An Interdisciplinary Approach to Engendering Jewish Religious History

An Interdisciplinary Approach 115 AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO ENGENDERING JEWISH RELIGIOUS HISTORY by Richard Freund and Hollis Glaser Richard Freund, Professor of Religion at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has published extensively on Judaism in the Greco-Roman period. He is Director of the Bethsaida Excavations Project and editor of a multi-volume work titled "Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee." In 1991-92 he was appointed an American Academy of Religion-lily Teaching Fellow. He currently serves on the Society for Biblical literature's Consultation on Academic Teaching and Biblical Studies. Hollis Glaser is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Her publications include "Bureaucratic Discourse and the Goddess," in The Journal of Organizational Change Management (Vol. 5, No.2) and "Organizing Against Violence," in Sexual Aggression: Key Activism and Research, Sean Gilmore, ed. (Sage Publications, forthcoming). I. An Interdisciplinary Approach: Freund and Glaser We, Dr. Hollis Glaser of the Department of Communication and Dr. Richard A. Freund of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Nebraska at Omaha,l decided to take a combined, interdisciplinary approach to engendering Jewish religious history. Both of us lWe would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Wendy Wright of the Theology Department at Creighton University to this endeavor. 116 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 readily admit that we are not specialists assigned to this task. Rather, we engage in this work because we are both interested in issues related to the engendering and dissemination of textual information within Judaic Studies. We were originally going to provide separate discussions about how one might go about doing this work in relation to the issues raised in Dr. Peskowitz's essay (the "she saidlhe said" approach). In the end, however, we decided that it would not be possible to work independently since we wanted to share our insights and come to a reasonable consensus on how to do this work. We hope that this brief discussion of our methodology will be instructive to others who are also trying to figure out how to engender scholarship in Judaic Studies. Having read carefully Dr. Peskowitz's essay, we were left with a desire for more concrete solutions. What we want to figure out is what can be built out of the shards of existing Judaic scholarship? What (if anything) can be rescued from the already existing research, textbooks and pedagogical models in an attempt to engender the teaching of Jewish religious history within the academy? In what follows we will attempt to provide some substantive answers to this question. II. Some Methodological Suggestions First we believe that modern Enlightenment-style critical analysis should be the basis for engenderingJewish religious history. We recognize that the Enlightenment emerged out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European social, political, economic and religious traditions that have been challenged by those like Dr. Peskowitz. Nevertheless, we want to argue that these methods do in fact offer a way to isolate data from interpretation that we continue to find useful. We have found that it is not easy to reject the Enlightenment methodology upon which the Academy as we know it is founded. Nor is it an easy task to use these tools to dismantle this master's house. Thus, we agree with Dr. Peskowitz that all knowledge is constructed and, therefore, is capable of being understood and deconstructed. The difference is that we choose to do this from within Enlightenment categories. We want to argue that Enlightenment methodology can and should be used to reconstruct something new. Second, it is our contention that traditional research is not ungendered. It often contains unsupported social implications. While it is not possible to totally re-engender aU of this material, it may be possible to examine some pieces of this scholarship even as other aspects of it are discarded. We willingly reject any purist position about what data can or cannot be used. Instead An Interdisciplinary Approach 117 we want to argue for continued engagement with enlightenment research methods and data. What then can one do to teach and research in a more fully engendered way? One must return...