Judaism has long engaged with the aspiration to transmit vitality and virtue to future generations, debating, contesting, and in some forms endorsing it across radically different historical contexts. Yet the pursuit for ever-better offspring is entangled with contradiction, debunked theories, and atrocity. This course takes that history seriously instead of sanitizing it. Students will critically examine the full arc of eugenic thinking from biblical sources on heredity, rabbinic marriage law and ideas about procreation, through to modern responsa on preimplantation genetic diagnosis, involuntary sterilization, and CRISPR gene editing technologies. The course confronts the ethical fault lines that run through all such thinking: the contested meaning of "better," the unequal burdens of that judgment, and what our answers ultimately reveal about our commitments to human dignity, disability, suffering, and choice.  This is not a course about a discredited historical episode, but one about an ongoing set of questions Judaism illuminates with depth even as modern biotechnology, social practices, and public policies force society to answer these questions time and again.