Debating South African Jewish History (10 week course)

Debating South African Jewish History will be taught by Richard Mendelsohn, the co-author of The Jews in South Africa: an illustrated history.

Introduction: brief survey of South African Jewish history; course roadmap.

Session 1: The immigrant experience  

• Why did the Jews leave Russia? Pogroms or poverty?
• Why choose South Africa? Donald Currie or chain migration? 
• How and why did women’s experience of immigration differ from men’s?

Session 2: Succeeding in South Africa

• Why did the Jews succeed in South Africa? South African circumstances and/or Jewish skills?

Session 3: South African Antisemitism

• What were its origins? 
• When and why did it become virulent? 
• When did it subside and why has it revived? 
• How did the Jewish community respond to antisemitism?

Session 4: Jews and Apartheid

• Why and how did the Jewish community make peace with Apartheid?
• Why and when did this change?

Session 5: Resisting Apartheid

• Why were Jews over-represented on the South African left? 
• What were the roads to radicalism? 

Session 6: South African Judaism

• Why non-observant Orthodoxy for much of the twentieth century? 
• Why the religious turn in the late twentieth century and the present?
• Why did Reform make only limited inroads in South Africa?

Session 7:  South African Zionism and its critics

• Why was Zionism South African Jewry’s civil religion? 
• When and why did Israel become a bone of contention within South African Jewry? 

Session 8: Gender and South African Jewry

• Separate spheres and/or domestic feminism? (Bertha Marks)
• Respecting difference? (Roza Van Gelderen and Hilda Purwitzky)
• Leading the way? (Ray Alexander, Bertha Solomon, Helen Susman, Ruth First)
• Silencing women? The Kol Isha controversy.

Session 9: Building a community

• What were the origins of the Jewish community’s organisational structures and how did these evolve over time?
• How did women’s experience of communal organisation/life/governance differ from men’s?

Session 10: South African Jewry, Past, Present and Future

• Comparing past and present Jewish communal surveys
• Predicting the future