Association For Jewish Studies Research Articles

Na jubileusz 25-lecia czasopisma „Studia Judaica. Półrocznik” (numery 1–50/1998–2022)

On the Occasion of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Journal Studia Judaica. Semi-annual (Numbers 1–50/1998–2022) The article discusses twenty-five years of the existence of the academic journal Studia Judaica. Semi-annual which is an organ of the Polish Association for Jewish Studies. First, it is presented how the association itself was created, and then the periodical was founded. Next, it describes where the subsequent offices of the journal’s editorial office were located, who published the journal, and the composition of its editorial staff. Moreover, general information on the authors of the texts appearing in this periodical, their subject matter, and their reviewers are summarized. Finally, the focus is placed on the financial situation of Studia Judaica as well as its general condition and plans for the future.

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship: Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship:Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel Sara Ronis A review of: Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed by Shana Strauch Schick. Pp. xii 178+. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Hardback: $135.00 In 2018, I participated in a roundtable at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies titled "Different Approaches to Rabbinics Research: Between America and Israel." The participants were junior and senior scholars in academic positions in the United States and Israel, all reflecting on the complicated relationships between scholarship in these two regions. My own presentation was meant to represent the perspective of American early-career scholars. Being early career myself at the time and recognizing that people without tenure have distinct risks in offering critiques, I surveyed a number of junior scholars and shared their aggregated views without attaching names to the quotes. In talking to my peers, two important themes that came up were the perception that there is a shared academic interest in "law" – both actual laws and the concept of law more generally – across the community of scholars in North America and Israel, and a sense that rabbinists in Israel and America are engaged in fundamentally different kinds of work. The general picture that emerged was one in which Israeli scholars have better skills of textual criticism, manuscript traditions, and better knowledge of some of the Hebrew reference works, and as one colleague put it, American scholars are asking about what texts mean more expansively, "in conversation with wider theoretical trends and interdisciplinary approaches in the academy more broadly."1 This distinction points to a pervasive stereotype which contributes to how different communities of scholars see each other and engage with each other's works. But it is also clearly too broad; it does a disservice to the textual skills of rabbinists [End Page 275] trained in America, and to Israeli scholars' ability to engage with broader questions and conversations in the academy. Shana Strauch Schick's 2021 book Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed both affirms this shared interest in the law and convincingly challenges a reductive binary between scholars in these two regional centers. Strauch Schick earned a PhD from Yeshiva University, and teaches in both the United States and Israel. Where many scholars who have been trained in the United States read the Talmud with an eye toward discourse and rhetorical analyses, and identity-construction, Strauch Schick demonstrates profound expertise in textual criticism and manuscript traditions, and using these skills, offers a positivist reconstruction of the development of rabbinic concepts of intention. Strauch Schick's work is characterized by her extremely careful readings of complicated legal texts. It is worth repeating this last point – these rabbinic texts are complicated; understanding them requires profound experience with rabbinic thinking as well as deep familiarity with modern legal categories. In this short but dense book, Strauch Schick expertly analyzes these rabbinic texts and brings legal theory to bear in understanding what the rabbis are doing. Using source critical methodologies together with an eye toward the rabbis' cultural contexts, she Constructs a legal-intellectual history that highlights the distinct positions of the Amoraim expressed in their statements and rulings (identifying each according to generation, cultural environment, and school of thought) as well as the approaches favored by the redactors. This careful process of reconstruction reveals a decided shift in rabbinic thinking that ramifies across many aspects of Talmudic law" (p. 2). She offers this detailed reconstruction over the course of an introduction and five subsequent chapters. In her introduction, Strauch Schick situates her work within three scholarly contexts: the field of Jewish thought on rabbinic intention (including works by Shaul Kalcheim, David Brodsky, Yaacov Habba, Irwin Haut, Jacob Bazak, Avraham Goldenberg, Shalom Albeck, Ephraim Urbach, and Leib Moscovitz), scholarship applying source critical methodologies to the Talmud (the approach pioneered by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman, and nuanced by Robert Brody), and scholarship on the historical context of the Bavli (with an extensive list of relevant scholars, from Alexander Kohut and Jacob Levy in the nineteenth century to the more recent work of her dissertation advisor Yaakov Elman, [End Page 276] Isaiah Gafni, Shaul Shaked...

Written Testimony of Pamela S. Nadell Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary November 7, 2017: Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses

