the most influential and lasting works in the tradition. In this course, we will explore the ways Jews have been represented in American literature and their roles in modernizing and expanding the field. Fulfills the English Department’s Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

What was at stake in the production and consumption of literature in the age of television and nuclear proliferation? We will read and analyze U.S. fiction, drama, and poetry produced after 1945, a period during which minority voices, particularly (but not only) those of American Jews, became central in U.S. literary culture. We will explore the tension between literature as just another form of entertainment (or even a pretentious instrument of exclusion) and literature as a privileged site of social analysis, critique, and minority self-expression. Authors considered may include Chester Himes, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Lorraine Hansberry, Tillie Olsen, Fran Ross, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Susan Sontag, Alejandro Morales, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, Tony Kushner, and Lan Samantha Chang. Fulfills the Diversity of Literatures in English requirement.

Introduction to Hebrew with emphasis on its contemporary spoken and written form. Practice the skills of listening and speaking as well as reading and writing, together with systematic study of Hebrew grammar. The course helps students develop their speaking ability as the sequence of new vocabulary words are arranged to support students’ progress step-wise in basic speech patterns. The materials introduce students to Hebrew in all historical periods: biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern.

Introduction to Hebrew with emphasis on its contemporary spoken and written form. Practice the skills of listening and speaking as well as reading and writing, together with systematic study of Hebrew grammar. The course helps students develop their speaking ability as the sequence of new vocabulary words are arranged to support students’ progress step-wise in basic speech patterns. The materials introduce students to Hebrew in all historical periods: biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern.

This course offers an overview of Italian Jewish culture and literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Students will read prose and poetry, essays and articles, as well as watch films that address issues such as religious and cultural identity, the right to difference, anti-Semitism and the Shoah. The course will also give students an overview of the formation and transformation of the Jewish community in Italian society. In addition to well-known Jewish Italian writers like Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, students will read pertinent works by non-Jewish writers like Rosetta Loy and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

This course exposes students to major approaches and issues in the interdisciplinary field of Jewish Studies, through a unique, local lens: the experiences of Jewish students at Wellesley College throughout its history. We will learn about the college’s requirement, for many decades after its founding, for every student to take a Hebrew Bible class each semester; examine pioneering roles played by Wellesley alums in the rabbinical profession; and consider a variety of positions for and against Zionism held by Jewish students at Wellesley over the past century. We will read and conduct oral histories of alums, examine materials in the College Archives, and meet alums working in Jewish communal life and in the field of Jewish Studies. By the end of the semester, students will have a solid grounding in the field of Jewish Studies as a whole and a roadmap for pursuing the study of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture at Wellesley and beyond.

Critical introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, studying its role in the history and culture of ancient Israel and its relationship to ancient Near Eastern cultures. Special focus on the fundamental techniques of literary, historical, and source criticism in modern scholarship, with emphasis on the Bible's literary structure and compositional evolution.

Why do bad things happen to good people? This course examines how the Bible confronts some of the most complex and confounding questions humans can ask regarding the relationship between actions and their inevitable outcomes. Through close readings of biblical texts and contemporaneous examples from the ancient Middle East and North Africa, students will be introduced to key theories and methods in biblical studies as tools for examining how the dynamic relationship between behaviors and their results shape the biblical understanding of justice, divine retribution, rewards, and moral order.

We will compare (1) punishment and reward in biblical narrative and law and their reverberations in both prophetic literature and more esoteric texts like the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes/Qohelet, and Job, to both (2) relevant contemporaneous examples from the ancient Middle East and North Africa, and (3) contemporary examples from popular culture (e.g., Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Wicked, KPop Demon Hunters, The Good Place, Hamilton, and Spirited Away) in order to ask how thinking about reward and punishment has changed over time and, especially, how modern thinking both adheres to and diverges from biblical and other ancient models.

This class has no prerequisites; no previous knowledge of the Bible or ancient history is presumed.

This course explores the use of biblical stories and themes in cinema. We will begin with films based on selected biblical texts including the exodus, the book of Job, and Esther. We will focus our attention on the cinematic treatments of biblical themes: freedom and bondage, passing, and suffering. No previous knowledge of film or the Bible is assumed; the course offers an introduction to key modes of biblical interpretation including historical criticism, feminist, womanist, literary and comparative approaches. Films include Moonlight, Prince of Egypt, Inglourious Basterds, Passing, Harriet, Brokeback Mountain, Pariah, and Minari.

An examination of the origins, character, course, and consequences of Nazi antisemitism during the Third Reich.  Special attention to Nazi racialist ideology, and how it shaped policies that affected such groups as the Jews, the disabled, the Roma, Poles and Russians, Afro-Germans, and gay men.  Consideration of the impact of Nazism on women and on the German medical and teaching professions.

Why do people build monuments? How do they help and whom do they hurt? This seminar introduces approaches and case studies related to sacred monuments, monumentality, and memory from the ancient Mediterranean to the Confederate South. We will review current research in biblical studies, classics, archaeology, and sociology with a focus on physical monuments in the Bible, and in the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity, and up through the present. Case studies include historical monuments and artifacts such as the Law of Hammurabi, Confederate monuments, and obelisks of Mussolini; literary descriptions of artifacts including the Ten Commandments, cultic statues, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; and monument desecration and destruction including Roman condemnations of memory and #BlackLivesMatter protests. Possible trips to the MFA, and Harvard Art and Semitic Museums.