We then had academic "orientation", where we learned about the procedure to register and heard from a few professors. I'm super excited for my classes, which will (for sure) be:
Scientific Revolutions - Dr. Leo Corry
Israel And The Environment - Dr. S. Fleischer
Jewish Education The Reality And The Vision – Mr. Shaul Wachsstock
Canonical Jewish Texts - Dr. Hillel Ben Sasson
One I might take is Jews and The Passion, from Gospels to Gibson, which explores "the myth of the Jewish Christ Killer in all of its dimensions... We shall understand how - and why - the indictment of the Jews for engineering the death of Jesus took hold in Christianity of the first century. And we shall follow the development of the Christ-Killer myth from the first century to the twenty-first, considering its response to historical change and its impact on people, events, societies and cultures." The professor spoke at our orientation and piqued my interest. But is a "casual misogynist" and warned all the girls about gaining weight, so I don't know if I really want to deal with him...
The second option is Women in Islamic Culture: Past and Present. The class is about... well, women in Islam. From the syllabus: "Muslim women are usually described as heavily veiled, and constantly under the dominance of a male relative, their father, their brothers or husband, with limited access to the outer world. Their contribution to society is usually perceived as the mother or the wife, rather than a person on her own. The present course will address these assumptions, and challenge them. Discussions will revolve around several themes; the first will be the reproductive role designated for females, starting with Eve and ending in present-day fertility technology. Another theme will be women's education. We will examine the way gender influenced accessibility to education, general and professional, while comparing the Islamicate world to Christendom. The status of female individuals in modern Middle Eastern societies, Islamic as well as Jewish will be analyzed, focusing on gender role in nationalistic narratives throughout the Middle East."
Another one that I might take is Screened Ideas: Thinking Through Film And Television, in which we watch "movies and TV shows to focus our discussion on some of these longstanding philosophical
questions. These include, for example, ideas about such perennial philosophical subjects as reality and appearance, good and evil, and knowledge and skepticism. We will be reading a variety of philosophical texts, both historical and contemporary, with two fundamental aims: to understand what these authors were trying to say, and to attempt to form reasonable opinions about the problems and puzzles they were writing about." Movies for this course include:
A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971), A Serious Man (Coen Bros, 2009), Avatar (Cameron, 2009), Bicentennial Man (Columbus, 1999), Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen, 1989), Dogma (Smith, 1999), Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964), Extreme Measure (Apted, 1996), Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993), High Noon (Zinnemann 1952), Inception (Nolan, 2010),
Intolerable Cruelty (Coen Bros, 2003), Memento (Nolan, 2000), Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002), Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life (Jones, 1983), Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998),
The Matrix (Wachowski Bros, 1999), The Prestige (Nolan, 2006), The Third Man (Reed, 1949),
Total Recall (Verhoeven, 1990)
As well as selected episodes from the TV shows:
Family Guy (MacFarlane, 1999-), Lost (Abrams, 2004-2010), South Park (Parker & Stone, 1997-),
The Simpsons (Groening, 1989-)
So the question is this: which one should I take? Let me know down in the comments!