Written Testimony of Pamela S. Nadell Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary November 7, 2017Examining Anti-Semitism on College Campuses Pamela S. Nadell (bio) INTRODUCTION Thank you, Chairman Goodlatte, Ranking Member Conyers, and distinguished members of this committee for inviting me to this important hearing on antisemitism on our nation's college campuses.1 I am Pamela Nadell, a professor of history and director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University. I am also president of the Association for Jewish Studies, a learned society of nearly two thousand [End Page 195] members in the U.S. and far beyond who research, write, and teach in all fields of Jewish Studies from the Bible to contemporary Jewish life.2 I have spent most of my life on a college campus. As a scholar of American Jewish history, I know that antisemitism has coursed through our nation's past since twenty-three Jews landed in New Amsterdam in 1654 and the colony's governor, Peter Stuyvesant, wanted to expel what he called a "deceitful race [of] … hateful enemies and blasphemers." Had his "request that the new territories should no more be allowed to be infected by people of the Jewish nation" been granted, perhaps we would not have this morning's hearing.3 But, more than 350 years ago, he failed, and, since then, Jews have immigrated to America from around the world, and they and their descendants have proudly called this nation their home. As citizens, American Jews enjoy the rights guaranteed in our First Amendment—the freedoms of worship, speech, the press, and peaceable assembly. Those same rights allow others to voice their contempt for the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. We call that antisemitism, a form of bigotry and hatred based on many stereotypes and myths. Antisemites charge that Jews conspire to control governments, the media, the entire world; they deny the historicity of the Holocaust; they call Jews Christ-killers. At its heart antisemitism is a malevolent ideology. It targets Jews as individuals and as a people. As an historian, I know that antisemitism has waxed and waned across the landscape of American history.4 The political moment, economic dislocations, social forces, the movies in their heyday, and social media today set its volume control. ANTISEMITISM TODAY We are, by all, accounts, sadly, at one of those moments where the volume on antisemitism in American life is turned way up. Scholars and watchdog Jewish communal agencies produce alarming surveys. The press and, as this hearing demonstrates, the U.S. Congress, rightly pay attention.5 When a violent protest erupts as white supremacists in Charlottesville, [End Page 196] a college town, chant "Jews will not replace us," American Jews are rightly fearful.6 Antisemitism takes many forms: harassment and threats against individuals and Jewish organizations, vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish institutions. Swastikas spray-painted anywhere signal a renewed call to exterminate the Jews. The number of physical assaults remains low, but each is a shocking reminder of the vulnerability of all Jews. On social media, antisemitic threats have exploded. Attacks there, especially targeting Jewish journalists, run horrifically into the millions.7 The hard evidence about the rising numbers of antisemitic incidents is indisputable, and everyone—politicians, government officials, leaders of business and industry, and especially our nation's educators—must do all they can to model respectful behavior and condemn this bigotry, and all expressions of racial hatred. But, the question that has brought us to this hearing today is the climate of antisemitism on our campuses. Some charting its rise have specifically called out our colleges and universities as "hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment."8 Social scientists find that, when Jewish students are handed a list of antisemitic statements, nearly three-quarters will confess that they were exposed to at least one of them in the past year. As one 2015 study concluded from this data: "Hostility towards Jews and Israel appears to be a problem for a significant number of Jewish students."9 [End Page 197] But how does such unfortunate stereotyping impact Jewish student life on campus? Are campuses really hot-beds of antisemitism? Or...

Suppression of Permissive Norms in the Medieval Jewish Family

Suppression of Permissive Norms in the Medieval Jewish Family Shalem Yahalom The article surveys the development of the approaches towards nonfertile marital life in Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities. It appears that twelfth-century Ashkenazic Halakhah eroded the duty of procreation, leading to its permissive view of unnatural relations. In that view, aspiring to actualize sexual desires is legitimate, and satisfaction within married life prevents infidelity and sin. It should be recalled that in the Middle Ages pregnancy posed an extremely high risk to a woman's life, and unnatural relations served as an effective contraceptive method. In the thirteenth century, the trend of religious extremism in the Jewish community in France and the struggle against Cathar promiscuity in the general society led to the setting of moral and legal restrictions regarding this conduct. The new norm viewed the prevention of potential life as an act of murder, so that one who wasted semen in this manner was deserving of death as if he had committed bloodshed. [End Page 183] Shalem Yahalom Ariel University Copyright © 2020 Association for Jewish Studies

Introduction to the Theme: The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual

The following group of essays emerged out of a seminar held at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015. As section heads of Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity and Rabbinic Literature and Culture, tasked to think about how to address gaps in our fields, we recognized that despite a large amount of scholarship available on the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood, there was a dearth of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange, especially between ancient Jewish historians and those of us who engage in literary analysis of rabbinic sources. As a result, our divisions joined together to create “The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual,” taking advantage of the “seminar” format at the conference. Twelve scholars, each working with different source material and employing different methodological approaches, participated.

William Kolbrener. The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition—CORRIGENDUM

William Kolbrener. The Last Rabbi:Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition—corrigendum Shaul Magid https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009418000727, published online by Cambridge University Press, November 30, 2018 In AJS Review 42 (2), the name of the author of a book reviewed was misspelled. The correct spelling is William Kolbrener. The editors regret the error. The correction has been made online. [End Page 263] REFERENCE Shaul Magid, review of The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition, by William Kolbrenner, AJS Review 42, no. 2 (2018): 481–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009418000727. Copyright © 2019 The Association for Jewish Studies

William Kolbrener. The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition—corrigendum

