From Samson to Lil Dicky: Jewish Masculinities Between Germany, Eastern Europe and North America - Einzelansicht

This seminar will examine the complex entanglements between Jewishness and male gender identities in major Jewish centers in Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, and Israel. We will learn how negotiating and performing gender has defined Jewish history and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The seminar shifts our attention to several contexts that have shaped modern Jewish masculinities: orthodoxy, bourgeois Jewish cultures, Zionism, acculturation, and antisemitism. We will discuss masculine norms and virtues surrounding bread-winning, fatherhood, or defense-readiness and analyze how they were negotiated by men and women. The course re-centers Jewish voices and Jewish perspectives, rather than non-Jewish and often antisemitic approaches to Jewish masculinities. Discussing how Jews related to physical strength or military, we will learn how to question the lachrymose approach to Jewish history that underscores Jewish disempowerment.

Testat