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Contact
Phone 312.322.1794
Jewishstudies@spertus.edu
A variety of classes and public programs take place in the evening and on Sunday. See our calendar of events for more details.
For more information, contact Ellen LeVee 312.322.1794 or elevee@spertus.edu
Jewish Studies | Current Students
Sunday Seminars '08
For current MSJS, MSJE, MAJS and DSJS students.
» Registration form (.pdf)
Due to their success last year, we are happy to again offer our Spring Sunday Seminars. These seminars are intended primarily for graduate students enrolled in Spertus College degree programs who live in the Chicago metropolitan area or within easy commute. They offer the opportunity to develop greater familiarity with the College and interaction with other students. The courses listed below are offered subject to sufficient student enrollment. A registration deadline of April 28 has been set. Students may choose to take one or both courses. Lunch is available at the Spertus Café.
Contact Dr. Ellen LeVee, Assistant Dean for Jewish Studies at 312-322-1794 or elevee@spertus.edu, for more information.
Course Offerings
The Shtetl as it Was:
A Cultural History of the Jewish Towns in Poland
(3 quarter hour credits)
Dr. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Sundays, 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm, May 4, 11, 25, June 1, 8
Between the seventeenth and early twentieth century most East European Jews lived in a shtetl, changed a shtetl and changed with it. The shtetl underwent a cultural transformation through the spread of popular Kabbalah, the schism between the pious Hasidim and their opponents, the rise of the Maskilim (the enlightened Jews), the collapse of Polish ownership and the emerging Russian administration, the modernization of East Europe, and the late nineteenth-century crisis of the shtetl economy. This course provides students with a detailed vision of how the institutions, economy, culture, and households of the shtetl functioned. Students will meet with the Polish town owner and the Russian police administrator, will step into a Jewish tannery and a printing-press, will study Jewish books in a prayer house and a synagogue, will trade in the local annual fair and argue with the Burial Society members, will visit a shtetl cemetery and read the inscriptions on the tomb-stones, will read forbidden and allowed popular Jewish books, will participate in the exorcisms of local evil spirits and will look for the ways to escape the shtetl.
Judaism and the Social Sciences:
Processes of a Situated Self
(1.5 quarter hour credits)
Dr. Ellen LeVee
Sundays, 10:00 am - 1:00 pm, May 4, 18, June 1, 15
In contemporary America, the morality of a society is generally judged according to how well it allows and even facilitates personal autonomy and individual authenticity. From this perspective, Judaism, as a religious tradition emphasizing commandments, would seem to be the very antithesis of a moral social system. This course will explore the processes of a self as situated in the context of Jewish tradition, raising questions as to how coherent the assumptions of a purely personal subjectivity are, as well as suggesting an alternate worldview to current modern and post-modern perspectives. Topics to be considered include processes of internalization, the dynamics of the love-fear complementarity in Judaism, the fruitful tensions between internal experience and external observance, and the creativity involved in being commanded.
Faculty
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Moscow University (1988) and a Ph.D. in Modern Jewish History from Brandeis University (2001). He has been a Rothschild Fellow at Hebrew University (Jerusalem) and is an Associate Fellow at Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. He has edited books and published numerous articles in comparative literature and Jewish history and is the author of a monograph Evrei v Russkoi Armii, 1827-1914 [Jews in the Russian Army] (2003). At present he is working on a book project "Drafted into Modernity: Jews in the Russian Army (1827-1917)." Dr. Petrovsky-Shtern is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University and Ezra Sensibar Visiting Professor at Spertus for the 2006-07 academic year.
Ellen LeVee is Assistant Dean of Jewish Studies at Spertus College. Dr. LeVee received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. Her areas of research interest include Sociology of Religion, Social Theory and Judaism, and Women and Judaism. She has wide ranging experience in both teaching and administration, having taught Sociology at Berkeley, lectured on Jewish texts in adult education settings, coordinated the teaching efforts of clinicians in the area of Medical Humanities and Bioethics for the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and instructed students in writing at the Hebrew Theological College’s Blitstein Teacher’s Institute. Among her publications are articles in the journal Religion and Intellectual Life and the book series Lifecycles.
For more information or to register, contact Ellen LeVee 312.322.1794 or elevee@spertus.edu
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