Shalom

Welcome to the Modern Hebrew Studies Program at Harvard. The program is a part of the Jewish Studies Program, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

The program is designed for both undergraduate and graduate levels. The goal is to teach all skills (comprehension, reading, writing, and speaking) of Modern Hebrew. The faculty members offer four levels of the language, and at the advanced levels we train the students to handle the most difficult texts of fiction, literature, media language and scholarly writings. We also focus on the latest developments in spoken and written Hebrew as it is used in Israel in recent years. On all levels, even at the first level of beginners we teach the language through typical examples of contemporary Israeli culture: novels, short stories, poetry, feminist literature, Holocaust literature, literary and political journals and magazines, theater and films, TV shows, rock music from the Top 40, all representing current Israeli culture.

We use interdisciplinary approach to learning. In the Modern Hebrew Program students are encouraged to participate in courses, seminars, and workshops where they interact with their counterparts in anthropology, ethnic studies, art, music, history, classics, comparative literature, history, law, linguistics, political science, Divinity School studies, and religious studies. Indeed, in the last 12 years we have been advising and co-advising students who wrote theses in these fields.

Another most important goal of our program is to prepare both undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, for other courses in the department, in all subjects and periods, especially for ALL the courses in literature and history in the Jewish Studies section of NELC.

We have in our classes many students from the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Law School, The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, and linguistics who frequent our courses. We also collaborate closely with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

In order to make the Modern Hebrew Program vibrant, lively and relevant to the future careers and the intellectual lives of the students we have developed the LECTURE SERIES OF ISRAELI CULTURAL FIGURES AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS.

Faculty

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