OLLI101580 - Jews on Tractors: Adventures in Jewish Agricultural Colonization, 1880 - 1970
Course Description
JEWS ON TRACTORS: ADVENTURES IN JEWISH AGRICULTURAL COLONIZATION, 1880 – 1970
Instructor: Natan Szapiro
Day of Week: Wednesdays
Dates: June 5 – 26 & July 10 & 17 (6 sessions)
No Class: July 3
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: In-person at Center City
Looking back from our 21st Century perspective, the idea of solving the “Jewish Question” by transforming Jews into farmers living in their own rural communities seems quixotic, even vaguely comical. Yet, for almost a hundred years?—?from the 1880s until the 1970s, it was an idea that captured the imagination of a wide range of Jews: wealthy philanthropists, Socialist and Anarchist activists, Zionist youth and Bolshevik revolutionaries. After an overview of the overlapping ideas and multiple movements associated with a “Jewish return to the soil,” we will look at four efforts to realize this goal in Argentina, New Jersey, the Soviet Union and Israel. The final session will discuss the fate of these experiments and their legacy.
Maximum: 25
Instructor’s Bio: Natan Szapiro was born in Cuba and spent his childhood in Havana. After leaving Cuba, he grew up in Brooklyn and studied Latin American Anthropology and History at Brooklyn College and Columbia University. His areas of interest included Colonial Peru, 19th Century Cuba, Latin American revolutionary movements in the 1920s and 1930s, the Cuban Revolution and Jews in Latin America. At OLLI he has taught courses on Cuba and the United States, the Cuban Revolution, and Jews in Latin America. For a few years in his youth, Natan was himself a Jew on a tractor.
Notes
Why, when I’m registering do I join the Wait List?
Several of our courses are in high demand. In order to accommodate our members who are not tech-savvy and have trouble registering online, we created a registration system in which there is no advantage to registering early, no disadvantage to registering later.
When registering, you join the Wait List for each course. Don’t be alarmed. This does not mean the course is full. After the registration period is over, we run a lottery on the courses, and it randomly determines who is admitted to each course and who is not. You typically will receive notification regarding which courses you are admitted to, about two weeks before the start of the semester. If a course accepts 150 or more students, you are very likely to get into it.