Examine the significance of Benedict de Spinoza's philosophical system.

Study of the first decades of Israeli literature. Themes include the establishment of a new state in the aftermath of the Holocaust, conflict between Israel and Arab nations, and conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Explore the use of persuasive strategies in an ancient and non-Western culture, that of the Hebrew Bible. Using rhetorical techniques, analyze three types of texts: narratives of interactions between ordinary people and God; interactions between people, God, and authorized prophets; and prayers in prose and poetry.

Examine the work of Jewish creative intellectuals from the United States, Latin America, and Canada from a comparative perspective.

An introduction to the diversity of prophetic literature in the Old Testament, its historical development, social context, and Near Eastern parallels.

Examine the legal traditions of the Torah (Pentateuch) and what they reveal about the practice of law and justice in ancient Israel and the wider biblical world.

Examine stereotypes that have come to define Jewishness in American culture by focusing both on the antisemitic tropes perpetuated by non-Jewish representations of 'the Jew' in literary classics and on the archetypes employed as coping mechanisms in cultural representations created by Jews themselves. Analyze how stereotypes become enmeshed in cultural consciousness and investigate ways in which representations of ethnic, religious, and racial minorities are governed by these kinds of one-dimensional archetypes.

Examine the coalescence of educational theories and national aspirations in the process of shaping child-rearing practices within the Jewish population of Palestine under the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate and into the first two decades of the State of Israel.

Explore the cultural history of Jews in the United States, Latin America, and Canada through a representative sample of short literary texts, film clips, and musical recordings.

Examine religions through the concepts of space and time.

Examine the literature of Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors and their artistic successors. Engage novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, and even song lyrics with questions of memory and of place.

Explore how fascism, communism, liberal democracy, and the current nationalistic backlash against immigration have all used the popularity of sports to achieve their strategic goals, from the 1936 Nazi Olympics to Germany's 2014 World Cup victory and beyond.