Scholars Gather to Stoke Excitement over Jewish Studies

The crowd gathered outside the closed ballroom with a hunger usually reserved for food. But at the Association of Jewish Studies conference, it was tables laden with books that whetted appetites.

When the doors opened, whoever first reached the books on display could buy them for half-price at the conference’s close.

Braving their colleagues’ elbows, senior faculty and graduate students alike grabbed for budget copies of such volumes as “Through a Speculum That Shimes: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism” or “Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash.”

The scene exemplified the passion for the field of Jewish studies shared by the 600 scholars attending AJS’ 26th annual conference, held here last month.

Judith Hauptman, a professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, described an “addiction to the materials” she studies.

“It’s our passion for truth,” said Hauptman. “Does it make me more religious? A better human being? I doubt it.”

Other academics insist their scholarly work makes American Jews better Jews.

“The future of the American Jewish community depends a great deal on its understanding of the totality of Judaism and the Jewish tradition,” said AJS President Robert Seltzer, professor of history at Hunter College.

‘What we’re doing is indispensable – we’re providing a substance for American Jewish identity,” he said.

Bernard Cooperman, the conference’s program chair, hailed Jewish studies as a rare outpost of American Jewish cultural creativity. Cooperman directs the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

American Jews should be proud that today ‘there are more people doing sophisticated Jewish scholarship than ever,” he said.

The field’s growth in the quarter-century since the association’s founding could be seen in the books on display in the ballroom.

‘Twenty years ago, there were 16 books here,” said Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, pointing to the hundreds of titles published by university presses on display.

Similarly, from its 47 founders, AJS has grown to around 1,500 members. In 1969 there were three chairs in Jewish studies at universities around the country; now there are hundreds.

“The field has gone from being unimportant at American universities to being represented in every university that has any pretensions for first-rate scholarship, said Michael Meyer, a history professor at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.

This “explosion,” which began in the ]970s, had two causes, said Meyer.

First was America’s “increasing acceptance of ethnic differences,” he said.

And second was the endowment of chairs in Jewish studies by Jewish philanthropists.

In making the case for funding within the Jewish community, the academics focused on a side of the Jewish studies field barely dealt with at the conference: the students.

“Look how many of your children are interested in the field,” is how Jehuda Reinharz appealed to leaders of the Detroit Jewish community when he sought to build the Jewish studies faculty at the University of Michigan during his tenure there.

Reinharz, who attended AJS’ founding meeting as a graduate student, is today president of Brandeis University.

Jewish courses on campus are “the last way station” for Jewish education, said Reinharz, explaining the American Jewish community’s support for these programs.

Similarly, Cooperman called Jewish studies courses “the major source of sophisticated knowledge of the Jewish past and Jewish future for 90 percent of Jewish young people.”

They will take a course from us while they won’t go to an adult education lecture from their rabbi,” he added.

The Judaic studies program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, gave a clear demonstration of the connection between campus activity and community funders.

It issued a newsletter, reporting on its research work and public lectures. The newsletter also included a note of thanks to the Knoxville Jewish Federation and other donors for raising money for the university’s Judaic studies fund.

At Knoxville, as elsewhere, the most popular courses for students are introductions to Judaism or Holocaust history.

But that is not what brings most academics into the field, or to AJS sessions.

“We don’t really talk a lot about teaching at these conferences,” said Susan Handelman of the University of Maryland, College Park, at a rare session devoted to pedagogy.

Instead the focus of AJS is on the scholars’ ongoing research, and the conference helps scholars keep track of the increasingly specialized work being done.

Nearly 300 papers were presented conference’s 74 sessions, starting at 9 a.m. and ending at 11 p.m. for three days running.

Reinharz chaired a session on “Labor Zionism and Palestine in the Pre-State Period.” Cooperman discussed Jewish life in Renaissance Italy. Hauptman delivered a paper on “Women in Tractate Shabbat: Mishna, Tosefta and Talmud.”

One trend noted by participants and visible in the conference schedule was the increasing impact of feminist scholarship on the field.

Papers such as “Women Anonymous: The Dead Sea Scrolls’ Gender Legacy” and “Images of Women in Greek-Judeo-Spanish Folktales” were presented at the half- dozen sessions devoted to topics like “Women in Talmudic Literature” and “Women’s Biography and Auto-Biography.

“There are so many sessions looking at things from feminist perspective,” said Hauptman. “That was not true 15 years ago.

Others said AJS was just catching up with trends elsewhere in academia.

“If you look at the other academic associations, the profile of sessions is very different,” complained David Biale, Koret Professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Jewish studies “is still running behind, he said.

Biale delivered a paper at a session on “Representations of Menstruation in Jewish Culture.”

“Each group says ‘we’re Jewish studies,’ said Nahum Waldman, a professor of Bible at Gratz College in Philadelphia.

“We had a session on ‘Queer Studies/Jewish Studies.’ Is it appropriate? I don’t know,” said Waldman.

For Schiffinan of NYU, all this reflects the success of AJS: Jewish studies has left the confines of Jewish institutions, such as religious seminaries and Hebrew college, to find its place in the broader academic world.

“A lot of us complain about the junk [at some of the sessions], but the fact is that this has become like every other learned society. To some extent, we have to rejoice in some of the bad presentations: It indicates there is variety,” he said.

Taken together, said Cooperman, “The books and scholarship we produce gives the Jewish community insight into its culture in the secularized ways we define ourselves.”

But Biale noted that the best-selling Jewish books focus on Israel and the Holocaust, rather than on the broader themes discussed at the conference. He questioned whether the scholars were doing all they could to encourage the Jewish community’s appreciation of its history.

One of the few people attending the conference who does not teach or study at a university raised a similar question.

“The missing piece in the American Jewish community is the partnership” between the academics, who conduct the research, and the congregation rabbis who preach to the masses of Jews, said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson of Temple Eilat in Mission Viejo, Calif.

“The break between the rabbis and professors means professors speak and publish to each other, and are in a sense totally irrelevant to the lives of the Jewish community,” he lamented.