We often refer to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages as "the Rabbinic Period," on account of the massive literary production of the rabbis, including the two Talmuds and many midrashic works. But there is a wide-ranging and rich Jewish history known from Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources that is entirely ignored in rabbinic literature.These non-Jewish sources offer glimpses into Jewish history, but they are few and often hostile to Jews.

How can the historian separate real historical Jews from the symbolic Jews conjured out of Christian and Muslim theological prejudice? In this course, Fred Astren (San Francisco State University) takes up that question, telling stories the rabbis did not tell.

Who this is for:

• Readers interested in Jewish history beyond the rabbinic and Talmudic sources
• Anyone curious how Jews appear in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic historical sources
• Students of Late Antiquity, the early medieval world, or Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations

What you'll leave with:

• Familiarity with how Jews are depicted in Christian and Muslim historical writing
• Tools for evaluating historically biased or theologically motivated sources
• A sharper sense of the line between historical Jews and symbolic ones

Four Thursdays: October 29, November 5, 12, and 19, 6–7:30pm Pacific Time

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

Bukharian, Kavkazi (Mountain), and Georgian Jews have lived in Central Asia and the Caucasus for many centuries, and their histories touch the Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish worlds at once. This three-session course introduces each community in turn and explores the multilayered, millennia-old stories of these communities.

Who this is for:

• Anyone curious about the Jewish communities of Central Asia and the Caucasus
• Readers interested in Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish identity

What you'll leave with:

• An introduction to the history of each community
• A sense of how they relate to the Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Russian-speaking Jewish worlds

Three Tuesdays: November 10, 17 and 24, 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.