Curious about Jewish studies? Reject insinuations and join our conversations

As the directors of the Jewish studies programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, we found it disheartening that our local Jewish newspaper provided space for an article that denigrates our field as a “terrible waste.” We will not bore the readers of this paper by tearing apart the shoddy data referenced in the article. Critical thinkers can look up the study and note its biases and weaknesses themselves.

What saddens us most about the article is not the faulty research that undergirds it, but rather that it mischaracterizes the field of Jewish studies and makes gross generalizations about its practitioners. As local representatives of the field, we would like to clear the air, tell you about our work, and warmly invite you to take part in our classes and programs.

Jewish studies is an academic subject, not an advocacy organization, and our colleagues hail from many backgrounds. We are not all Jewish, as knowledge and training rather than Jewish identity offer entry into our guild. Individual Jewish studies scholars uphold a range of political opinions about Israel, Palestine and everything else. As a field, we are no more interested in convincing our students to adopt a political ideology than we are in converting them to Judaism.

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Rather, professors of Jewish studies teach students about the richness of Jewish history, religion and culture in all of its complexity. Students in our classes will understand why many Jews around the world adopted strong attachments to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. They will also understand why, before WWII, both the religious establishment in Eastern Europe and the leaders of the American Reform movement insisted that Zionism would be detrimental to the welfare of Jewish people. We do not offer our own viewpoints on these issues but offer the tools and contexts to think them through.

To paraphrase our Oberlin College colleague Shari Rabin, our classrooms are not debate clubs or political advocacy training sessions. They are laboratories for encountering ideas.

Perhaps the most important thing we offer our students, however, is an introduction to our methodologies. At a moment when people can’t seem to differentiate propaganda from truth or fact from fiction, our students understand that a scholar must be able to back up every claim with primary source evidence. Moreover, we give our students the opportunity to try their own hands at scholarly research, when we encourage them to interpret historical documents, take them on field trips to archival collections, show them how to read archeological field reports, or instruct them on how to conduct their own oral histories or ethnographies.

In the end, what offers coherence to our field is not ideological uniformity but strict standards for how we know what we know. Individual scholars may have different interpretations of the evidence, and at times bitter disagreements over political differences as well. But we will engage with quality scholarship from the people with whom we disagree. In our own subfield of Jewish history, we respect the years of labor that go into searching the archives and discovering what made our subjects tick. We know the time and effort that goes into interpretation, writing, carefully citing every claim, submitting our scholarship to rigorous peer review, and readying our work for publication. What makes us scholars is not just that we read many books or offer a compelling lecture (though we do these things as well), but because we adhere to the highest standards of humanistic research and make original contributions to the field.

Meanwhile, while public discourse is saturated with discussions of Israel and Palestine, our research and classes consider a much fuller range of topics. The Jewish studies program at the University of Pittsburgh includes three historians: one who studies the early modern period, one an expert on the Jews of Pittsburgh, and one who researches the history of Jewish women. It also features an archeologist of Second Temple Judaism; an anthropologist studying Israeli medical ethics; authorities on Primo Levi and Paul Celan; a scholar of post-Holocaust Jewish philosophy; a sociologist of Holocaust memory; and more. CMU boasts historians of Sephardic Jews, the Holocaust and Yiddish culture in the former Soviet Union, Irish and Jewish nationalisms, as well as a political scientist studying the psychology of contemporary antisemitism. You are welcome to contact any of us to find out more about our work. We would be thrilled to share how we know what we know.

You are also invited to participate in our upcoming events. Those who join us can learn from Rachel Perry, who will introduce you to four Jewish women who told their stories of surviving the Holocaust through the medium of visual art. You can take part in an evening with award-winning Yemeni-Israeli author Ayelet Tsabari, who will discuss her novel “Prayers for the Brokenhearted.” And once again, we will be partnering with the Pittsburgh Jewish Book Festival to host Professor Miriam Udel, a preeminent scholar of Yiddish children’s literature. Contact us at jsp@pitt.edu or Cmu-jack-buncher-jewish-studies@lists.andrew.cmu.edu to join our mailing lists.
To members of the Pittsburgh Jewish community: Our public programs are quite popular, free of charge and always open to you. If you are inclined to dismiss the richness of Jewish studies as a vehicle of “indoctrination and delegitimization,” then by all means stay home. But if you are curious about how scholars and artists think about Jewish religion, history and culture, come and learn with us. You will be joining a fascinating conversation. PJC

Rachel Kranson is director of Jewish Studies and associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Michal Friedman is associate teaching professor and the Jack Buncher endowed chair in Jewish Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

Editor’s note: The article referenced in the first paragraph of this piece is “The terrible waste that is Jewish Studies at American universities” (Aug. 14), authored by British historian and columnist Dominic Green, and was reprinted from The Jewish Chronicle of Great Britain.