Jewish Studies’ Growing Pains

Toronto — Amid the turbulent end of the 1960s, when campuses were roiling with anti-Vietnam war protests, a group of staid professors gathered in Boston for what was the first meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies. Less than 50 people, mostly men, gathered in one room to discuss new ideas in traditional areas like rabbinics, Bible, Talmud and Jewish history.

Last week, more than 800 people braved this Canadian city’s largest snowstorm in years to meet for the 39th annual AJS conference, with some 60 daily sessions over three days on subjects ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Holocaust memory in Russia to the presence of the Jew on YouTube.

The field of Jewish studies has grown tremendously

Now that many universities across North America and in Israel and Europe, the countries that comprise AJS’s estimated 2,000 members, have Jewish studies departments, programs and courses, some Jewish studies professors are stepping back to assess the place of Jews in academia and to speculate about the future of the field.

At the Toronto conference, a panel asked whether Jewish studies was a mainstream or anomalous part of the academy. Scholars from universities throughout the country agreed that funding often drives the creation of new Jewish classes and programs at colleges more than ideology does. Because departments, classes and chairs often receive funding from outside private donors or Federations in addition to university money, they become like trophy programs, as Frederick Greenspahn, director of Jewish studies at Florida Atlantic University put it, "more like add-ons, dessert or decoration, than the main course."

"The only reason anyone cares about Judaism — other than Jews — is because of Christianity, and the connection to the Middle East," Greenspahn continued. "We’re players in a much bigger pictures, and we may be pawns."

Mark Raider, who holds a chair in Jewish studies at the University of Cincinnati, spoke of the "corporatization of the academy" and noted his value to the university is as much about fundraising as it is about academics.

Still, he said of the academic process, "it shouldn’t become the donor driving the mission of the department."

In a conversation with The Jewish Week, Greenspahn said that Jewish studies programs are more financially tied to the Jewish community than other cultural or ethnic departments are to their respective communities, such as women’s or African-American studies that began around the same time as Jewish studies. He added that there is almost an undercurrent of anti-Semitic stereotype that accompanies the growth of Jewish studies programs in this country, the abundance of Jewish university presidents and the acceptance of Jewish students and professors on campus.

"Universities realized they could get something from Jews if they dangled something Jewish in front of them," said Greenspahn. "They don’t necessarily want us there, but they’ll take us if it comes with a check."

Marsha Rozenblit, conference program chair and a professor of Jewish history at the University of Maryland, agreed that Jews have "bought their way into the university," but added that this is by no means the full story.

"I’m confident because Jewish studies has made a name for itself as an important scholarly enterprise," said Rozenblit, pointing to the fact that Jewish students enroll in Jewish studies courses not only for identity-building reasons, or consciousness raising, as was previously assumed, but also as a way to explore their identity in an authentic, intellectual way, or to raise consciousness about Jews. Non-Jewish students tend toward a curiosity about the "other," and a belief that studying the Jewish experience in America and beyond can be a template for looking at issues of assimilation and minorities in a majority culture that apply to many different ethnic and cultural groups.

Sara Horowitz, AJS president and a professor at York University in Canada, pointed to the gains women have made in Jewish studies since the association began, and said that scholars are constantly negotiating the balance between donors and scholarship, assuring that funders are kept out of the academic process.

Since 9/11, universities have initiatives to build Muslim studies programs, with reports of new chairs being funded by Middle Eastern countries, a fact that hasn’t escaped Jewish studies donors and scholars who are seeking new ways to balance this trend.

In addition to the growth of the field as a whole, new disciplines within Jewish studies are gaining ground and currency. With the opening of the archives in Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of communism, research on the east has caught up with and overtaken research about western European Jewish communities. Sixty years after the founding of Israel, studies about the Jewish state have become a research fixture. And scholars are finding ever new, creative ways to address popular culture from an academic perspective, and this along with visual cultural studies has also gained prominence in the field.

Presenting his paper on "Matisyahu and the Paradoxical Performance of Hasidic Reggae Superstardom," Louis Kaplan, an associate professor in multiple disciplines at the University of Toronto said that Matisyahu, in "appropriating reggae/rasta culture" through the safer context of Judaism "isn’t an anomaly but is performing a minstrel-like phenomenon similar to those from the 1920s," the most famous being Al Jolson’s "The Jazz Singer."

Kaplan later told The Jewish Week that visual culture, ranging from photography to art to new media, is an important, emerging discipline, one that is sometimes hard to merge with Jewish studies, though that marriage, he feels, is a necessary one.

"Jewish Studies is so involved in text and the primacy of the written, it’s afraid of giving equal weight to the visual," said Kaplan.

Jeffrey Shandler, associate professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University and a co-convener of the Working Group on Jews, Religion, and Media, a project at NYU that looks at how media in all its forms affects Judaism, said when he first submitted a paper on how Jews watch television to AJS 20 years ago, the organization didn’t know what to do with it. Today, there are dozens of papers on TV, the Internet, contemporary art and other subjects within popular culture that examine its effects on Jewish religion and culture.

"Everyone in Jewish studies should be in on this conversation," Shandler said of the place of new media and visual culture. "Not everyone’s going to be an expert on Bible, but they need to know the Bible exists."

Horowitz said that AJS would like to expand globally, offering travel grants for foreign scholars and donating duplicate books to up-and-coming libraries abroad. She also observed that the field continues to grow, not only with new graduate students but also with older scholars from other fields who reach middle age and begin to tilt their work toward Jewish issues.

At a meeting of Jewish studies program directors, one unknown that was discussed was simply the fact that a generation of professors is getting ready to retire, and there is no guarantee they will be replaced with faculty equipped to teach Jewish courses. At the same time, said Rona Sheramy, AJS’s executive director, new Ph.D’s will be forced to explore alternatives to the academy, such as consulting, outside research or journalism, a transition AJS is ready to help with.

AJS is mainly the domain of academics, but not exclusively. Rabbi Judith Lewis said she has been coming to AJS for many years because, as rabbi at Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, she feels it is important to keep her Jewish scholarship up-to-date and finds learning authentic scholarship in a transdenominational setting keeps her going all year long.

"I’ve always considered it my responsibility to be an educated generalist," said Rabbi Lewis. "What I get here I can then bring home to the non-academic population and translate it."

Those in the field and those observing it feel sanguine about the future of Jewish studies, as more and more universities turn their scholarly attention to Jewish subjects of inquiry. As Sheramy, said, "people go in because they love the life of the mind."