Title of the course	History and Culture of the Jewish identity in Eastern Europe
Title of the Academic Programme 	Bachelor’s programme “History”
Type of Course	Mandatory
Prerequisites	Russian and East European History
ECTS workload	5
Total indicative study hours	Directed Study	Self-directed study 	Total
	76	114	190
Course Overview	The course provides students with a general overview of the East European period in Jewish cultural history with a particular focus on folklore and visual culture.
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO)	Reconstructing the cultural history of Jewry, we will imply different methods and approaches developed by anthropologist, sociologists, historians of institutions, etc. teaching our students how to apply them to the analysis of cultural interactions in a global perspective.

Indicative Course Content	Introducing the concept of usable past within the framework of the global Jewish context.
Examination of usage of different types of heritage as sources for constructing local and global Jewish identities and reveling relations between them.

Teaching and Learning Methods	The course consists of lectures (38 hours) and seminars (38 hours).


Indicative Assessment Methods and Strategy	Students’ progress will be measured by students’ activities in class (10% of the final grade), midterm (20%), assessment of an individual project (20%) and a final exam.
 The final exam will take the form of aт written essay and discussion of it. Test that amounts to 50% of the final grade.
Readings / Indicative Learning Resources

	Mandatory
Lucy Dawidowicz. The Golden Tradition, Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe. (Syracuse University Press, 1996)
Gershon D. Hundert. Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. (University of California Press, 2004)
Shaul Stampfer. Families, Rabbis and Education. Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010)
Optional
Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Life Is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (Schocken Books, 1995)
Yekhezkel Kotik. The Memoirs. Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl. Еd. by David Assaf (Wane State University Press, 2005)
Dan Miron. The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Imagination (Indiana University Press, 1995)
Yiddish Folktales. Ed. by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich (Schocken Books, 1997)
Photographing the Jewish Nation. Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions. Ed. by U. Avrutin, V. Dymshits, A. Ivanov, A. Lvov, H. Murav, A. Sokolova (Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press & Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2009)


Course Instructor	Professor Valery A. Dymshits