William Kolbrener. The Last Rabbi:Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition—corrigendum Shaul Magid https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009418000727, published online by Cambridge University Press, November 30, 2018 In AJS Review 42 (2), the name of the author of a book reviewed was misspelled. The correct spelling is William Kolbrener. The editors regret the error. The correction has been made online. [End Page 263] REFERENCE Shaul Magid, review of The Last Rabbi: Joseph Soloveitchik and Talmudic Tradition, by William Kolbrenner, AJS Review 42, no. 2 (2018): 481–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0364009418000727. Copyright © 2019 The Association for Jewish Studies

On Kosher Hamburgers, Yiddish Tangos, and Non-Affiliated Jews: Writing Jewish Latin America into the Americas

On Kosher Hamburgers, Yiddish Tangos, and Non-Affiliated Jews:Writing Jewish Latin America into the Americas Raanan Rein (bio) and Adriana M. Brodsky (bio) During his visit to the United States in 2018 while watching a Miami Heat basketball game, the president of the legendary soccer club Boca Juniors, Daniel Angelici, was impressed by the possibility of eating kosher food at the stadium. It was then that he decided to bring that novel idea to the "Bombonera" (the nickname for Boca Juniors' stadium). In August 2018, a kosher food stand was opened.1 Now, Jews and non-Jews alike will be able to enjoy a kosher version of the choripán, the quintessential and popular sausage snack.2 The inauguration of such a stand in one of Argentina's most renowned soccer temples received worldwide attention. Due to the importance and visibility of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, and its long-standing involvement in Argentina's national sport, however, this should be no surprise. Indeed, one of the recent trends in Jewish-Latin American historiography precisely highlights how national cultures in the region influenced the elaboration of Jewish identities, and, simultaneously, how Jews ethnicized the larger society. This essay looks at some of the innovative contributions and challenges of Jewish Latin American historiography and what these studies can offer scholars focusing primarily on the Jewish experience in the United States. Current studies of Jewish history in Latin America insist on the importance of comparative studies, both within nations across different ethnic groups, and also across national borders within the Americas. The largest immigration to Latin America, which counted hundreds of thousands of Jews, took place between 1880 and 1930. [End Page 345] These were mainly Ashkenazi Jews driven away by pogroms, poverty, and discrimination. There was also a smaller number of Sephardi immigrants. Argentina, for example, counted only 6,085 Jews in its 1895 census, although the number was probably higher; by the 1930s, there were likely more than 200,000. In Brazil, the 1900 census listed 819 Jews. By the early 1930s, that number rose to around 30,000. And in Mexico, the official number of Jews increased from 134 in the early twentieth century to 9,000 in 1930.3 The richness of Jewish life in Latin America, which currently amounts to at least 500,000 Jews,4 has proved relevant to national histories, the Jewish world, and to the study of the relocation and movement of people and ideas, contributing to the reconfiguration of our understanding of Jewish geographies. While traditional historiography has tended to compare US Jewish experiences with European ones, attention to Jewish Latin America will better highlight the particular and unique in their case studies and what is in fact part of broader New World patterns as far as the social integration of Jews into their new host/home lands. The field of Jewish Latin American studies is a relatively new one compared to US Jewish studies, and it is therefore less bound by tradition when it comes to the historiography of organized Jewish communities and their internal dynamics. The exponential growth of this field, in particular since the foundation of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) in 1982, does not allow us to refer to most of the studies published on different aspects of Jewish life in this hemisphere. Since there is little continuity between the Jewish experiences during the colonial period and the communities established during the years of Jewish mass migration to the Americas from the late nineteenth century onwards, this essay focuses on the modern period, and leaves the experience of Jews during the colonial period and the Anusim (those forced to convert and their descendants) for another discussion. When possible, we have given priority to material available in English and accessible to the readers of the American Jewish History. We have also mostly focused on historiography, as the existing body of work in literature and cultural studies is vast and deserves its own essay. And since previous historiography overemphasized the supposed importance of antisemitism in the region, this text will refer mostly to studies about [End Page 346] Jewish integration in and contribution to the many societies...

Message from the Editors

Message from the Editors Carol Bakhos, Adam Shear, and Aviva Arad, Managing Editor The Association for Jewish Studies and the AJS Review editors and editorial board extend their condolences to the family of Professor Yaakov Elman, longtime member of our editorial board, who passed away on July 29, 2018. May his memory be a blessing. Note on Changes to Our Submission Process Beginning January 1, 2019, all article submissions to AJS Review should be submitted as an MS Word document through an online submission portal, which will be found at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/AJSReview. Submission instructions and requirements will be provided as you submit, and authors can also consult the journal's Instructions for Contributors on the journal website at http://cambridge.org/AJS. Peer reviewers will also be solicited and return reports through the online portal. Any submissions already under review at the launch of the new portal will continue to be handled by direct contact with the managing editor at review@associationforjewishstudies.org. Book reviews will not be a part of the new submission process and will continue to be solicited and received via email by our book review editors. We look forward to receiving your contributions. [End Page 267] Copyright © 2018 Association for Jewish Studies

The Secret of Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas: The Meaning of “Sod Ha-tefillah” and “Sod Ha-bitaḥon” in the Work 'Or Ha-Shem

