This four-session course introduces Sigmund Freud’s thought through his 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The book is full of jokes from the world of Freud’s father: Jewish Central Europe rather than cosmopolitan Vienna, a land of matchmakers, schnorrers, and ambivalence about assimilation.

We will focus on Freud's own texts in order to understand him as a Jewish thinker hoping to operate in a universalistic scientific idiom, trying to produce a science of the mind out of the material of Jewish experience. We will, of course, think about the jokes themselves, and about what they do for us. Freud said they provide "victory," but he never said over what, leaving us to answer that question for ourselves.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious about Freud's Jewish background and how it shaped his thought
• Readers interested in Jewish humor, jokes, and Central European Jewish culture
• Students of psychoanalysis, Freud, or the history of ideas
• Anyone who enjoys close reading; no background required

What you'll leave with:

• A close reading of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
• A way of reading Freud as a Jewish thinker as well as a “universal” scientist
• Your own answer to Freud’s open question: what victory do jokes provide?

Four Thursdays: November 12, 19, December 3 & 10, 1–2:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

For decades, the children's house stood at the heart of the kibbutz movement's vision of communal education: from infancy through the teen years, children lived and slept there, apart from their parents, as an expression of the movement's founding ideals. Communal sleeping for younger children began to disappear in the 1970s and was gone by the 1990s, although some kibbutzim still maintain separate communal housing for teenagers. For those who lived it, the experience, especially at night, could be exhilarating or deeply traumatizing, and its legacy still shapes how many Israelis think about family, community, and child-rearing.

In three weekly sessions, we'll explore the children’s house through literature and film: short stories including work by Amos Oz, memoir excerpts, selections from Bruno Bettelheim's Children of the Dream, and the documentary Children of the Sun.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious about Israeli history and the social experiments of the kibbutz movement
• Readers interested in Israeli literature, including the work of Amos Oz.
• Former kibbutz volunteers who want to revisit that experience through a new lens
• Anyone interested in the psychology of child-rearing and alternative models of family life

What you'll leave with:

• Discussion of stories by Amos Oz and others, memoirs, Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream, and the documentary Children of the Sun
• A sense of how growing up in the children’s house shaped the people who lived it

Three Mondays: November 16, 23, and 30, 7–8:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Ladino music records the history of the Sephardic world: melodies that joined medieval Jewish liturgy with the Christian and Muslim music of Iberia, then traveled after 1492 to North Africa, Europe, and above all the Ottoman Empire, taking on new influences along the way. The course gives one session each to the genres at the center of Sephardic life: romansas (narrative ballads), kantikas (lyrical songs), and the historical poems and liturgical hymns known as coplas and piyyutim. Throughout, we’ll look at how oral transmission, community identity, and gender shaped each tradition, from medieval Iberia to today’s revival.

Session 1: The Narrative Tradition (Romansas) Ballads that began with Iberian street minstrels had spread through Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Spain by the fifteenth century. We’ll listen to romansas sung mostly by women and see how Sephardic communities reshaped their themes of loyalty, honor, and exile to reflect Jewish life.

Session 2: Life Cycle and Song (Kantikas) Kantikas, the tradition’s lyrical popular songs, took shape under Mediterranean and Balkan influence from the late nineteenth century on. Sung mostly by women, they cover love, family, weddings, lullabies, and laments, along with songs for the life cycle and the holidays.

Session 3: Faith and Identity (Coplas and Piyyutim) These two genres were performed by men. Coplas, composed by rabbis and scholars across the Ottoman Empire, taught Jewish history and ethics and chronicled real events such as plagues and political upheavals. Sephardic piyyutim, rooted in the Golden Age of medieval Spain, are sung in Hebrew and form the core of synagogue worship.

