Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 115 a network of connections with nearby institutions. This can be helpful in expanding the number and diversity of programs we are able to sponsor. On a number of occasions we have cooperated with the University of Minnesota, by sharing the cost of bringing speakers to the area and helping to publicize one another's programs, to our mutual benefit. The third and final challenge (and one that we are only beginning to meet) is to integrate Judaic Studies more fully into the rest of the curriculum. It is important that faculty in a wide range of disciplines be encouraged to develop courses, or units within larger courses, that address issues related to Jews and Judaism. Carleton faculty in both American Studies and Women's Studies have been quite successful in promoting similar efforts. In all these ways-by pooling our resources and by building bridges across disciplines and institutions-we have been able to overcome the significant limitations, of interest and of resources, which exist in a college of our size and location. These represent the challenges , but also the possibilities, for Jewish Studies in the small liberal arts college. Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign Michael Shapiro . University of Illinois Up until the early 19708, there were no university courses in any aspect of religious studies, Jewish or otherwise, at the main campus of the University of Illinois. The trustees over the years had interpreted the constitutional separation of church and state to mean that a public university could not in any way foster the study of particular religions. The vacuum was filled by the religious foundations-Hillel, Newman, Canterbury, Wesley, etc.-most of which offered courses in their own denominational traditions and doctrines. Such courses were usually taught or overseen by clergy, and students could earn up to 8 hours of university credit by taking them. Once the university created its own unit and courses in religion, it decided that it would no longer give students credit for the foundation courses, which would now become purely extracurricular. It is still not clear (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is not public knowledge) how the university managed to persuade the religious foundations to accept extracurricular status for their courses. In any event, there was surprisingly little protest from the foundations , even though some of them had considerable political clout, and the 116 SHOFAR university established its own unit, called the Program in Religious Studies, recently renamed the Program for the Study of Religion. No such unit could be complete without courses in Biblical Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, and post-biblical Judaism. Biblical Hebrew and Hebrew Bible courses have been taught first by David Peterson and more recently by Wayne Petard, productive scholars, well-trained and up to date in biblical archaeology , form criticism, and other modern approaches. The Judaica position was filled by Gary Porton, who now directs the program. A student of Jacob Neusner's at Brown, Porton specializes in rabbinic Judaism but teaches everything post-biblical. He established and directed a major in Judaica within the program, and some of his students have gone on to graduate or professional studies in the field. At about the same time, Modern Hebrew began to be taught in the Linguistics Department, which was then, and still is, the administrative home for the teaching of many exotic, non-standard languages. Linguistics usually supports one or two years of introductory courses and hires native speakers to teach them, usually graduate students in Linguistics or spouses of graduate students in other fields. Peter Cole, an American trained in theoretical linguistics at Tel Aviv University, developed and supervised the teaching of Modern, or Israeli Hebrew. In response to student demand, a four-year series of courses emerged. Instructors were almost exclusively native speakers, and the courses initially stressed the colloquial, spoken language and deemphasized the study of literature. Cole and others developed texts and other teaching materials, and pioneered in the use of PLATO, a very user-friendly interactive teaching machine with a touch-sensitive screen and a keyboard which could be directed by make Hebrew letters appear on the...