The Secret of Rabbi Ḥasdai Crescas: The Meaning of “Sod Ha-tefillah” and “Sod Ha-bitaḥon” in the Work ’Or Ha-Shem Avraham Stav The article discusses the various instances of the term sod (literally: secret) as it appears in ’Or ha-Shem by Ḥasdai Crescas. As opposed to the common scholarship on the subject, which identifies these “secrets” as rooted in kabbalistic ideas, the article clearly proves otherwise. These “secrets” are in fact all interwoven ideas that constitute a single chain of thought emerging from the religious implications of Crescas’s view of causal determinism. This analysis, based on a comparison of the teachings of Crescas and Thomas Aquinas, sheds light on Crescas’s view of prayer, and explains the centrality of his concept of bitaḥon, trust in the Almighty, both as a means for the acceptance of prayer and the ultimate purpose of the institution of prayer altogether. From a broader perspective, the article reinforces the position that regards Crescas as a rationalist philosopher influenced by his Christian predecessors, while simultaneously distancing him from the world of kabbalistic thought. [End Page 193] Avraham Stav Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Copyright © 2018 Association for Jewish Studies

Introduction

Introduction Benjamin M. Baader (bio) The essays in this volume use the methodology of gender theory in order to interrogate the category "Jewish." Gender studies has for decades critically examined the categories "male" and "female" and has created an entire body of theoretical approaches to analyze their operations,1 while the theorizing of "Jewish" is a relatively recent development in the field of Jewish studies. Thus, a group of scholars has set out to explore whether this gender studies tool kit might be deployed productively to investigate Jewish difference and Jewish coherence. Lisa Silverman and I first organized a 2010 Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) roundtable on the issue, and then together with Beth Berkowitz and Chaya Halberstam we convened the conference "Grammars of Coherence and Difference: Jewish Studies Through the Lens of Gender Studies," at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in May 2015.2 Roughly half of the essays in this journal issue began as presentations at the scholarly gathering in Milwaukee, which was structured as a dialogue between gender studies scholars and Jewish studies scholars from a large range of disciplines and working in the entire spectrum of geographic and historical locations. The discussions at the conference stood out because Jewish studies scholars from areas as disparate as rabbinics and modern Jewish history joined in the same conversation; because Jewish studies scholars seriously engaging with gender studies scholars opened radically new vistas to all of us; and because for much of our gathering, we succeeded in addressing some of the big conceptual questions that underlie the nitty-gritty of our scholarly engagement with things Jewish. At the same time, more questions were raised than answers provided, and we organizers were left exhilarated, yet not fully satisfied. Thus, I am delighted that our firework of thoughts, ideas, and explorations finds a more organized and permanent expression in this volume. Throughout the history of this project, the scholars involved in it have been struggling with—and at times disagreed about—terminology. While Silverman and I used "Jewishness" at the AJS roundtable, the group that organized the Milwaukee conference became cautious about the term, due to its vagueness and theoretical imprecision. We tried to step away from the concept of "Jewishness," and called the conference "Grammars of Coherence and Difference," [End Page 1] to suggest that the operations of gender and the operations that create the category "Jewish" were comparable systems in which order and meaning is created in logical and systematic ways, like in the grammar of a language. Yet while we call the grammar that produces the categories of "male" and "female" by the name of "gender," an equivalent term for the grammar that produces the category of "Jewish" is lacking. In order to address this want, Silverman had suggested in 2011 and 2012 publications using the term "Jewish difference" as the equivalent of the term "gender."3 In the call for a Jewish Difference Working Group, that we conference organizers composed in the months after the conference in Milwaukee, this program is made explicit: Right now, Jewish studies scholarship lacks a common term that refers to the relationship between the constructed poles of the Jew and the non-Jew. This relationship forms the basis of much of our work across chronological and geographic time spans. We often call upon the terms "Jewishness" and "Jewish identity" to perform some of this work, but these terms are limited in their ability to refer to the much more specific and powerful analytical and cognitive structures at play in how we come to understand the meanings of the Jewish and non-Jewish. We propose using the term Jewish difference to refer to this relationship. Jewish difference occupies a linguistic space similar to the one gender occupies with regard to the relationship between "man" and "woman": it names the analytic structure that houses the "Jew" and "non-Jew." It is one of a number of analytic categories or frameworks, like gender and class, that often intersect, overlap, and use each others' terms in order to articulate their power. However, Emily Sigalow is alone, among the contributors to this volume, in using the term "Jewish difference" in the novel conceptual meaning that we...

