Courses
JWS4900/JWS3850/ENG3810: Holocaust Literature
Spring 2024 - Baruch College, CUNY
ENG 5000: Independent Study: Sephardic Experiences in the Holocaust
Spring 2024 - Baruch College, CUNY
JWS 3950/LTS3085/ENG3950: Latin American Jewish Literature
Fall 2023 - Baruch College, CUNY
JWS 4900: Mapping the Jewish Experience
Spring 2023 - Baruch College, CUNY
ENG 2800: Great Works of Literature I
Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024 - Baruch College, CUNY
SPR 2022: Jewish Literature and Film Under Dictatorship in Latin America
Spring 2022 - YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Twentieth century Jewish literature is often marked by the aftermath of the Holocaust. This course will explore how this phenomenon occurs in Latin American Jewish literature by studying Jewish literary works of fiction and nonfiction written during the various Latin American dictatorships of the twentieth century. Through a comparative approach, students will learn about artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers whose works were censored, published in exile, or used as tools of resistance against the military dictatorships. We will also watch films that address the difficulties of those who lost loved ones to dictatorships. We will discuss issues of loss and memory, and explore questions such as: How does Holocaust memory and Jewish memory intersect in the case of the Jewish desaparecidos? Focusing on first-generation Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan Yiddish writers, students will analyze literary and artistic works while learning about the historical and socio-political circumstances that influenced their lives and literary creations.
SPR 2022: Jewish Literature and Film Under Dictatorship in Latin America
Spring 2022 - YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Twentieth century Jewish literature is often marked by the aftermath of the Holocaust. This course will explore how this phenomenon occurs in Latin American Jewish literature by studying Jewish literary works of fiction and nonfiction written during the various Latin American dictatorships of the twentieth century. Through a comparative approach, students will learn about artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers whose works were censored, published in exile, or used as tools of resistance against the military dictatorships. We will also watch films that address the difficulties of those who lost loved ones to dictatorships. We will discuss issues of loss and memory, and explore questions such as: How does Holocaust memory and Jewish memory intersect in the case of the Jewish desaparecidos? Focusing on first-generation Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan Yiddish writers, students will analyze literary and artistic works while learning about the historical and socio-political circumstances that influenced their lives and literary creations.
JWST 31917: Women and the Holocaust
Spring 2022 - The City College of New York, CUNY
This course explores topics related to women’s experiences during the Holocaust from an interdisciplinary approach. Through the study of primary sources, online archives, literary texts, and artistic representations, students will gain a multifaceted perspective of this topic. This course aims to present the diverse experiences of women’s lives in the ghettos, concentration camps, death camps, in hiding, and in resistance. Students will gain a broader understanding of the Holocaust and mass killings of by learning about the first-hand experiences of Jewish, Roma-Sinti, and other “undesirable” women. The aim of this course is to address deeper questions of how the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust affected the lives of women differently from the lives of men.
JWST 31916: Jewish Literature under Latin American Dictatorship
Spring 2022 - The City College of New York, CUNY
This course explores twentieth-century literature that deals with Jewish experience during and after military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay. Focusing specifically on works written by authors whose families were directly impacted by state-sanctioned violence, students will learn about issues of Jewish memory, representation of atrocity, and quest for justice. Students will examine writings about the historical and social-political aspects of Latin American dictatorships, and how these texts intertwine Holocaust memory and Jewish life and culture in Latin America. This course will take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach by examining Jewish responses to dictatorship in relation to those of contemporary black and indigenous writers in Latin America.
JWS 3950: Special Topics in Jewish Studies
Spring 2022 - Baruch College, CUNY
This course explores twentieth-century literature that deals with Jewish experience during and after military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay. Focusing specifically on works written by authors whose families were directly impacted by state-sanctioned violence, students will learn about issues of Jewish memory, representation of atrocity, and quest for justice. Students will examine writings about the historical and social-political aspects of Latin American dictatorships, and how these texts intertwine Holocaust memory and Jewish life and culture in Latin America. This course will take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach by examining Jewish responses to dictatorship in relation to those of contemporary black and indigenous writers in Latin America.
