Winter 2007

by Prof. Marc Dollinger
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair
in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility
San Francisco State University

For most of Jewish history, responsibility for education belonged to the Jewish community. Yeshivot, funded with philanthropic dollars from Jewish leaders, trained future rabbis. Talmud Torahs and synagogue religious schools taught Jewish belief, ritual, and customs to their students. Jews, most often excluded from the university systems by anti-Semitic admissions policies, turned inward to advance their own knowledge.

In the early nineteenth century, German intellectual Leopold Zunz proposed a radically new approach to university-level Jewish Studies, Wissenschaft Des Judenthums, the science of Judaism. Zunz wanted Jewish textual study introduced at Europe’s universities and he pressed for a scientific or critical approach to understanding Judaism. His was an ambitious attempt to bring Jewish Studies into the university and to approach the subject as a student would any other discipline. While Jewish community-supported educational centers would teach rabbinic students and press for stronger Jewish identity, universities would approach Jewish Studies with the academic detachment and third-person perspective of a scientist.

Zunz’s ambitious plans for the integration of Jewish Studies into the university took over a century and a half to achieve. Anti-Semitism within European society precluded most Jews from ever receiving a university appointment, and most of the interest in Jewish Studies grew from Christian theologians studying the roots of their own faith tradition.

While the birth of the Zionist movement and the destruction of European Jews in the Shoah ignited renewed interest in university-level Jewish Studies, programs and departments in Jewish Studies did not enjoy dramatic growth until the 1970s. Two factors contributed to this surge: the end of anti-Semitic quotas in higher education during the 1950s and the African American-inspired ethnic revival of the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, American Jewish intellectuals were enjoying widespread access to the university at the same time that Jews across the country were searching for ways to discover their “roots.” Just as African-American and other ethnic studies programs grew, Jewish faculty, students, and community leaders demanded creation of new programs in Jewish Studies.

The effort was buoyed by the renewed interest in multicultural approaches to university education. Through interdisciplinary breadth requirements, college administrators encouraged undergraduates of all backgrounds to explore the history, culture, and beliefs of different peoples, including the Jews. Whether in less formal interdepartmental programs or full-fledged academic departments, Jewish Studies courses welcomed students from across the religious spectrum. Students can now earn an undergraduate degree in Jewish Studies, and several universities offer graduate training as well.

Most powerfully, the rise of Jewish Studies programs in the last generation has been made possible by the financial support of Jewish community foundations, agencies, and philanthropists. What Zunz originally envisioned as a departure from Jewish community support has developed into a vital “town-gown” partnership. In both private colleges and cash-strapped public universities, Jewish Studies programs have relied upon Jewish community support to ensure that department chairs and directors have the resources necessary to offer a rigorous Jewish Studies curriculum.

At San Francisco State University, community funding is even more critical. In a university political culture that often denigrates Israel and Zionism, the Jewish Studies Program serves as an academic home for high-level scholarship and teaching. With community support, including support from Koret , for example, the San Francisco State Jewish Studies Program has been able to launch a brand-new course this semester on Israeli cinema, part of our expanding academic focus on Israel Studies. 

In the broadest sense, community support helps the S.F. State Jewish Studies Program achieve its three core objectives:

   1. Provide university-level Jewish Studies education to undergraduates of all religious and ethnic backgrounds;
   2. Raise the intellectual level of campus discourse on Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Zionism by offering rigorous, academic courses on these subjects;
   3. Serve the surrounding Bay Area community with university-level Jewish Studies research, teaching, and outreach.

As part of a growing national movement that combines community service with classroom education, the S.F. State Jewish Studies Program will launch the Bay Area Jewish Service Learning Project this winter, the first graduate certificate program in Jewish service learning. In partnership with the Bureau of Jewish Education and in collaboration with Spark: Partnership for Service, funded by the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund, the project will train Jewish community professionals in the mechanics of creating and running service-learning programs in their respective agencies, offer university-level education in Jewish texts related to community service, and provide participants with opportunities to meet and interact with similar-minded colleagues.

Jewish service-learning students gain by becoming better-informed workers, while the Jewish community benefits from more knowledgeable and engaged volunteers. As the graduate certificate program develops, people of all ages and interests will have the opportunity to serve the Jewish community, learn about the Jewish origins of their service, and achieve, simultaneously, the goals of both the university and the Jewish community.

The strong relationship between Jewish Studies programs and the community echoes the wisdom of former Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, who built his own intellectual career on the notion that civic engagement as an American citizen demanded strong Jewish values as well. Two community funders, the Koret Foundation and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, employed Brandeis’s quote “T o be better Americans, we must become better Jews” in a recent essay contest run by the Jewish Community Federation’s Endowment Fund. These funders and others are helping to develop a university-community relationship that, like Brandeis himself, affirms the importance of both.

Marc Dollinger is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University.