Interview with Adriana M. Brodsky and Darrel B. Lockhart, Presidents of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association

Interview with Adriana M. Brodsky and Darrel B. Lockhart, Presidents of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association

Signposts: Cyrus Adler’s Vision of American Jewish Historical Writing

Signposts:Cyrus Adler’s Vision of American Jewish Historical Writing Jeffrey S. Gurock (bio) If Cyrus Adler (1863–1940) came back to life today, he would be gratified with the activities of the American Jewish Historical Society [AJHS] as it commemorates its 125th anniversary in 2017. For in its scope and emphases, the society is fulfilling the vision that he had for the professionalization of a field that only in the last few decades has come fully into its own. More than 100 years ago, this first major Jewish scholar to associate himself with the society envisioned a day when trained and productive professional academics, schooled in a variety of disciplines, would examine the American Jewish experience rigorously even as he hoped for this moment in time when their work would be adjudged as valuable contributions to the wider worlds of Jewish and American scholarship. In examining the AJHS’s contemporary agenda, he would be pleased that its leadership is deeply committed to “foster[ing] awareness and appreciation of the American Jewish heritage and to serve as a national resource for research.” And he would have heartily agreed that while its public programming is well known to those who attend events at the Center for Jewish History—the home of the AJHS since 2000—the core of the society’s mission lies in the collection of historical documents and the publication of scholarly works in the field. He would be proud that its journal, American Jewish History, now publishing its 101th volume, has remained the most significant and enduring aspect of the society’s work. He would have noted with pleasure that this most important academic periodical in its field, is overseen by the society’s Academic Council, composed of 123 members who teach and write about all aspects of American Jewish studies, most with posts at universities in the US and abroad. He would be absolutely delighted that it is a field that now comprehends not only history, but sociology, anthropology, economics, literary studies, and other cognate disciplines, and that many of the Council colleagues occupy chairs in these variegated disciplines at distinguished universities. And he would have been excited that, every two years, these scholars gather at a scholars conference where a fellow academician who does not work specifically in American Jewish studies is featured in a plenary session that typically relates or compares the [End Page 489] Council members’ academic work to cutting edge studies in American and modern Jewish history. It would make abundant sense to Adler that examinations of other ethnic or racial groups, or considerations of gender relationships, are high on the agendas of these invited academicians. He, likewise, would be happy to be informed that, on occasion, Academic Council affiliates return the favor when they present at the meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAHS), or the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). In other words, he would be most appreciative to find–upon his return visit–at this landmark moment of a century and a quarter of work, that the society is solidly positioned within the world of academe.1 To be sure, upon reviewing the history of the society since his passing in 1940, Adler would acknowledge that the road to such a contemporary respected status had been long and hard; American Jewish historical writing had to overcome its amateurish beginnings and surmount enduring prejudices among academics about the value of early professional work. But he could still stake the claim that the dream of professionalization began with him when he spoke boldly of what American Jewish historiography could become during his two addresses to the society as its president, the first in 1902, the second in 1909. Admittedly, Adler’s prime intellectual concern was not the serious study of this country’s Jews. He was an Orientalist by training and had earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Semitics. He was the first scholar educated in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in that discipline. But Adler had a distinct and prescient vision of what American Jewish Studies might someday become.2 Actually, Adler had played an important role in launching...

The Western Jewish Studies Association, 1995-2013

When the founding conference of the Association for Jewish Studies met at Brandeis University in 1969, 64 percent of American Jews lived in the Northeast and only 13 percent lived in the West.1 As Kristen Loveland has observed, the 1970s, however, the AJS more embodied a club of scholars located overwhelmingly on the East Coast, than a fully professional or national organization.2 Both the composition of the organization's leadership and membership reflected the concentration of most Jewish Studies departments, programs, and institutions in the Northeast. Approximately two-thirds of the members of its first Board of Directors lived and taught on the East Coast.3 With the exception of 1972, when the conference convened at the University of Maryland, the AJS annual conferences were held only in Boston through 1998.4 After the first six conferences, the organization concluded a twenty-year contract with the Boston Copley Plaza meet there every December in return for affordable room rates.5Nevertheless, it was apparent early in its history that if the AJS aspired be a truly national organization, it would need develop outreach programs for its members who didn't live and teach in the Northeast. By 1972 AJS President Baruch Levine announced a proposal to fund a regional conference program in Judaica which would enable us [the AJS] sponsor four colloquia in various parts of the country each year.6 Securing a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and matching funds from several Jewish organizations, the Regional Conference Program commenced in 1973 and continued until the end of the decade.7 Acutely aware of the organization's East Coast moorings, Arnold Band of UCLA, the AJS president between 1973 and 1975, declared, One meeting a year is not enough, and not everyone can make a meeting on the eastern seaboard. A minimum of two regional conferences is plausible: one in the Midwest and one on the Pacific coast. Regional provincialism should not be one of the characteristics of our association.8Unfortunately, Band's advice went unheeded. While the AJS remained committed its annual Boston conference in December, the impetus for establishing regional Jewish Studies organizations shifted individual scholars residing outside the Northeast. A group of Los Angeles-based Jewish Studies professors had been meeting at private homes since the 1960s, but a plan for joint sponsorship of it by the city's branch of Hebrew Union College and the University of Judaism failed materialize in the 1970s.9 In this issue of Shofar, Peter Haas recounts how and why the Midwest Jewish Studies Association was founded in 1989.10The founding of the MJSA served as a precedent for the Western Jewish Studies Association. The westward and southward demographic migration of American Jews continued unabated with the percentage of American Jewry living in the Northeast dropping 47.8 by 1995 when the percentage of Jews residing in the South had risen 21.1 and 19.4 in the West. Corresponding this shift, existing Jewish Studies programs in the West were expanded and new chairs and programs in Jewish Studies were established at other schools. For example, San Diego State had offered a minor in Jewish Studies since 1970, but received an endowment in 1985 hire a director tasked with teaching modern Jewish history and a visiting Israeli professor in 1985. I was appointed the first permanent director three years later.11 Living as far as one could be from Boston in the lower 48 states, I quickly realized how expensive, time consuming (two full days of travel), and inconvenient it was for Western-based scholars attend the annual AJS conferences. As the organizer of a weekly Jewish Studies lecture series, I hosted many Jewish Studies professors primarily from schools in Arizona, California, and Oregon. From our conversations, I learned that most of them resented that the AJS did not rotate the site of its annual conference or sponsor regional affiliates like professional organizations in other disciplines. …

