History

Course

World Cultures and History - 10 Classes

Have you traveled to distant lands or read a good novel and wondered how these places or stories fit into the bigger sweep of history? Did you find history boring in high school? Was your study limited to that of the West? Is it time to take another look at world history and cultures? Let me provide you with a model of world history and cultures that can help you place these lands and periods into the right historical context. In this course, I will utilize a model developed by Peter Stearns at George Mason University to make history more comprehensible.  Space Limited

Topics to be discussed in this lecture: Various Irish myths of an ancient Jewish origin; why Cromwell invited Jews back to Ireland; Litvaks of Dublin’s “Little Jerusalem”; the Limerick pogrom (1904) and anti-Semitic violence in late 19th century Cork; Dublin’s (future Lord Mayor) Robert Briscoe and the Founding of Sein Fein; biographical sketches of famous father and son Irish Jews: Irish and Israeli Chief Rabbi
Isaac Herzog and Israeli President Chaim Herzog; “James Joyce’s Jew: the role of Leopold Bloom in his epic novel Ulysses; are ye a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?: the demise of Irish Jewry.

95% of the population of Ireland is Catholic, 5% is Protestant,
I am the Chief Rabbi of the rest
--Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of Ireland (1948-1959)

Early Jewish migrations to the Black Sea region; Black Plague Massacres and the mass migration of Western European Jews to Ukraine; economic and social Life of the Ukrainian shtetl Jew; Ukrainian Jewry and the Cossack pogroms; profiles of great Ukrainian Chassidic masters; chafing under Czars: Jews in the Pale of Settlement; Krimchak and Karaite Jews of Crimea; under Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and White Guardists (1917-21); The Babi Yar Massacre; Natan Sharanksi and the Refusenik movement.*No class 2/15

These PowerPoint/DVD presentations deal with Mizrachi (Eastern, Oriental) Jews whose mores and folkways were in many ways at great variance with those of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewry. Communities discussed in these presentations: Jewish Untouchables?: Caste and racial stratification among God’s Chosen People in Cochin and Bombay, India; the people with the blue-stained fingers: Tadjiki Jewish silk-dyers of Central Asia; a remedy for the Evil Eye: folk traditions of the Jews of Afghanistan; lost in the land of Assyria: The Mountain Jews of Kurdistan; "Blue-turbaned Muslims": the Jews of Kaifeng, China. * No class 2/15

"NEW" Birobidzhan: Stalin's Socialist Paradise for Jews in Siberia - 4 classes

In 1934, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Region, popularly known as Birobidzhan, in a remote, sparsely populated territory in the Soviet Far East. Designated as the national homeland of Soviet Jewry, Birobidzhan was part of the Kremlin's efforts to create an alternative to Palestine; Topics discussed: Lenin, Stalin, the Nationalities Issues, and the Jewish Question; Jewish Bolshevism, Bolshevik Judaism: the establishment of the Jewish Section of the CP; propaganda campaigns to settle Jews on the soil in the Crimea and Siberia; everyday life and culture in the JAR; other solutions to the "Jewish Problem" Stalin and the Doctors' Plot.

"NEW"  Proselytes and Apostates: Conversion to and from Judaism- 4 classes

Ger tzeddek: The “Righteous Convert” in the Bible and Talmud; Jewish Queendom of Adiabene; Jewish kingdom of Himyar; Subbotniki of Ukraine;  peasant converts of San Nicandro, Italy; Abayudaya of Uganda; Bene Menashe of Mizoram, India; Individual Converts: Ruth, Onkeles, Lord George Gordon, Warder Cresson, Sammy Davis Jr., Nissim Black; Meshummad: the apostate in the Bible and Talmud; some notable apostates: Jeronimo Santa Maria, Abner of Burgos, Nicholas Donin, Jacob Frank, Boris Pasternak, Rabbi Italo Zolli.