In an upper-level undergraduate course entitled Jewish American Literature and Culture, which was cross-listed in English and American Studies, students engaged in textual analysis and service learning to examine Jewish American identities not as fixed, inherited essences but rather as fluid social and cultural productions that are subject to constant negotiation and debate as they circulate among readers and in everyday life. Students learn to isolate and analyze these negotiations and debates as they engage with cultural texts (literature, films, ads, popular music, etc.) and with the circulation of meanings in daily life as they change over time and from place to place. The course exposes students, primarily juniors and seniors fulfilling a requirement for the English or American Studies major, seeking junior- or senior-level courses to fulfill General Education requirements, or simply interested in Jewish literature and culture, to Jewish cultural content and provides them with the theoretical awareness and analytic skills to recognize that group identities are not fixed or unified. Instead, students learn to view identities as multiple and changing as they circulate in time and place, intersect with other identity positions such as gender and age, and respond to social action.

Through a sequence of class discussions and staged writing assignments, students worked with a cultural text or on a service learning project to demonstrate how Jewish American identities are constructed through cultural forms and practices in everyday life. They were asked to describe, analyze, and synthesize their material in three separate stages. First, they were asked to describe the cultural text or service learning setting with which they were working. Second, service learners were asked to isolate some aspect, e.g., narrative, behavior, incident, structure, of that text or setting and analyze its role in negotiating, asserting, or challenging the meaning of Jewish American identity. Students working with literary texts were asked to gather and present material from relevant secondary sources that addressed a pertinent topic or narrative feature of the text. Third, students were asked to place their individual projects in the broader context of core course readings, themes, and discussions. In a final paper, students synthesized their learning and summarized it in a brief oral presentation to the entire class.

Through the content of readings, service learning projects, class discussions, and written assignments, students developed and demonstrated their awareness of the creative and everyday cultural forms and processes through which group identities, specifically Jewish American identities, are formed, negotiated, and transformed in shifting historical contexts and in relation to other identities, pressures and limits. Through a sequence of short paper assignments on and discussions about description, analysis, and synthesis, students had an opportunity to receive and respond to feedback in advance of their final paper. The literary texts and service learning settings enabled students to consider how identity formation involves negotiations over such matters as language use, national origins, immigration history, racial status, citizenship, social class, war, transnationalism, gender, and sexuality.

To better reach my goals for this course through the analysis of cultural texts and service learning, I intend to make a few changes:

• I want to provide more reading and writing assignments that focus on everyday processes of identity-formation and that show how identities change over time and from place to place.
• I want to draw more frequent and explicit parallels and demonstrate the circulation that connects cultural texts (not only their content but also how they are produced and consumed) to everyday behaviors, actions, and practices.