The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry

The Tauber Institute is devoted to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture and society. It has a special interest in studying the Holocaust and its aftermath within the context of modern European intellectual, political and social history.

The institute is organized on a multidisciplinary basis with the participation of scholars in Jewish studies, history, philosophy, political science, sociology, literature and other disciplines. The institute was founded in 1980 as a result of a major benefaction by Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber and is named in honor of his parents.

Classes with Faculty Associates

The Tauber Institute is pleased to announce the Spring 2025 classes taught by our esteemed faculty associates:

Jonathan Decter
Debating Religion: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Dialogue and Dispute (NEJS 134A)
A history of interreligious polemic, disputation, and dialogue among Jews, Christians, and Muslims from antiquity to modernity. The course highlights points of difference and contention among the traditions as well as the ways in which the practice of disputation played a formative role in the coevolution of those traditions.

Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain (FYS 4B)
Designed to instill and enhance flexible writing and research skills. A selection of readings stimulates discussion, deepens understanding, and serves as foundation for writing assignments. Students will recognize the role of writing in fostering critical thinking and learn to identify conventions of disciplinary writing.
From 711 until 1492, the Iberian Peninsula was populated by people adhering to the three monotheistic traditions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Despite competing claims to religious truth, members of these religious communities lived together and interacted to form a unique society that some have called a “culture of tolerance” while others have decried such an irenic image as a mere myth. In this seminar, we will examine the interaction among the three religious communities focusing on political and social development, inter-religious conflict and violence, and intellectual and architectural/artistic production. We will investigate the degree to which “Spanish” (or more accurately “Castilian”) culture can be described as “Christian” or as “Muslim-Christian-Jewish” in character. We will also engage the historiographic traditions that have given rise to contrasting images of the medieval period and consider what is at stake in these debates from a modern and contemporary perspective.

ChaeRan Freeze
Gender, Ghettos, and the Geographies of Early Modern Jews (NEJS 140B)
Examines Jewish history and culture in early modern Europe: mass conversions on the Iberian peninsula, migrations, reconversions back to Judaism, the printing revolution, the Reformation and Counter Reformation, ghettos, gender, family, everyday life, material culture, communal structure, rabbinical culture, mysticism, magic, science, messianic movements, Hasidism, mercantilism, and early modern challenges to Judaism.

Women, Genders, and Sexualities (WGS 5A)
This interdisciplinary course introduces central concepts and topics in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Explores the position of women and other genders in diverse settings and the impact of gender as a social, cultural, and intellectual category in the United States and around the globe. Asks how gendered institutions, behaviors, and representations have been configured in the past and function in the present, and also examines the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with many other vectors of identity and circumstance in forming human affairs.

Eugene Sheppard
Hegel: Self-Consciousness and Freedom in the Phenomenology of Spirit (PHIL 167A)
Offers a close reading of Hegel and pays special attention to his analyses of the changing patterns of understanding and self-understanding and the way in which he opens up these transformations for the reader to experience. In his modern paradigm, the Subject and the Object of thought necessarily affect one another's potential, essence, and fate. And through a rational comprehension of role of Spirit (Geist) in thought and the world, we can see how they become inextricably bound together. Indeed, for Hegel, the dialectic between subject and object provides the very ground for the self-aware and free subject to participate in modern life.

Laura Jockusch
Inside Nazi Germany: Social and Political History of the Third Reich (NEJS 148A)
Provides an overview on the social and political history of Nazi Germany (1933-1945) covering the most significant topics pertaining to the ideological basis, structure and functioning of the regime as well as the social and political mechanisms that led millions of Germans to perpetrate war and genocide.

The Holocaust: History, Memory, and Misrepresentation (NEJS 37A)
Provides students with thorough knowledge of the history of the Holocaust, using a broad array of digital sources and to give students a deeper understanding of how religious, ethnic, racial, gender and sexual differences can be used as grounds for persecution, exclusion, and even mass murder on a transnational scale directly involving over twenty nations.
We investigate the ideological roots and nature of the National Socialist state, the decision-making and implementation of anti-Jewish policies, the different kinds of perpetrators involved. We will consider the interconnections between the persecution and murder of the Jews with the treatment of other groups of Nazi victims, such as Roma, people with disabilities, homosexuals among others. Likewise, we study the Jewish responses to these policies in various European countries and explore the roles of non-Jews as bystanders, collaborators, or rescuers. Students will also learn about some of the historical problems and controversies that characterize the current scholarship on the Holocaust.

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