Last week, I was quite literally on the road, travelling on trains, planes and buses. No matter the destination -- New York; D.C.; College Park, Maryland; and Cincinnati, Ohio -- the conversation at hand had to do with the future of Judaic Studies. At the risk of sounding like the doomsayers who find their worst fears confirmed by the Pew Center study on contemporary Jewish life, I've come away from my wanderings rather concerned about the ongoing vitality of Judaic Studies. The field is currently celebrating, or about to mark, its 40th birthday on many a college campus, amidst dwindling enrollments and exceedingly anxious university administrators who measure success, or viability, solely in terms of metrics.
For all its maturity, Judaic Studies is a veritable start-up, especially when compared with other longstanding disciplines in the humanities such as History, English or even Semitics. Along the way, it has experienced more than its fair share of growing pains. Some have to do with the circumstances under which the field is constituted, others with the nature of the academic economy, much less the vagaries of the marketplace, and still others with the vexing matter of its intellectual utility.
University deans decide whether Judaic Studies ought to be administered as a program or as a department, a seemingly insignificant semantic decision whose implications run deep; donors, in turn, provide the financial incentive to set things in motion. The faculty, meanwhile, answers not only to these two constituencies, but to its colleagues as well, many of whom, even forty years on, are still not persuaded that Judaic Studies is a legitimate academic enterprise, with its own distinctive methodologies, body of practices and conceptual concerns.
There’s not too much we can do about university administrators, donors or the economy. But, as Judaic Studies approaches its next forty years, perhaps we could do something about our presence on the academic landscape. Much as I’d prefer to think otherwise, we who traffic in Judaic Studies inhabit an intellectual ghetto, whose gates we zealously monitor. Privileging the mastery of traditional Jewish texts at the expense of other kinds of sources and clinging tightly, stubbornly, to a static and internal hierarchy of interpretive values, we have not always been the most welcoming of neighbors.
Before the next significant birthday rolls around, here’s hoping we can do better.
