Jewish Studies Commons^™

The History Of Teaching The Holocaust In Public Secondary Schools In The United States, From The 1960s To The Present, Julia Highbury Spenser

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Godshard's Word, Ari Mackoff

Senior Projects Spring 2022

A kabbalistic, speculative novella that loosely reimagines the biblical Jonah story, set in the mid-1500s in a world with an alternate gender framework. Explores concepts of Jewish textuality and canonizing, and the pushback against the divine call that characterizes certain Tanakhic figures.

Haredi Chinuch: The Role Of Education And Technology On The Borders Of Ultra-Orthodox Communities, Anna Stewart

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …

Revisiting The Who And The Where: A Quest To Understanding The Identities Of Second-Generation Israeli-American Youth, Yuval Elbaz

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This is a study about identity formation patters on twelve second generation Israeli-Americans. The study will be divided into three sections: economic assimilation religious assimilation, and political assimilation. I will argue that living in the United States has a significant influence on the way participants viewed their Israeli identities. Although identity will be the focal point of this study, this is not to claim that identity is a fixed category, but rather is fluid and affected by various external and internal factors. In this study, identity is defined as the way people view themselves. For all participants, growing up in …

From The Outside Looking In: Mass Media Representations Of Jews In The U.S., Evyatar Guttman

Senior Projects Fall 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Innovation From Above, Below, And Behind: The Linguistics Of The Hebrew Revival, Aviv J. Porath

Senior Projects Spring 2021

This thesis seeks to investigate the unique example of Modern Hebrew’s linguistic revival and determine the historical and linguistic qualities that made it successful. I intend to challenge the common narrative of Hebrew revival as 'miraculous' and isolated from Jewish history. I will demonstrate the long legacy of Hebrew creativity, preservation, and reinvention that formed the foundations the Zionist movement was able to build upon. I also seek to expand the narrative of the revival process itself to more accurately account for the modern result that is Israeli Hebrew. The ‘planned’ element of the revival process, i.e. the well-documented top-down …

Self-Loving Jew, Akiva Shlomo Hirsch

Senior Projects Spring 2021

This is a stand-up comedy show by a person named Akiva Hirsch who attended Bard College. It revolves largely around a protest with Students For Justice In Palestine that they were a part of, and the ensuing internet backlash.

Building And Dreaming Diaspora: Zionist Negotiations, Collective Life, And Jewish Summer Camp, Mica Elise Hastings

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Rewriting The Haggadah: Judaism For Those Who Hold Food Close, Rose Noël Wax

Senior Projects Spring 2020

American Jews, specifically those who do not observe, often turn towards food as a performance of Jewish identity, both publicly and privately. Longing for roots, these Jews reach for a piece of Jewish culture that can make them not only feel Jewish, but also grounded in a longstanding tradition that explicitly ties Judaism to a dynamic food culture. In doing so they invent traditions, creating habits sometimes loosely based in prescribed or familial tradition, sometimes not at all. In this way, food, through invented traditions, allows modern non- observant American Jews to make their Jewish identity tangible.

The Origins Of Modern Anti-Semitism In France: A Study Of Jewish Experience From The Ancien Régime To The Second World War, Hadley Rose Britt

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

“A Palace On A Mountaintop”: Building Isaac Bashevis Singer’S House Of Justice, Mia Rachel Schiffer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the early and mid twentieth century, as social and political movements fractioned Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, Isaac Bashevis Singer turned with singular focus to “the idols” of love and literature. Exploring the changing face of Jewish life through storytelling, he encountered the same questions of spiritual and social transformation, of continuity and dissolution at the center of political debate.

This project asks how morality and ethics function in the context of cataclysm in Singer’s work. By parsing the author’s personal history recorded in two autobiographies, "In My Father’s Court" and "Love and Exile," and his novels "Enemies, a …

Primo Levi And Frantz Fanon: The Seizure Of Human Dignity, Reprisal, And Thereafter, Jake Cicero

Senior Projects Spring 2019

History has proven that memory, both collective and individual, can act as a trigger for revolution – the question at stake is the extent to which violence is appropriate, or furthermore beneficial, to the revolutionaries. There are limits to rational, ideological, and theological approaches to humanity amidst defining 20th century experiences for humanity. The path to modernity is a contested one. Primo Levi and Frantz Fanon give voice to the internalized debates of the oppressed and uncover historical truths to shed light on the reality of revolution in the 20th century. Fanon, the anti-colonial revolutionary and Levi, the survivor of …

A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader And The Spatial Poetics Of Disability, Carl Robert Nelson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Devorah, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In Devorah, I sought to deliver an image to a text I could only engage with through removal. Unable to read the original Yiddish memoir written by my great grandmother, Devorah Schneider, I relied on a translation. Upon realizing that a photograph of the world couldn’t properly illustrate the experiences I was reading, I decided to expose photographic paper beneath an empty enlarger, one with no negative. As the blank projections bled, grew, shrunk and glowed in my darkroom, I began to build an abstract language in dialogue with Devorah’s words.

The project began when I decided to engage with …

Crazy In The Garden, Martin Pate Katzoff

Senior Projects Fall 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Ubi Bene, Ibi Patria - The Identities, Displacements, And Homelands Of The Juifs D’Algérie, Britt Shacham

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Multidisciplinary Studies of Bard College.

Beyond The Pale: The Development Of Yiddish Socialism, Zoli B. Goldblatt

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: The Poetics Of Violence In Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry, Benjamin Julius Dranoff

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College