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.

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.