From: Lawrence Schiffman LONG ISLAND JEWISH WORLD, July 26, 1996 You Don't Have to be Jewish. By Lawrence H. Schiffman The cat is finally out of the bag. There are two kinds of Jewish Studies in this country, serious academic study of the historical experience of the Jews in all its historical, literary and cultural manifestations, done at a small number of universities, and a much more widespread form of Jewish ethnic studies that serves more the short term needs of the Jewish community than the American academy at large. City University, as anyone can tell, at least at Queens college, has made a definite decision. It is out of the big leagues. It proffers ethnic studies as Judaic Studies and compromises academic and intellectual integrity, not to mention the anti-discrimination laws which are so important to Jewish security in this country. How do I know that this is the case? First the institution offered the directorship of its program in Jewish Studies to someone on the academic fringes, lacking the necessary credentials to direct a serious program. What are these credentials? Program directors and chairs give intellectual direction to a program and this means that they have to be intellectually accomplished themselves. Certainly the head of such a program should be a senior scholar which means that he or she has written a second book, not simply published the doctoral dissertation. Further, in this field, the candidate should have a wide knowledge of Jewish history and literature and be competent in the Hebrew language. Queens seems to have set these qualifications aside. Then it mistreated the person it had unwisely selected by allowing him to be driven from office for totally irrelevant reasons pertaining to his religious background, thus violating civil rights laws which the university is obligated to observe by federal law. And, why? Because someone had the misconception that the university is a place to advance the parochial needs of the Jewish community. This entire affair need not surprise us at all. It stems form the generally politicized atmosphere that typifies much of public higher education. Such problems have dogged Jewish Studies at the City University since the beginning of the expansion of Judaic offerings on the American campus after the Six Day War when various Jewish communal functionaries and rabbis were allowed to make decisions that should have been made by scholars. This, indeed, is the way that City College dealt with Afro-American Studies and it is for this reason that they appointed Leonard Jeffries who also lacked the necessary qualifications for academic leadership of a serious program. No wonder that he ended up substituting ideology for scholarship and disgracing the academy that had appointed him. True university Judaic Studies, such as is practiced in this city at NYU where I teach and at Columbia, is a dispassionate inquiry into a series of humanistic questions, most of them literary and historical but some sociological, which is conducted in the same way as one studies any other academic discipline. Indeed, the rise of modern Judaic Studies can be seen as the importation of the methods of western academic scholarship into the study of the Jews and Judaism, previously pursued by traditional Jewish means of study alone. True academic Judaic Studies has many positive effects on the Jewish community, but its practitioners, as part of the university community, must surrender certain particularistic goals so as to partake of an open intellectual atmosphere in which all are welcome and all are equal. A Jewish history course of this type will attract both Jewish and non-Jewish students, and, even if they may have come for different reasons, all will feel equally welcome. In fact, it is impossible to conceive of the legitimacy of a university course in which all students are not welcome. So how can one then conceive of such an adminsitrative or academic position? Many members of the Jewish community will find this strange since they have been sold a bill of goods about the nature of Judaic Studies, to some extent by universities seeking to raise funds and also by Jewish organizations which themselves have not understood what is really going on. The fact is that when we enter the classroom at a university for truly academic Jewish Studies, we are dealing with Jewish materials and issues in the same way that a scholar would deal with Greek texts or the history of medieval China. If we don't, we have vitiated the benefits of the university environment. It is because of these specific benefits that our Jewish seminaries, even within their exclusively Jewish contexts, have sought to emulate these methods and approaches in some of their work, specifically in their graduate programs. I need to make myself clear. There is no question that entry into the university environment demands of all its practitioners a surrender to universal goals. But those of us who practice this kind of Jewish Studies do not regard this surrender as a sort of entry fee that we are forced to pay. On the contrary, it is this surrender of parochial interests that allows us to open our Jewish tradition to forms of inquiry and research-and therefore to new understandings-that would be impossible otherwise. In other words, we pay this price not for acceptance, but rather for the benefits this form of research brings to the understanding of Jewish texts, history and society. (For a debate on these questions see, "Sacred Studies in Secular Settings, A Roundtable," Wellsprings, Summer, 1996, pp. 18-28.) It is this method of study of Judaism, which is divorced from the needs and interests of present-day communal issues, which makes university Judaic study so attractive, perhaps even because of the presence of non-Jewish students and faculty. Indeed, it is the dispassionate scholarship and study which the university makes possible that distinguishes it from traditional Jewish Rabbinic study, and it is this academic character that has made Judaic Studies so attractive to so many students-whether Jewish or not. So university study of Judaic Studies cannot be confused with higher Jewish education given for Jewish communal purposes. They are just not the same thing. Actually, the university classroom is not a good place to try to teach people how to be practicing Jews. It simply can't be done. It won't be done-at least in a secular university. And