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 2022 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.

ChaeRan Freeze
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
Modern Jewish Philosophy (NEJS 159a)
Surveys the contours of modern Jewish philosophy by engaging some of its most important themes and voices, competing Jewish inflections of and responses to rationalism, romanticism, idealism, existentialism, and nihilism. This provides the conceptual road signs of the course as we traverse the winding byways of Jewish philosophy from Baruch Spinoza to Emanuel Levinas.