Did young Jewish men and women fall in love in the old days? What was the place of love in traditional Jewish society? How did ideas about love, romance, and marriage change with time?

We will address these and other important questions about Jewish life by looking closely at stories written in Yiddish in the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia, Poland, and America. We will explore the ways Yiddish writers portrayed romantic feelings, study their literary techniques and devices, and create our own interpretations of their works. We will read and discuss stories by the classic authors of Yiddish literature — Sholem Aleichem, and Y.L. Peretz — as well as by their younger followers and opponents, including Dovid Bergelson, Sholem Asch, I.B. Singer, Rokhl Korn, Kadya Molodowsky. We will also look at visual representations of love in art and film.