Jewish Studies in North American Colleges and Universities: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The establishment of academic Jewish Studies positions and programs at a significant number of public and private North American institutions of higher education during the final third of the twentieth century is an interesting and complex phenomenon. In these remarks, the author provides a brief historical overview of academic Jewish Studies in North America and reflects on the present state of Jewish Studies programs in secular higher education settings and their ongoing challenges and future prospects. Her conclusions are neither comprehensive nor data-driven nor do they focus on the vibrant and excellent scholarship that characterizes Jewish Studies in 2013. Rather, the paper is based on the research of other scholars and the author’s experiences as a professor and administrator in Jewish Studies programs and departments at three public universities and one private university over the past four decades and as President of the Association for Jewish Studies between 2004 and 2006. The author also draws on her larger administrative perspective as an academic dean, since 2009, for seventeen Humanities departments and programs at the University of Oregon. The essay focuses on undergraduate Jewish Studies; the topics discussed are: Jewish Studies in North America: An Overview; Women and Academic Jewish Studies; Jewish Studies Instruction; Connections with Jewish Students and Jewish Organizations; Links with Israel; Other International Relationships; Donors and Endowments; Present Realities and Future Challenges.

The Midwest Jewish Studies Association: The First Decade

inaugural meeting of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association took place on September 24, 1989 at Spertus College (now Spertus Institute of Learning and Leadership) in Chicago. plenary address was delivered by Professor Byron Sherwin on the topic The Agenda of Jewish This agenda-setting thought piece was followed by the drafting of the organization's by-laws, and two academic sessions: one on Jewish literature from 200 BCE to 200 CE, and one on Teaching Introductory Courses in Jewish Studies at the University Level. Participants included all of the founding members: Sam Greengus (HUC-JIR) , Peter Haas (Vanderbilt), Joe Haberer (Purdue), Saul Lerner (Purdue), Gilead Morahg (University of Wisconsin), Alexander Ringer (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Sam Shermis (Purdue), Byron Sherwin (Spertus), and Gordon Young (Purdue).The brief description above reflects several aspects of the MJSA which became part of its very DNA, so to speak. First, is the date itself, 1989. This date marks the time when Jewish/Judaic Studies in North America had reached an important stage in its development. Jewish/Judaic Studies was available at literally hundreds of academic institutions across North America, from small liberal arts colleges to major state universities. Second, of course, are the midwestern roots of its organizers. As one can see from the affiliations listed above, the Jewish Studies program at the Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN was the epicenter of the idea that there was a need for such an organization. Along these lines, it is not coincidental that Spertus not only became a major locus for the foundation of the association, but remained the source of vital support throughout its history. This reflects the maturation of Jewish/Judaic Studies outside of the major Jewish centers of the Northeast. Third, it should be pointed out the fully one half of the conference programming was dedicated to pedagogy. This is significant because it points to one of the foundational values of the association, namely to address the teaching needs of small programs that had very little support structure in the institution or in the surrounding community.Although the academic study of Judaism in North America goes back in some sense to colonial times, it was invariably situated in the context of biblical or theological studies. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the study of Judaism moved out of Protestant theological contexts and into modern academic institutions. But outside of specifically Jewish institutions like Hebrew Union College (founded in 1875), the Jewish Theological Seminary (founded in 1887), and Brandeis University (founded in 1948), there were only a handful of scholars before World War II explicitly doing Jewish Studies at American Universities (notably Salo Baron at Columbia and Harry Austryn Wolfson at Harvard). expansion of Jewish Studies as part of regular academic programming at public and private secular universities in North America began in the wake of World War II but witnessed its most impressive expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the proliferation of other ethnic and area studies including Women Studies and African American Studies. new reality of Jewish Studies received institutional recognition with the founding of the Association for Jewish Studies in 1969.The almost explosive expansion of the 1960s was remarkable on a number of levels. Two aspects in particular should be pointed out because these were significant for the founding of the MSJA. One was that the vast bulk of the scholars who took up positions in the 1960s and 1970s were American born and American trained. This means that their training was not in the traditional yeshivas, nor in the Wissenschaftlich European tradition, but in the established academic disciplines of the modern American research university. Young Judaic Studies scholars had degrees in disciplines like anthropology, comparative literature, history, philosophy, and religious studies, and then applied the methods they learned to Jewish data. …

