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The course examines three towering figures of twentieth-century thought:
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Gershom Scholem (1879-1982), and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Tracing the overlapping and divergent life paths of these figures and the story of their complex friendships and fallings-out, the course brings central issues of contemporary political, philosophical, legal, and religious thought into focus. Issues discussed include: Jewish identity in the modern age; the paradox of non-national nationalism; messianism, trauma and the concept of history; mysticism and the law; German-Jewish letters and Kabbalah; Holocaust memory, human rights, and the Eichmann trial.
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