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 Fall 2023 classes taught by our esteemed faculty associates:

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.

Laura Jockusch
Revenge, Justice, and Reconciliation: Mass Atrocity Trials in the Long Shadow of Nazi Crimes (NEJS 136B)
Can crimes of the magnitude of the World War II and the Holocaust be redressed by legal means? This course explores the complex history of prosecuting Nazi crimes and how the political contexts and the legal frameworks have changed over time. It also studies the extra-judicial implications of mass atrocity trials: the societal discourse they stir, the educational lessons they teach, and historical records they create. Moreover, the course analyzes how the history of prosecuting Nazi crimes has impacted the legal redress of other gross human rights violations in the more recent past and whether the lessons learned from prosecuting Nazi crimes can be applied to the quest for racial justice in America today.

Eugene Sheppard
Jewish History: From Ancient to Modern Worlds (NEJS 6A)
Surveys ideas, institutions, practices and events central to critical approaches to the Jewish past and present. Dynamic processes of cross-fertilization, and contestation between Jews and their surroundings societies will be looked, as well as tradition and change, continuity and rupture. 

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.