The Midwest Jewish Studies Association: The Second Decade and Beyond

The Midwest Jewish Studies Association:The Second Decade and Beyond Mara W. Cohen Ioannides (bio) In the fall of 1997 I attended my first Midwest Jewish Studies Association conference where I met Byron Sherwin, Peter Haas, Joe Haberer, and Gordon Young. I had no idea how important these people were to the organization. To me they were people who welcomed me warmly to the conference and encouraged my research and participation. Over the next 15 years, each of these men played an important role in my becoming a scholar of American Jewish Studies and current president of the MJSA. Byron Sherwin, still at Spertus, has been one of my faculty. Peter Haas, now at Case Western Reserve University, has become my mentor and teacher. Joe Haberer and Gordon Young, both at Purdue, became significant forces in encouraging me to take a more prominent role in the organization. Joe, in particular, was supportive when I became president of my development of the MJSA into a more student-focused organization. When I first attended the conference, the emphasis was on pedagogy. In fact my first paper was “Teaching the Troops Trupin: A Jewish Text in a Non-Jewish Class,” an examination of how I approached teaching Sophie Trupin’s Jewish woman’s homesteader memoir at a public university in the Bible Belt. While our mission statement still includes the word pedagogy, over time the papers presented have become more focused on research in Jewish Studies than on teaching Jewish Studies. In fact, at the 25th conference there was no paper on the act of teaching Jewish Studies in the modern university; although there have been quite a few papers in the last few years of pedagogical methods used in the past—an historical examination. This seems to reflect the state of Jewish Studies in the United States. As Judith Baskin explains in her essay, Jewish Studies has become part of the standard offerings at major universities. A generation of faculty has developed programs and pedagogical practices, so that the next generation has something to build from. Because of their hard work, those of us who have followed them do not have to struggle quite so much in our approaches to teaching Jewish Studies. The syllabi and methods are already in place and we can focus on tweaking them to the needs of our institutions and students. Another part of our mission is to encourage research in Jewish Studies. We are a proud sponsor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies [End Page 145] as Peter Haas explains in his essay. In 1990, the journal was equal parts article, book review, and poetry. Poetry is no longer regularly included, and the book review section has been much expanded, all the while the articles have broadened in topics. In 2008, Joe Haberer, the original editor, published an essay about the 25 years of the journal in the journal. He humbly called it “a premier journal of Jewish Studies.” By 1988, there were “200 [subscribers], half of it from the Purdue community, the rest from across the country,” clearly showing what Joe had suspected that there was a great need for a cross-disciplinary journal of Jewish Studies. It was in this year that his formal peer-reviewed process was incorporated. The first special issue on a specific topic was on teaching Judeo-Christian relations, a parallel to the pedagogical focus of the newly founded MJSA. In 1996 the journal moved from being published by Purdue University, to being published by Nebraska University press; this move from a university to university press only emphasized the quality of the product. Later it was moved back to Purdue University to be published by Purdue University Press. Shofar has always included articles on any aspect of Jewish Studies from pedagogy to literature, from archaeology to popular culture, and anything else to which one could apply an understanding of Jewish Studies. When the journal was picked up by Project Muse in 2006, the readership expanded exponentially. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies is listed in Project Muse, with articles back to 1990 when it went from being a newsletter to a full-blown journal. The database...

Women and the Transformation of Jewish Studies: An Oral History of the Association of Jewish Studies Women's Caucus: The Paula Hyman Oral History Project

The Association of Jewish Studies Women’s Caucus, founded in 1986, has had a transformative impact on the AJS and on Jewish studies more generally, increasing the presence of women in leadership roles within the organization and advocating for the inclusion of a gender perspective in the field, both methodologically and theoretically. The caucus’s most immediate impetus was the emergence and growth of women’s studies in the U.S. university curriculum, followed by the many challenges accompanying efforts to support both equity and recognition for women in Jewish studies. This oral history project, developed in cooperation with the Women’s Caucus of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), was conceived in the wake of the untimely death in 2011 of Paula Hyman, a caucus member and a leading voice in both Jewish studies and Jewish feminist scholarship. Published to coincide with the third anniversary of her passing, it is based on interviews conducted in 2012 and 2013 with some twenty of the group’s leaders, including as many of its founders as possible, complemented by archival materials.

