After Thirty Years—The Failure of Jewish Studies

70 SHOFAR VIEWPOINT The Viewpoint column is an open forum for opinions on various topics. The positions taken by the authors of these Viewpoints do not necessarily reflect the ideas of the editors of this journaL We welcome readers' responses to this article as well as all other sections ofShofar. After Thirty YearsThe Failure of Jewish Studies Jacob Neusner Jacob Neusner is Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Jewish studies on the campus in the USA have completed the first chapter in their history. The Association for Jewish Studies, which a dozen of us organized in 1968, is nearing its quarter-century mark. Mine is one of the earliest entirely normal, fully academic careers, since I never worked anywhere but for a university from the completion of my formal education to the present day, and I now celebrate my thirtieth anniversary ofmy doctorate and first job. So we may now ask, have Jewish studies on the campus kept their promise? Let others argue the affirmative. As an engaged party, my task is to point to the failures. First, have Jewish studies on the campus materially changed the world of the Jewish community? Criteria would include a constant and fresh supply of ideas, intellectual challenges, to the Jewish community. Has the fact that professors give full time to Jewish learning and Jewish teaching in the privileged sanctuary of the university made much difference to the Jewish community at large? In my view the three most interesting minds in organized Jewish life today are Irving Greenberg, who left the university, Harold Schulweiss, who never had a professorship, and Dennis Prager, who makes his living outside of academe. So the academy has not stimulated fresh and independent Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 71 thinking about contemporary Jewish problems, so far as the organized community is concerned. Second, have Jewish studies on the campus significantly solved pressing problems off-campus? Take the obvious example of teacher training. Have schools of education made themselves a source for Jewish teachers for the Jewish schools, under the leadership of academic professors of Jewish studies? No, they have not. The one important university base for educating Jewish teachers is Columbia University's Teachers College-and that school is important in the Jewish community because of its association with Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Yeshiva University, Gratz College, the Baltimore Hebrew University, the Hebrew College of Boston-these are principal points of origin for well-trained Jewish teachers. And the education of community professionals takes place under Jewish auspices-Brandeis, Yeshiva University, for instance-and not in the universities that collected millions from Jews for Jewish studies. The Jewish community invested millions of dollars in Harvard's Jewish studies program. What has it gotten back? The Boston Jewish community is pretty much what it always was: proud of Harvard, an unreciprocated love. Yale collected millions more, but the New Haven Jewish community still is a stagnant and boring and unimportant place. University of Chicago and Northwestern University got millions more-and have yet to make distinguished appointments-appointments at the standard that applies to all other fields. And so it goes. Third, what about libraries? There can be no Jewish life without books, and ~ynagogue libraries rarely build collections worthy of the name (by the high standard, for example, of Providence's Braude Library at Temple Beth El, there is scarcely a Jewish library of any consequence in the whole country). But there are university libraries, and they get plenty of money for books, and the Universities get zillions of dollars from Jews. So have the universities at least built collections that the Jewish community can use? Well, yes and no. The books are there. But outside of the state universities, the price of going to read them, the complications of getting permission, are such that the books might as well be on the moon. When I was at Brown I systematically arranged for local rabbis to use the Brown collection in Judaica, which is quite good; it involved knowing the right librarian. But here again, the libraries of the Hebrew colleges and the institutions supported by the...