LIT 4329: Single Author: Clarice Lispector
Spring 2021 - The University of Texas at Dallas
The greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth-century, Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) has been called “a literary magician,” “better than Borges,” who “belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce.” A Ukrainian-born Jewish infant refugee who grew up in northern Brazil, Lispector is a literary giant who remains a powerful presence in contemporary international literature. From Near to the Wild Heart (1943) to The Passion According to G.H. (1964), toThe Hour of the Star (1977), Clarice Lispector wrote mesmerizing masterpieces. We will explore her writings, which have finally appeared in the English language, and begin to uncover her genius.
HIST 4379: Topics in Women's and Gender History: Women & the Holocaust
Spring 2021 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course aims to explore topics related to women’s experiences during the Holocaust from an interdisciplinary approach. Through the study of a variety of primary sources, online archives, literary texts, and artistic representations, students will gain a multifaceted view of this topic, which merges the field of Holocaust Studies and Gender Studies. The aim of this course is not simply to gather information but to address deeper questions of how the war affected the lives of women differently from the men. This course will analyze women’s lives in ghettos, concentration camps, death camps, in hiding, in resistance, including specific experiences of diverse voices.
HIST 7306: Advanced Topics in Women Gender and Sexuality: Women and the Holocaust
Fall 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course aims to explore topics related to women’s experience during the Holocaust. Through the study of a variety of primary sources, online archives, literary texts, and artistic representations, students will gain a multifaceted view of this topic, which merges the field of Holocaust Studies and Gender Studies. This course will analyze women’s lives in the ghettos and in concentration camps, including specific experiences of abuse as well as resistance.
LIT 3337: Comparisons: Literature & Dictatorship in Latin America
Fall 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course will focus on literary works written during the various Latin American dictatorships of the twentieth century. Through a comparative approach, students will learn about writers, poets, and artists whose works were censored, published in exile, or used as tools of resistance against the military dictatorships. Students will analyze literary and artistic works while learning about the historical, socio-political circumstances that influenced their creation.
HIST 4V71: Independent Study in Historical Studies: Women in the Holocaust
Spring 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This independent study course focuses on discussing topics related to Jewish women’s experience during the Holocaust such as hunger, reproductive matters, motherhood, sexual abuse, resistance, and more. Through a variety of texts and sources the student will gain a multifaceted view of this important subject.
HUHI 7314: Advanced Topics in European Thought, Culture and Society: Fascism in Marseille, Spain & Lisbon
Spring 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
The history of World War II is often studied from the perspective of the larger European urban centers. Less studied are the routes that allowed refugees to escape. Marseille and Lisbon, port cities placed on the edges of Europe, played particular roles in the history of European refugees from the Third Reich, the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The course examines the experience and flight of refugees as victims of violent conflicts and as agents of change at their places of destination. To better comprehend the Holocaust from the periphery, this course analyses a number of different sources that examine and explore trajectories, trends, and tribulations of refugees. The important role of aid organizations and institutions will also be analyzed and students will gain hands-on experience in conducting online research in the archives. The artistic productions and expressions associated with the experience of being displaced during World War II will also be explored for us to gain a more in-depth meaning of what it meant to the refugees to be at the very edge of Europe with slims chances of crossing the Atlantic.