Periodicals and Collected Essays

Periodicals and Collected Essays Pamela Barmash, Shachar Pinsker, and Rick Painter ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES REVIEW. 36.2 (2012) Aaron Amit, “The ‘Halakhic Kernel’ as a Criterion for Dating Babylonian Aggadah: Bavli Ḥullin 110a–b and Parallels,” pp. 187–205; Natalie C. Polzer, “Misogyny Revisited: The Eve Traditions in Avot de Rabbi Natan, Versions A and B,” pp. 207–255; Debra Kaplan, “‘To Immerse their Wives’: Communal Identity and the ‘Kahalishe’ Mikveh of Altona,” pp. 257–279; Bracha Yaniv, “The Hidden Message of the Hares in the Talons of the Eagle,” pp. 281–294; Iris Idelson-Shein, “‘Their Eyes Shall Behold Strange Things’: Abraham Ben Elijah of Vilna Encounters the Spirit of Mr. Buffon,” pp. 295–322; Janet Handler Burstein, “Performing Holocaust Memory: Judd Ne'eman’s Zitra,” pp. 323–336. Book Reviews, pp. 337–369. ASSOCIATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES REVIEW. 37.1 (2013) Daniel Stein Kokin, “Toward the Source of the Sambatyon: Shabbat Discourse and the Origins of the Sabbatical River Legend,” pp. 1–28; David M. Goldenberg, “‘It Is Permitted to Marry a Kushite,’” pp 29–49; Ilana Sasson, “Gender Equality in Yefet Ben {Elī’s Commentary and Karaite Halakhah,” pp. 51–74; Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, “The Virgin Mary, Miriam, and Jewish Reactions to Marian Devotion in the High Middle Ages,” pp. 75–91; Nicham Ross, “Can Secular Spirituality be Religiously Inspired? The Hasidic Legacy in the Eyes of Skeptics,” pp. 93–113; Adam J. Sacks, “Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann Controversy as Destabilizing Transatlantic Text,” pp. 115–134. Book Reviews, pp. 135–176. ISRAEL STUDIES. 17.3 (2012) Special Section: Israel’s Foreign Relations: Asian Perspectives. Yiyi Chen, “China’s Relationship with Israel, Opportunities and Challenges: Perspectives from China,” pp. 1–21; Maina Chawla Singh, “Indians and Israelis: Beyond Strategic Partnerships,” pp. 22–44; Özlem Tür, “Turkey and Israel in the 2000s—: From Cooperation to Conflict,” pp. 45–66. Special Section: Literature and Music. Rachel Harris, “Samson’s Suicide: Death and the Hebrew Literary Canon,” pp. 67–91; Phillip Hollander, “Contested Zionist Masculinity and the Redemption of the Schlemiel in Levi [End Page 437] Aryeh Arieli’s ‘Allah Karim!’” pp. 92–118; Assaf Shelleg, “Israeli Art Music: A Reintroduction,” pp. 119–149. Articles. Dana Kachtan, “The Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Military—From the Bottom Up,” pp. 150–175; Meir Seidler, “Zionism’s Conflicting Founding Designs and Their Ideological Impact,” pp. 176–190. ISRAEL STUDIES. 18.1 (2013) Maya Balakirsky Katz, “The De-politicization of Israeli Political Cartoons,” pp. 1–30; Hizky Shoham, “From ‘Great History’ to ‘Small History’: The Genesis of the Zionist Periodization,” pp. 31–55; Abigail Jacobson, “American ‘Welfare Politics’: American Involvement in Jerusalem During World War I,” pp. 56–76; Jacob Tovy, “All Quiet on the Eastern Front: Israel and the Issue of Reparations from East-Germany, 1951–1956,” pp. 77–100; Hillel Cohen, “Palestinian Armed Struggle, Israel’s Peace Camp, and the Unique Case of Fatah Jerusalem,” pp. 101–123; Oded Haklai, “The Arab Minority in Israel: Challenges and Limits in Recent Disciplinary Approaches,” pp. 124–145; Batya Shimony, “Shaping Israeli-Arab Identity in Hebrew Words—The Case of Sayed Kashua,” pp. 146–169; Tamar Wolf-Monzon, “‘The Hand of Esau in the Midst Here Too’—Uri Zvi Grinberg’s Poem ‘A Great Fear and the Moon’ in Its Historical and Political Contexts,” pp. 170–193. ISRAEL STUDIES. 18.2 (2013) Special Issue: Shared Narratives—A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue. Ilan Troen and Natan Aridan, “Note from the Editors of Israel Studies,” p. v; Daniel Kurtzer, “Preface,” pp. vii–viii; Paul Scham, Benjamin Pogrund, and As’ad Ghanem, “Introduction to Shared Narratives: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue,” pp. 1–10; As’ad Ghanem, “Palestinian Nationalism: An Overview,” pp. 11–29; Moshe Maoz, “The Zionist/Jewish and Palestinian/Arab National Movements: The Question of Legitimacy—A Comparative Observation,” pp. 30–40; Yosef Gorny, “To Understand Oneself: Does It Mean to Understand the Other?—Reflections,” pp. 41–52; Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and Zeina M. Barakat, “Israelis and Palestinians: Contested Narratives,” pp. 53–69; Dalia Ofer, “We Israelis Remember, But How?: The Memory of the Holocaust and the Israeli Experience,” pp. 70–85; Adel Manna, “The Palestinian Nakba and Its Continuous Repercussions,” pp. 86–99...

Conference News

Shofar aims to promote the exchange of ideas and information among teachers and scholars of Jewish Studies. We recognize that academic conferences related to Jewish Studies provide substantial and creative material that assist educators in their endeavor to incorporate the concepts and themes of Judaic scolarship into their classes. Periodically, Shofar will feature issues of substance, collegiality, and general interest that emerge from the annual meetings of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association and the Western Jewish Studies Association, as well as other conferences.