Cities give expression to man's power while they highlight human limitations. It is urban social diversity that makes great wealth and thriving culture possible, but it also fixes discrimination behind walls constructed from paper and stone. Nations make cities symbols of the sacred and the glorious, while they ignore the poverty and social alienation that city life breeds. Jews, intensively urbanized for millennia, provide a special vantage point from which to study the beauty and the tragedy implicit in city-building. Our sources will include the Bible, poems, plays and novels but also US Supreme Court rulings and news of riots in Israel. We will survey how Jews have shaped, and been shaped by, the urban challenge over time and space.