those segments of the Jewish community that might think that they can fulfill their obligations to make people Jewish by having someone teach a course on the Dead Sea Scrolls at New York University (or even a course in Yiddish literature) are very wrong. The part of the Jewish educational curriculum that deals with making Jews feel committed to Judaism through direct teaching of the things that we believe in as Jews is something which cannot and should not be done in the university classroom. Hillels and centers for Jewish student life need to tackle these problems, but they are as we know vastly underfunded by the Jewish community. We cannot confuse the purpose of the enterprise of academic Jewish Studies with the purpose of what is done in a Jewish communal structure. For this reason, the kinds of texts studied and the methodology in use differ considerably. In the university, the texts we study may include the documents of the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman environment, and the Christian reaction to our tradition, as well as Jewish materials. In academic Jewish Studies we study subjects that, up until recently, there was no attempt to explore in the traditional Jewish framework. Similarly, we bring a more "scientific" aspect to our questions. We attempt to study all the manifestations of Judaism and Jewish civilization in all periods in which they existed whereas the traditional curriculum is much more limited. But the traditional curriculum, and in fact modern curricula aimed to make people committed Jews, will select entirely different topics and approach them from differing perspectives. For this reason, the two enterprises must remain separate. To confuse the academy with the Jewish community gives rise to such political problems as were manifested in the Queens College appointment Only the misconception that Jewish Studies is some form of Jewish parochial education within the university, or the notion that the Judaic Studies professor is some kind of a clergyman, could lead anyone to think that only a Jew could head a Jewish Studies department. And if so, what kind of Jew? Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, unaffiliated? Who would decide? Further, in the fray, all perspective was lost on the history of the entry of Jews into the university. It was not that long ago that others argued that only Christians could teach religion, or that Jews did not even belong in medical schools. How would we feel if the university stated that only Christians could teach Bible or, as was the case in Columbia University within the recent memory of some, that only Protestants could teach English literature? In the university, candidates for positions in Jewish Studies must be judged on their academic credentials alone and not on their ethnic affiliations. This is the difference between true academic institutions and ethnic studies programs. And it is time that the Jewish community came to understand what Jewish Studies really must be, if it is to be respected and integrated in the larger American academic context. So what about the claim that a white can never be head of an Afro-American Studies program, and, therefore, that only a Jew can head a Jewish Studies program? Afro-American Studies also needs to be conducted as a true academic enterprise. Just as in Jewish Studies most scholars interested in the field will be Jewish, it is to be expected that most scholars who enter the field of Afro-American Studies will be black. It must be required in a serious university, and I can tell you that it is, that those who pursue this field also do so according to scholarly canons and that even if, like Jewish Studies, it benefits a certain specific community in providing an understanding of its history, it must see that history in the wider universal context of academic exploration. This approach is yielding excellent results at places like Harvard and NYU where political considerations have been placed on the back burner, and the academic growth of this field has been encouraged. I hope that we will soon see numerous non-blacks in these fields as we should see an increase in non-Jews in the field of Jewish Studies. And while we are talking about Harvard and NYU, let me tell you that we put our money where our mouth is. Our Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies has one full time non-Jewish member and one non-Jew who holds a secondary appointment with us, not to mention the many non-Jewish undergraduate and graduate students who study with us. A non-Jewish post-doctoral fellow who was for several years at NYU was recently offered an appointment at Harvard in the Center for Judaic Studies. So you don't have to be Jewish. The scholar in the university atmosphere must bring wide training to his or her discipline, understanding Judaism within its wide humanistic context. Accordingly, he or she must also study such issues as historical consciousness, languages, phenomenology of religions, for example. Nonetheless, competence in Hebrew is a requirement for virtually all Judaic scholars. Knowledge of Hebrew is not required for practitioners of Judaic Studies in order to privilege Jews, or to establish Jewish identity, but rather because it is virtually impossible to properly pursue any field of advanced research in the field without Hebrew. It is essential because so many of the primary sources of the Jewish tradition are in Hebrew and also because so much research on Jewish Studies is written in Israel in Hebrew and is not found in translation. But Hebrew knowledge is also not limited to Jews. Many of my non-Jewish colleagues are familiar with modern Hebrew and read the latest scholarly literature in Israeli periodicals. Who then should head a program in Judaic Studies at a major university devoted to academic Judaic Studies? A senior scholar who has written and published two books and numerous articles on a field of Judaic Studies, who knows Hebrew and can use it for his or her research. Does this theoretical program head or the professors who will work under him or her have to be Jewish? Certainly not. You don't have to be Jewish.. Lawrence H. Schiffman is professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His most recent book is Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls published in hardcover by the Jewish Publication Society and in paperback by Anchor Doubleday.