Boston College, one of the nation's most prominent Jesuit universities, began offering an interdisciplinary minor in Jewish studies on Oct. 2, despite having fewer than 100 students who self-identify as Jewish.
The program started as a grassroots movement of both Jewish and non-Jewish faculty members, said Maxim Shrayer '89, a professor of Russian and English at BC who chairs the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and is co-director of the new Jewish studies program.
"We were titillated by the context of this being a Catholic and a Jesuit university, because it augments the Jewish tradition in a way that perhaps a nondenominational or a specifically Jewish-affiliated University might not have," Shrayer said.
The minor in Jewish studies consists of six classes, including an introductory foundation course, "Mapping the Jewish Experience," as well as four electives from at least three different departments and a capstone course.
Ariel Goldberg, a sophomore at BC, was the first student to sign up for the minor in Jewish studies and does not think the program is specifically geared toward Jews. "Boston College has done a fantastic job of encouraging students to broaden their horizons," she said.
BC has approximately 9,000 undergraduates, around 75 percent of whom identify as Catholic; 1 percent identify as Jewish.
Shrayer said these numbers suggest that professors may take the context of such a homogeneous student body into consideration. The professors are aware that students might be unfamiliar with the topic, as may not be the case at places like Brown, Brandeis University or Boston University, he said.
"We teach Jewish studies as a foreign subject, because many students will study it as an unknown subject," he said. Jewish studies is "both close to their hearts and very distant."
The program currently has 15 BC faculty representing nine departments, including English, film, fine arts, history, music, philosophy, romance languages, Slavic and theology, according to Boston College's Web site. Shrayer co-directs the program with Dwayne Carpenter, professor of romance languages and literatures and head of Hispanic studies.
Shrayer said that to his knowledge, BC, the University of San Francisco and Fairfield University are the only Jesuit schools in the country to offer degree-granting Jewish studies programs. Other large Jesuit-affiliated schools, such as the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University, offer no such degree-granting programs.
"We are really among the very first to put together a degree-granting program that offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the Jewish civilization, from the beginning to the present," Shrayer said. "In this context, students would view the study of Jewish studies as a learning prospect, because it's so new (and) so novel here."
Goldberg mentioned "Introduction to Hebrew" and "Propaganda Film" as classes that sparked her interest. She said that these were classes she would have taken without the minor, but was pleased to have them apply to a minor.
"I've had a teacher in high school that said that you don't need to be an animal to be a great veterinarian, so if you apply this same logic to (taking Jewish studies), you don't need to be Jewish to minor in Jewish studies," she said.
Goldberg said that when she first read about the program she questioned how successful it was going to be. But she now knows there is no agenda behind the creation of the minor.
Shrayer agrees. "What's been happening since we launched the program officially is that some people who have interviewed us have tried to describe this as a politicized issue, but what really drove us is intellectual curiosity," he said. The Christian and Jewish faiths are "connected historically, and from an intellectually genuine point of view it would be difficult and futile to disconnect the two."
Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies Maud Mandel does not see this necessarily as a reflection of the Jewish and Christian relationship. "There is a process of what people have referred to as the nominalization of Judaic studies - that is, its integration into universities as a mainstream intellectual endeavor, which started occurring 20-30 years ago and has spread rapidly, particularly throughout the Northeast and West Coast at major and minor universities," she said.
"It's becoming increasingly surprising when major schools don't cover that aspect of history," she added.
"If things go well, I can imagine a major and perhaps graduate studies in Jewish studies," Shrayer said.
Brown has one of the oldest Judaic studies concentrations in the country, Mandel said. According to the Encyclopedia Brunoniana, Brown's Judaic studies program was created in 1982. Like BC's program, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Jews and Judaism. "The idea is to study people who self-identify as Jewish from the earliest ancient Israelites societies to contemporary times, from a number of different perspectives," Mandel said.
The Judaic studies concentration at Brown requires at least 10 classes, including one full year of Elementary Hebrew; six courses in Judaic studies, including at least one from the social sciences and one from the humanities; and two "learning modules" that provide an introduction to a general academic discipline or compare a Judaic topic with some other relevant topic.
An aim of the concentration is to teach "how different approaches to studying look at this group and can investigate the past, the literature, the practices and social realities of this particular group," Mandel said.