Who this is for

• Anyone interested in Sephardic history, Jewish music, or the Ladino language and its revival
• Students of Jewish liturgy and poetry curious about Sephardic traditions of coplas and piyyutim
• Readers and singers drawn to the oral and folk traditions of the Mediterranean and Ottoman worlds

What you'll leave with

• A grounding in the history of Ladino music from medieval Iberia through the Ottoman Empire to its modern revival
• Familiarity with the three core genres of Sephardic song
• An understanding of how gender, oral transmission, and community identity shaped this tradition over centuries

Three Wednesdays: November 25, December 2 and 9, 1–2:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Avot Yeshurun (1904–1992) is one of modern Hebrew literature's most singular and disorienting voices. He was a poet who insisted Hebrew carry what it could barely hold: the diasporic weight of Yiddish and Arabic, and the ongoing presence of the dead among the living. Writing against the grain of the modern Hebrew literary establishment, Yeshurun forged an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic poetics that unsettles any clear border between languages, generations, and homelands.

In this three-session course, we'll enter Yeshurun's work through close attention to key poems in translation, alongside prose selections that illuminate his relationship to language mixing, translation, memory, and catastrophe. No prior familiarity with Yeshurun or Hebrew poetry is required, just a willingness to sit with the difficulty, strangeness, and resonant ghosts that his poetry hosts.

Who this is for:

• Readers curious about modern Hebrew poetry, Israeli literature, or twentieth-century Jewish writing
• Anyone interested in translation, multilingualism, and diaspora in literature
• Students of Hebrew literature, Yiddish studies, or Jewish intellectual history

What you'll leave with:

• Close familiarity with key poems and prose by Avot Yeshurun, in translation
• A framework for reading Yeshurun's hybrid Hebrew-Yiddish-Arabic poetics
• A deeper understanding of how modern Hebrew literature grapples with memory, loss, and catastrophe

Three Wednesdays: December 2, 9, and 16, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Why did so many Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become revolutionaries? Ask the question in New York or Warsaw and you get one set of answers. In Baghdad, Casablanca, or Tehran, the story changes. Radical Jewish Politics: A Global Perspective, a new volume from Rutgers University Press, starts in the Middle East and North Africa, with Jewish communists in Iraq and Egypt and anticolonial fighters in Algeria and Tunisia, and zooms out to Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. What emerges is a history of Jews who wanted to remake the world and, just as much, to find a place in it. Communism, anarchism, and anticolonial nationalism all promised that place, and all of them, sooner or later, exacted a price: prison, exile, or Jewishness itself. Editors Nathaniel Deutsch and Alma Heckman of UC Santa Cruz and Tony Michels of the University of Wisconsin–Madison join us to talk about what this new global view reveals.

Who this is for:

• Anyone interested in modern Jewish history beyond Europe and the United States
• Readers curious about Jewish communists, anarchists, and anticolonial activists

What you'll leave with:

• A look at Jewish radicals in Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Argentina, and Brazil and how local conditions shaped their choices
• The chance to put your questions to the volume’s three editors

Monday, December 7, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.

Complete our full Hebrew 1 curriculum in just four weeks! Beginning December 14, this accelerated course uses Prayerbook Hebrew the Easy Way and combines eight recorded lessons with four live online study sessions with the instructor. Two recorded lessons are released each week, allowing you to work through the material on your own schedule, while the weekly live sessions give you a chance to ask questions, review what you’ve learned, and get additional guidance. Because the main instruction takes place in the recorded lessons, the live sessions are designed as brief weekly check-ins rather than full class meetings.

By the end of the course, you’ll be ready to continue directly into Hebrew 2 in January.

Who this is for:

• Learners ready to complete most of the Hebrew 1 coursework through recorded lessons, with a short live session each week
• Hebrew 1 students who would like a concentrated review before beginning Hebrew 2 in January 

What you'll leave with:

• Completion of the full Hebrew 1 curriculum in just four weeks
• The ability to read basic prayerbook and biblical Hebrew texts
• A solid grasp of the Hebrew alphabet, vowels, and foundational vocabulary
• Readiness to continue directly into Hebrew 2 in January

Required text: Prayerbook Hebrew the Easy Way, available at Afikomen Judaica in Berkeley and other outlets.

Recorded lessons: Two each week, released December 14, 21, and 28 and January 4.

Live study sessions: Sundays, December 20 and 27 and January 3 and 10, 7–7:30pm Pacific Time, online.

Questions? Our FAQ covers registration, recordings of missed sessions, refunds, and financial assistance.