YU Begins Rollout of Great Works Courses
Yeshiva University started offering Great Works courses in the Fall 2026 semester, teaching history’s most influential literature and compositions.
Twenty-five Great Works courses — spanning disciplines including English, Jewish Studies, History, Psychology, Sociology and Biology — have been created; several are being taught this semester, Dean Rebecca Cypess told The Commentator. Current courses include “Freedom and Authority in Jewish and Western Thought” by Prof. Ari Mermelstein, “Suffering and Evil” by Rabbi Shalom Carmy and “History of Codification of Jewish Law” by Rabbi Yaakov Taubes.
Prof. Mermelstein’s “course is part of an exciting new program being piloted in Fall 2026 that focuses on Great Works in the Western Tradition,” the online course description states. “These Great Works courses explore what makes a piece of art or writing ‘great,’ and why we return to them generation after generation.”
The implementation of Great Works in schools is attributed to the University of Chicago’s Prof. Mortimer Adler, and dozens of such programs exist in the US today, teaching works like Plato’s “Republic,” Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” with the latter’s “Inferno” having already been taught in Spring 2026 in YC, Cypess noted.
The initiative began last year when a faculty committee was formed to discuss the curricula of Yeshiva College and Stern College for Women. The committee determined it should emphasize Great Works offerings, Cypess said, and is nearing the completion of an overarching “General Education curriculum that will help students expand their perspectives and enrich their thinking while remaining flexible and amenable to students’ interests,” she stated.
Great Works courses are not currently required for students, though this may change in the future, Cypess said. She also hopes to launch a Great Works minor.
Cypess discussed the value of teaching Great Works.
“Great Works courses bring students face-to-face with key primary texts from across history and intellectual traditions as a means of enriching their educational experience,” she said. “These courses address fundamental questions such as how to live well and meaningfully; how to build, sustain and participate in a well-functioning democracy; the role of communities — religious and otherwise — in forming a whole self; and the scope and limits of human knowledge.” Courses will mainly deal with primary sources, “engaged through close reading and seminar-style discussion.”
Cypess noted that a Great Works curriculum is especially fitting for YU.
“At Yeshiva University, the Great Works tradition is alive and well in the millennia-old traditions of Jewish learning, which permeate the undergraduate Torah programs on both campuses,” she argued. “In its juxtaposition of traditional Torah learning and expansive college study, YU is highly distinctive. This profile generates important opportunities for our students and our broader intellectual community.”
Jack Warren (YC ‘28) reflected on the courses as they relate to the future of YU.
“While the Great Works courses will empower some students with an authentic, ennobling and scholarly Torah u-Madda approach, they also raise a question,” Warren told The Commentator. “With the recent decline of Torah u-Madda, will these courses spell its revival? Or will they only deepen the divide between its scarce practitioners and the Torah u-Parnassah-niks on the right and the ‘Modox’ on the left?”
Photo Caption: Mendel Gottesman Library
Photo Credit: Beyond My Ken / Wikimedia Commons
