Jewish studies and Jewish identity: some implications of secularizing Torah - A Success Story

Judaism, Spring, 1993 by Bernard D. Cooperman

How Successful are Jewish Studies?

But there is also a disturbing side to the removal of Jewish Studies from under Jewish auspices and their transplantation to a secular environment. I, at least, am not sure that this development is completely positive. For one thing, enrollment figures are still discouragingly low, and, although I have no firm data, my impression is that they are getting lower.(2) Certainly we are failing to attract Gentiles to our courses. At Harvard, where I taught for many years, even the four or five non-Jews who used to take my Hebrew or modern Jewish history courses have disappeared in recent years.

It is difficult to pinpoint a reason for this drop-off. Some would point to the decline in support for Israel: Israel is no longer "in" and few care about its history or culture. Others point more specifically to the recent unrest there which has made travel to Israel less attractive: if students don't intend to spend a summer there, why learn the language? Sometimes we can point to structural features of university curricula which are totally beyond the control of students and Jewish Studies faculty and which make our courses less attractive: the abolition of a language requirement or increased "great books" requirements, for example, make our own courses less useful to students trying to amass enough credits to graduate. Yet others point to the radically utilitarian attitude that supposedly prevails on university campuses. If you are bound for business school, you don't stop en route to smell the daisies or to study Maimonides, especially if the Maimonides course is not a guaranteed "A." Whatever the explanation, with rare exceptions Jewish Studies courses do not attract large number of students. The field remains a "parochial" subject appealing primarily to the already converted. This is not, of course, to condemn the enterprise; raising the level of discourse among involved Jewish young people is obviously to be desired.

But there is worse news yet. While it is undoubtedly true that we raise the level of our students' understanding of the Jewish past and present, it is equally true that the overwhelming bulk of our courses remain, nevertheless, at a distressingly introductory level. Because there are very few majors in Jewish Studies -- the field leads, after all, almost nowhere professionally -- most students will take only one course with us over the course of their four years in college. Inevitably, they will pick a broad survey course or an introductory language course.(3) In other words, the overwhelming majority of students in our courses will remain at a beginner's level.

So what? After all, this is true in all fields. Indeed, it is an underlying principle of American higher education that we aim to give students an introduction to many different aspects of human culture, rather than encouraging them to specialize, in the European fashion. And, as noted, even an introduction at the university level is much more than was available previously.