Religion & Ethnicity in Israel/Palestine

Professor Mark Wagner Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures

From its inception, the Zionist movement, which sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and did so, had a rocky relationship with Judaism. At the same time, the Palestinian national movement, which arose in tandem with Zionism, wrestled with the question of whether or not the national cause was also the cause of Islam, writ large. Palestinian Christians found themselves caught in the middle. This course will examine debates over the role of Judaism in the state of Israel. It will also address Islamic politics among Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and in Israel. It will also address the interlinked emergence of religious extremism among Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Finally, the difficult question of the relationship between Jewish ethnicity (European or Afro-Asiatic) and Jewish religiosity will be explored.