The article first appeared on Jewish Ideas Daily and is reprinted with their permission.It’s that time of year again – not just ahead of the High Holy Days but the time
when Jewish college students pore over online course catalogues and make their
choices for the fall semester. Will they take Jewish Studies courses? If
so, does it matter which ones?
Courses in Hebrew language, “Judaism 101,” the
Holocaust, and the contemporary Middle East are ubiquitous. Some colleges
and universities provide menus ranging from rigorous, sacred-text-based courses
on the Bible and Talmud to more literary and cultural offerings. The rest of the
approximately 100 Jewish Studies programs in American colleges emphasize more
recent Jewish culture and history – Yiddish theater, Israeli literature, or the
role of women and gender in American Jewish life.
While students decide,
adults debate. Is the field of Jewish Studies in decline? Is a course
called “Harry Potter and the Holocaust” (University of Florida, Fall 2012) a
sign that standards are low and getting lower? Will “real,” text-based Jewish
Studies ultimately be limited to rabbinical seminaries and yeshivot?
The debate
has gone on for years, but events of this spring and summer have added some new
twists. Several recent stories have described the decline of the Reform and
Conservative movements and the rising numbers of Orthodox, particularly the
ultra-Orthodox (Haredim).
First came the Jewish Community Study of New
York, documenting the decline in non-Orthodox synagogue affiliation and the rise
of intermarriage. Then, on August 1, New York’s Siyum ha-Shas brought out
more than 90,000 Orthodox men, mostly haredi, to celebrate the completion of the
seven-year cycle of studying the Talmud. Non- Orthodox Jewish learning has no
comparable mass event.
The concern about non-Orthodox engagement with
Judaism, particularly with Jewish learning, has raised the stakes for Jewish
Studies at nondenominational colleges and universities: That is where most young
non- Orthodox Jews are to be found. The college years might be the only time
when most liberal Jews in their late teens and early twenties voluntarily engage
with the Jewish tradition. If so, Jewish leaders and parents fear, Jewish
Studies could make or break young Jews’ relationship with Judaism for the rest
of their lives.
But is it really the role of Jewish Studies to make Jews?
What are the proper goals of Jewish Studies? It is instructive in this regard to
take a look at the history of not just Jewish Studies but Religious Studies in
general in the United States.
The study of Christianity originated as a
religious endeavor with a religious purpose. It was only in the mid-19th
century, as James Turner shows in his erudite but accessible
Religion Enters the
Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America, that
scholars of Christianity began to use more critical methods, and
Transcendentalist contemporaries of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mostly non-academics,
sought similarities between Christianity and other religions. Though almost all
were practicing Christians, they did not believe Jesus Christ was the only path
to truth.
By 1875, these scholars were conscious that they were forming a
new discipline. Universities and divinity schools created professorships in
comparative religion. Some scholars in the area studied the Hebrew Bible in
great detail, but they did not include Judaism among the “World Religions” that
they explored along with Christianity; they viewed Judaism not as a separate
faith but as a precursor to the Christian faith.
The watershed moment for
modern Christian studies, Turner says, occurred in 1902 with the William James
lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience. James’s purpose was
not to compare the Christian faith with other religions but to examine the
subjective experiences of religious persons, regardless of their individual
paths. James’s lectures were instant classics, and prominent American
universities began to teach Religious Studies as an academic discipline with
critical methodologies.
The origins of Jewish Studies in the American
academy were very different. From the start of Jewish Studies as we know
it today, it was accepted that Jewish Studies would be an academic enterprise,
like other major disciplines in the modern university. Jewish Studies never was
– and, given the context, could not be – intended to promote
Judaism.
What we now think of as Jewish Studies – the study, often by and
for Jews, of the history, sacred and secular literature, and culture of the
Jewish people – took root on a large scale in the 1960s and 1970s. In the late
1960s the academy exploded with new disciplines, including Jewish and other
“ethnic” studies.
At the same time, the American professorate became open
to Jewish men, who had previously been almost entirely excluded. Prominent
Jewish donors established chairs and scholarships, a practice that continues
today. The Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the discipline’s primary
scholarly and professional organization, was founded in 1969. The AJS emerged
out of the recognition that Jewish Studies was changing, and that the American
Academy of Jewish Research, founded in 1920 by scholars from the rabbinical
seminaries, was unable and/or unwilling to address those changes.
Jewish
Studies rose with the humanities and has seen its fortunes fall along with
theirs. These are difficult economic times. There are far more jobs in
technology and the sciences; the number of students majoring in humanities
fields like history or English is at an alltime low. Even at the most elite
colleges, professors are forced by their deans, departments, or both to choose
between offering rigorous courses that attract few students and teaching classes
that are popular – and watereddown. Jewish Studies has not escaped these
pressures.
But Jewish Studies is not under special attack. Its goals
remain the same as its founding goals in the mid-to-late 1960s: teaching Jews
and non-Jews about Judaism in a manner consistent with the mission of a secular
university. As an additional benefit to the Jewish community, Jewish
students are given a better understanding of their Jewish heritage, even if that
understanding is more popular than scholarly.
But today, when Jewish
students are more likely to arrive at college with little knowledge of Jewish
tradition and little inclination to take humanities courses, it is important to
strike a balance between academic rigor and popular appeal. In the absence of
respectable enrollments, a discipline that aims only at the elite may find
itself headed toward irrelevance. More popular courses help Jewish Studies
fulfill its mission because they get more people into the classroom to learn
about Judaism. Such courses won’t make Jews; but then, that was never the
intention.
The writer holds a PhD in European History from Harvard
University. She is a writer and teacher living in New York City. This article
originally was published by Jewish Ideas Daily and is reprinted with their
permission.