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.

Twenty years ago, historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg published Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century, a landmark study of the complicated political relationship between Black and Jewish Americans. Challenging both the nostalgic idea of a seamless Black-Jewish alliance and the notion that the relationship simply collapsed, Greenberg traced a history in which cooperation and conflict, shared political goals and competing interests, were intertwined from the beginning.

Two decades later, Greenberg returns to Troubling the Waters to ask what has changed, what has endured, and how the history looks from the vantage point of today. What can the past tell us about Black-Jewish relations now, and does the idea of a Black-Jewish alliance still help us understand the political relationship between the two communities?

Who this is for

• Anyone interested in the history of Black-Jewish relations in America, beyond the simplified alliance-or-collapse narrative
• Readers of Troubling the Waters looking to hear from the author directly, twenty years on
• Those thinking about coalition politics and how shared and competing interests shape relationships between communities over time

What you'll leave with

• Greenberg’s account of how cooperation and conflict between Black and Jewish Americans were intertwined from the start
• Her view of what has changed in twenty years, and whether the idea of an alliance still helps explain the present

Two Wednesdays: November 11 & 18, 6–7:30pm Pacific

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

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.

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.