ARHM 3342: Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies in the Arts and Humanities: Refugees, Exile & Human Rights
Spring 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
The history of humanity is made up of global migrations and movements of people. For some scholars there existed no refugee problem until the emergence of fixed and closed state borders of the modern age. Others argue that people have been uprooted and temporarily homeless throughout history. Labels and concepts that attempt to define migrants usually do so from a hegemonic perspective attached to legalistic frameworks. Such attempts to categorize people in movement include racializing mechanisms, and constantly ignoring the individual perspectives of the migrants, which may include reasons for fleeing a country, social class, education, religion, and political affiliations. This course explores specific moments in history where migrants, refugees, exiles were forced to be on the move, to better understand changes and differences in the history of refugees. How do we define refugees? What forces them to leave their place of birth? What does homeless mean and how does it manifest itself in their lives and cultures? Why do refugees become stigmatized? In addition to learning about the history of refugees, this course will also examine creative works of art, literature, and poetry of refugees and about the exile. This course is co-taught by three professors.
LIT 3337: Comparisons Latin American Exile
Spring 2020 - The University of Texas at Dallas
Exile is one of the most prominent phenomena of the twentieth century to have influenced world literature and art in profound ways. In this course, we examine questions such as: How do writers and artists define exile? How does exile define them? More specifically, what impact did the experience of exile have on Latin American literature? We explore and discuss literary works written in exile or about exile by refugees who were forced to flee from their countries of origin. How does exile or homelessness manifests itself in their creative works? This course explores the connections between different national literatures and disciplines during three specific historical periods of social, political, economic, and human crisis during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Latin American Military Dictatorships. The connections between these works of literature are interdisciplinary, comparative, thematic, and historical. We will read, analyze, and discuss essays, literary articles, poetry, fiction and nonfiction novels that help to shed light on this topic.
HIST 4359: The Holocaust & Human Rights in Latin America
Fall 2019 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course will explore the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of violation of all human rights, which resulted in the historic UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. With a focus in Latin America, this course will examine the history of military dictatorships and oppressive regimes, genocide, and other human rights violations throughout the twentieth-century. This course will discuss and analyze representations of recalling of violence in literature, film, and memoirs by survivors of the dictatorships in Latin America, specifically in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the special case of Mexico. Students will search and identify multiple human rights violations which occurred during and after the drafting of the Declaration, in Latin American countries in the later part of the twentieth-century. This course is co-taught by three professors.
LIT 3337: Comparisons: Literature Under Dictatorship
Fall 2019 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course explores twentieth-century Latin American Literature that deals with the topic of life under military dictatorships. Focusing specifically on works written by authors directly affected by state-sanctioned violence in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, and others, students will examine historical and socio-political circumstances that impacted the lives and memories of these writers. Some of the literature will also draw on the memories of Jewish immigrants, or Latin Americans of Jewish origins, and address how these became special targets for the various military dictatorships. The questions raised about the desaparecidos and memory of the dictatorship years will be based on an interdisciplinary approach drawing comparisons between different Latin American countries and systems as portrayed in literature and poetry.
HIST 2370: The Holocaust
Fall 2019 - The University of Texas at Dallas
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this course explores the Holocaust and its aftermath. It challenges our fundamental assumptions and values, and it raises questions of great urgency: “What was the background of the Holocaust?” “How was it possible for a state to systematize, mechanize, and socially organize this assault on the Jewish people?” And “How could the Nazis in a few years eliminate the foundations of Western civilization?” The course will search for answers to these questions and investigate many others. In addition, it will explore the ways in which the Holocaust is often represented in survivor testimonies, literature, films, museums, sites of remembrance, and in new media. This course is co-taught by three professors.
HIST 4359: Topics in Latin American History: The Holocaust and Human Rights in Latin America
Spring 2019 - The University of Texas at Dallas
This course explores the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of violation of all human rights, which resulted in the historic UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. With a focus in Latin America, this course examines the history of military dictatorships and oppressive regimes, genocide, and other human rights violations throughout the twentieth-century. This course discusses and analyzes representations of recalling of violence in literature, film, and memoirs by survivors of the dictatorships in Latin America, specifically in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the special case of Mexico. Students will search and identify multiple human rights violations which occurred during and after the drafting of the Declaration, in Latin American countries in the later part of the twentieth-century. This course is co-taught by three professors.