About This Course
This course is closed.
The course “Reading Conversion” exposes you to a wealth of conversion stories from across the globe and throughout history. The texts explore the complex aspects of religious identities and the varied expressions of community belonging and social borders.
Conversion is a multidimensional phenomenon with religious, social, political and legal implications. By examining these implications, one can learn how religious communities function, how they deal with identity issues, and how and why they demarcate their boundaries.
Conversion can also illustrate the policies and internal structures of such communities, interactions with those deemed as “Others”, and the dynamics of minority-majority cultural groups living alongside one another.
The course provides an analytic structure for understanding political, social, religious and legal issues, communal and religious limits, and the exchange of knowledge.
This course is provided through EdX. Students may sign up to take the course by contacting prs@jewishpluralism.org. Students will be given a code for a free verified certificate. Students will take the course and submit the EdX certificate to validate the satisfactory completion of the course and receive one credit towards their required electives.
Course Objectives
- To understand conversion as a worldwide human phenomenon
- To study world history through the prism of religious conversion
- To encounter textual sources in their original language and in English translation
- To discover the social and historical background of the texts
- To analyze different genres of historical and mythical writing
- To investigate how the visual arts interpret historical and mythical events, while learning the methodology of comparative studies
- To develop independent research methods in the humanities
- To explore the complex aspects of religious identities and the appearance of community belonging on the one hand, and social borders on the other
Meet Your Instructor
IsraelX is a national consortium of higher education institutions in Israel, led by the Council for Higher Education and the Ministry for Social Equality. IsraelX is the international arm of Campus - the Israeli National Project for Digital Learning, whose goal is to promote general, academic and professional education in Israel in order to reduce social gaps and accelerate economic growth.
