In this course, we will meet and intimately get to know, to the full extent that intimacy can be attained by reading, the first Jewish mothers and fathers. Reading select passages from the Book of Genesis, we will make the acquaintance of Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, Leah, Rachel and Jacob. In order to meet these mothers and fathers in light of our modern sensibilities, though, we will prepare our opening of the Book of Genesis by readings about mothers and father in the psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Viktor Frankl and Erich Neumann, and in the plays of the Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, specifically the Oresteia and Oedipus trilogies.
