Over the centuries, Jews have become the urban dweller par excellence.  For thousands of years, the majority of Jews has lived in towns or cities, and Jewish culture has been shaped by the urban experience.  If anything, the modern era has increased this tendency, such that almost everywhere Jews form the most urbanized ethnic group within the broader society.

This basic "given" of Jewish history has too often been taken for granted.  While there are many histories of Jews in one city or another, there is no book devoted to the impact of the urban environment on Jewish social and cultural life over the centuries.  This course will try to go "behind" local history in order to gain some appreciation of the Jewish urban experience per se.

Our goal is two-fold:

a) to explore the history of the Jewish people from an urban point of view, asking why Jews tended to flock to cities, how they organized themselves in the cities, how they interacted with the other urban populations, how municipal governments shaped policy towards the Jews, and how, especially in the modern State of Israel, the Jews have organized and shaped the urban environment within which they live.

and b) to explore the impact of the urban experience on Jewish culture and on cultural perceptions of the Jews, asking how Jewish literature perceived of the city and what role has been assigned to the Jew in the urban landscapes of fiction and film.

We also have a third, pedagogic goal:

c) to train students in the art of historical research and reasoning through archival and library exercises, short writing assignments, and a longer comparative essay.

We will examine the Jewish urban experience through many kinds of source material:  historical documents taken from archives and legal anthologies, works of religious and social commentary, memoirs and travel accounts, modern novels, short stories and poems, documentary and feature films, maps and urban plans, and analytical articles by historians.