Teaching Jewish History to the "Other"

110 FOCUS ON PROGRAMS AND TEACHING SHOFAR We welcome responses, dialogue, and discussions of experiences in this regular column. . Teaching Jewish History to the "Other" 1 Daniel Goffman Ball State University The American system of higher education has developed a plethora of programs in area and topical studies in the past few decades. Among the most popular such centers, sometimes even departments, are Women's (or Gender) Studies, African-American (or Black-American) Studies, Native American (or American Indian) Studies, Hispanic Studies, and Jewish Studies . Predictably enough, colleges and universities with significant student populations in one or another of these categories tend to offer programs accordingly . Women's Studies programs have proliferated at liberal arts and women's colleges, while remaining almost non-existent at engineering and men's colleges; and African-American Studies programs thrive where there is a large clientele of African-American students. This situation, perhaps inevitable given interests and expectations, is also unfortunate, even dangerous, in its tendency to isolate special interest and minority groups and increase ethnic and racial fears at the very point where we have the best opportunity to break down stereotypes and tensions. It is important that we offer students courses in their own heritages; but, in our richly pluralistic society, it is even more crucial that we expand knowledge of other peoples, other communities, the other gender, with whom we must live and work. Jewish studies is among the offenders in this potential cultural and racial polarization. Most major universities with significant Jewish enrollment have established Jewish Studies programs, offering courses in Jewish religion, Jewish history, Jewish philosophy, the Holocaust, and the Arab-Israeli conflict , attended by students who are predominantly Jewish. Such programs, which could strive to build cultural bridges by cultivating the non-Jewish stu1This paper was first given at a panel, "Teaching Jewish History," at the Second Annual Conference of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association, October 14, 1990. It is reprinted here with permission from The History Teacher, Vol. 24, No.2 (February 1991), pp. 157-174. Volume 10, No.1 Fall1991 111 dent, too easily become ghettoized. Their principally Jewish clientele encourages an almost exclusive focus on Jewish history, philosophy, and religion, while non-Jews, who might feel some curiosity about the linkages between this civilization and their own, become frustrated, intimidated, even ostracized . Universities without significant Jewish enrollment meanwhile rarely support Jewish studies programs. Many do not offer any courses in this discipline . The students in such institutions might pick up a bit of Jewish lore in a course,on comparative religions or learn a little about the Holocaust in a required and often resented western civilization sequence. In large measure, however, any religious or racial stereotypes learned from parents, teachers, and peers remain unchallenged. The university where I teach is such an institution. In a student body of eighteen thousand, there are between thirty and forty "declared" Jews, approximately 0.2 percent of the total. Not surprisingly, given these demographics , the school offers no courses in Jewish studies. Not because I was hired as a historian of the Jews (my specialty is Ottoman history), but because I have a cognate field in early-modern European Jewish history and believe that no major university should be bereft of Jewish studies courses, I have twice offered a special topics course entitled "The History of the Jews in Europe and the Middle East in Medieval and Modern Times." I soon found that teaching such a course at such an institution is radically different from the "Jewish Studies" model. First of all, there is no builtin demand upon which to draw. One cannot simply insert "Judaism~ or "Jewish" in the course title and attract a core of committed students eager to learn more about or reintroduce themselves to their heritage. At this university , students sign up because of a need to fulfill a "world history" requirement , or because a fifteen- or twenty-minute lecture in a comparative religions or western civilization course intrigued them, or because they have taken another class with me. The first time I taught the course, it barely drew the ten registrants necessary to "go." Secondly, the aforementioned demographics of this institution preclude a core...