Winter 2007

by Prof. Murray Baumgarten
Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies
University of California at Santa Cruz

I do not think it possible to be an educated human being at the beginning of the 21st century without some knowledge of the history and culture of the Jewish people.

Unlike previous eras when Jews and Judaism were subsumed under, and sublimated into, the “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” it is now evident that Jewish people and Jewish achievements, Jewish tradition, history, and culture have profoundly altered the course of the modern world. I could at this point recount the panoply of the Jewish thinkers and actors who have done this, beginning of course with Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, David Ben-Gurion, Rosalind Franklin, and Golda Meir. I leave it to you to add your own overachievers to this list, from Milton Friedman and Isaiah Berlin, HaRav Cook and Saul Lieberman, to Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand.

Whoever makes your list simply underlines the fact that the repertory and educational treasure house of these role models, values, meanings, and habits is the substance of the university curriculum of Jewish Studies. A word of warning is in order, however: Like the Jewish people, this is a wide-ranging group—messy, argumentative, divided—but whatever you think of individual cases, this is one of the most vital, alert, smart group of people in the world.

Try this thought-experiment: Imagine the century just past without Jewish achievements. There goes relativity theory, modern medicine, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurial economic theory. Then we must also add the charting of the human psyche by the practitioners of “the Jewish science”; and not omit the evocation of the intricacies of human feeling, under the conditions of terror that the 20th century has specialized in, by great Jewish poets like Dan Pagis and Yehuda Amichai, novelists like Saul Bellow, A. B. Yehoshua, and writers like Primo Levi. And can we manage without Jewish performers, filmmakers, comedians? Without the Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor? I think not.

Can you imagine how this cast of characters behaves in the archive that is Jewish history? They’re an unruly lot, always trying to upstage each other like Groucho on “You Bet Your Life.” Because that’s what they and we have always done—reached for the ring. And often seized it. So the achievement of the Jews in our time included the making of a revolution in the Middle East called the State of Israel. And it changed everything. When you think of it, what other national liberation movement succeeded like Zionism? And continues to reveal the tenacity and steadfastness of a people determined to repel terror.

Jewish Studies is not a passive archive. While drawing on the resources of the magnificent library of human experience that Jews have articulated through the millennia in our books and journals, the varied courses sponsored by Jewish Studies serve as beacons that light up the recesses and the values of Western civilization as they enlighten the corners of other world civilizations, including those of Asia. And they even bring understanding through the discourse of difference to the world views and practices of Christianity and Islam. As a minority culture, Jews have been outsiders. Living within the majority culture and interacting with it, Jews have been insiders. As Thorstein Veblen noted, when Jews become “naturalized … hyphenated … citizen[s] in the gentile republic of learning … [they] come into their own as creative leaders in the world’s intellectual enterprise.”

Just as the presence of physics courses at the university reminds us of the impact of modern science, whether or not we take courses in the subject, so too Jewish Studies attests to the power and importance of the Jewish imagination in shaping the modern world.

In supporting and nourishing Jewish Studies, the Koret Foundation has created the conditions for the contemporary marketplace of ideas to flourish. It has opened up the university curriculum to the cultural competition without which it atrophies. It has made it possible to ask fundamental questions—of community and fate, choice and identity-formation, ethical assessments and moral questioning from perspectives outside a conventional majority view.

Koret’s support for Jewish Studies has made an enormous difference for teachers and students, and has thus helped them to question previously unchallenged assumptions; that is, the impact of Jewish Studies in the university curriculum is to make possible independent thinking. In this way, Koret funding for Jewish Studies supports fundamental conditions for 21st-century education.

 Murray Baumgarten is Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Neufeld-Levin Chair in Holocaust Studies (with Peter Kenez) at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is founding director of The Dickens Project, editor-in-chief of The Strouse Carlyle Edition, and editor of JUDAISM: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life & Thought.