UNDERSTANDING JEWS TODAY

Jewish identity.
How many people profess to be Jews?
Who is a Jew? Jewish identity: between ethnic and religious.
What is Judaism? One form of Judaism or several?.
The history of Judaism up the present day.
Ancient Israel, from its origins to the.
Babylonian Exile and the Restoration (13th-15th centuries BCE).
Judaism of the Second Temple in the Persian and Hellenistic periods (from Ezra to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.)
The classical Judaism of the Mishnah and the Talmud (2nd - 6th centuries CE).
Mediaeval Judaism and the worlds of Islam and Christianity.
Modern Judaism .
Jewish pietism: Hasidism.
The haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment.
Reformed Judaism.
Orthodox Judaism.
Conservative Judaism.
The Reconstructionist movement.
3SecularandreligiousZionism.
The Judaism of the Holocaust and Redemption.
The State of Israel: Religion and State, religious significance of the State.
Modern Jewish thought
Structural Tensions within Judaism.
The fundamental paradigm: Exile-Redemption.
The real and the utopian, law and prophecy, in tension: the Messianic Halakhah or the law of the Messiah .
The diaspora and the State of Israel: between political dependence and independence.
Universalism and particularism; ethnicity and nationalism.
Public and private Judaism; the Judaism of the community and of the individual.
Tradition and modernity: a duality to be resolved.
Appendix: Jewish Fundamentalism.
The origins of Jewish fundamentalism.
Religious and cultural identity in the phase of recularization.
Fundamentalism and nationalism.
Fundamentalismin the diaspora. Europe and the United States.