The academic field of Jewish Studies has always stretched between differing audiences and purposes. In its earliest phases, from the Wissenshaft des Judentums [Science of Judaism] as it was practiced in nineteenth-century Europe until at least the 1950s in the United States, the field’s practitioners understood themselves not only as exploring unresolved questions about Jewish history and culture but also as complementing or resisting antisemitic perceptions of Jews as well as the religiously and ideologically motivated study of Jewish texts and languages undertaken by Christians. The rise of Ethnic Studies programs in the 1960s offered Jewish Studies scholars another way of seeing their field, even though its foundation in Religious Studies and its institutional particularities have always distinguished it from those disciplines. Over the past half century, Jewish Studies has expanded massively, with more than 2,000 scholars now typically attending the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies.

All that said, the interdisciplinary nature of Jewish Studies as it’s currently practiced means one can’t provide any precise or narrow definition of the field. Jewish Studies scholars specialize in periods ranging from antiquity to the present and in almost every geographic region in the world; their credentials might include degrees in Jewish Studies, per se, but more likely they’re trained in departments of History, Religious Studies, English, Art History, Music, Anthropology, or something else entirely. What tends to unite scholars of Jewish Studies are the languages, ideas, texts, figures, and organizations about which they teach and research: Jewish Studies scholars might have specializations in Rabbinic literature; Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino language and literature; Holocaust Studies; or Israel/Palestine Studies, among many other possibilities. The reading list below includes a number of surveys of the field that can serve as starting points for considering it, as well as some landmark scholarly interventions that most contemporary Jewish Studies scholars will have a few thoughts about (even if it they specialize in something far afield).

Judith R. Baskin, “Jewish Studies in North American Colleges and Universities: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Shofar 32, no. 4 (2014): 9–26.

Baskin, a scholar of Rabbinic literature and former president of the Association for Jewish Studies, here offers a straightforward, clear introduction to the field of Jewish Studies in the United States and Canada, covering many of the key aspects and issues.

Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique 77 (1999): 61–85.

Offering a useful jumping-off point for a deeper exploration of the place of Jewish Studies in European and American universities, Heschel reconstructs the rise of the Wissenshaft des Judentums “in light of postcolonial theory,” and particularly the work of critical theorist Homi Bhabha, “as an attempt to subvert Christian hegemony and establish a new position for Judaism within European history and thought.” In that sense, she provides insights into both the motivations and the circumstances in which the modern field of Jewish Studies could be said to begin. Heschel, the daughter of the celebrated theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, critiques the attack by philosopher Gershom Scholem on major figures in German-Jewish thought as a “naïve” application of “Zionist historiography.”

Christian Wiese, “Inventing a New Language of Jewish Scholarship: The Transition from German Wissenschaft des Judentums to American-Jewish Scholarship in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Studia Rosenthaliana 36 (2002–2003): 273–304.

In examining the transition from Germany to the United States, and from German to English, as the dominant location and language, respectively, of modern Jewish Studies scholarship, Wiese surveys many of the key figures and institutions of the nineteenth century and offers insights into their motivations and interventions. Most of the scholars Wiese discusses were rabbis, whether more traditional ones or proponents of radical reform, and this reflects the degree to which secular Jewish Studies, housed in nonsectarian universities, took longer to develop. One of Wiese’s central examples is the research and writing of the Jewish Encyclopedia, which he calls “the first comprehensive scholarly collection of material pertaining to Jewish history, literature, ritual, sociology and biograph.” He notes that “although marking the highest expression of European Jewish scholarship it was published in English” in the United States.

Rachel Kamel, “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,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 27 (Fall 2014): 129–158.

One important facet of the development and expansion of the field Jewish Studies was its creation of opportunities for women to pursue scholarship and teaching, giving access to resources and prestige that had been expressly denied to Jewish women in most places and times throughout history. Change took place slowly, over the 1980s and 1990s, and pioneering women in the field recall the prejudices they faced in this oral history of the Women’s Caucus of the Association of Jewish Studies. Inequities and gender discrimination have continued to be problems in the field (Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff’s recently published book The Woman Question in Jewish Studies, is strongly recommended reading on this topic), but the generation of scholars who pushed for women’s inclusion in the field, many of whom contribute to this oral history, should be celebrated for what they accomplished. Along with all the institutional achievements, they “unquestionably changed the epistemological horizons of Jewish studies by influencing it to accept gender as a category of analysis.”

Lihong Song, “Some Observation on Chinese Jewish Studies,” Contemporary Jewry 29, no. 3 (2009): 195–214.

Following the expansion of Jewish Studies in the European, American, and Israeli academies, as well as the establishment of diplomatic and cultural relations between the State of Israel and a variety of countries, Jewish Studies has expanded globally. In China, for one striking example, many individual scholars and academic institutes have pursued extensive and fascinating projects in the field. Lihong, a professor in Nanjing University’s Glazer Institute of Jewish and Israel Studies and Department of Religious Studies, surveys the growth of the field and outlines some of the distinctive features and foci of Jewish Studies in China, such as the history of the Kaifeng Jews and Holocaust Studies. While the landscape in China has certainly changed since 2009, this survey article offers a sense of how and why Jewish Studies has reached a variety of countries without large Jewish populations and what possibilities and challenges are opened up for the field in such places.

Leslie Morris, “Placing and Displacing Jewish Studies: Notes on the Future of a Field,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 764–73.

In this essay, Morris, a scholar of German literature, takes up a series of major disciplinary questions about Jewish Studies in the contemporary university. Among other provocative approaches, she emphasizes literary and textual study as increasingly dominant or powerful within Jewish Studies and “the vexed and eternally returning question of what is Jewish about Jewish literature” as paradigmatic for the field.

Edwin Seroussi, “Music: The ‘Jew’ of Jewish Studies,” Jewish Studies 46 (2009): 3–84.

Seroussi surveys the history and state of attention to music in Jewish Studies and, in doing so, suggests some of the typical approaches, questions, and tensions that can surround any interdisciplinary project that overlaps with Jewish Studies. The article remains fascinating in a more general sense for the way that it leans, self-consciously, on a stereotyped idea of “the ‘Jew’” in framing its concern about music being ignored, marginalized, or trivialized in earlier waves of Jewish Studies scholarship and for its indexing of the uneven and contingent expansion of Jewish Studies to address a variety of previously neglected topics, methods, periods, and areas.

Jeffrey Shandler, “Queer Yiddishkeit: Practice and Theory,” Shofar 25, no. 1 (2006): 90–113.

One urgent and exciting development in Jewish Studies over the past few decades has been the growing contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars and the growing recognition of queer theory as a generative force in the field. In this article, Jeffrey Shandler, building on his theorization of post-vernacular Yiddish, examines “a cluster of discrete cultural phenomena” that “juxtapose queerness and Yiddish in some way and that do so as a means of challenging some cultural status quo.” In addition to offering readings of some powerful artists, Shandler emphasizes that “Queer Yiddishkeit is of particular interest for the way that it proposes (as does queer culture generally) an alternative to a biological model of conceptualizing intergenerational cultural transmission.”

Robert Chazan, “A New Vision of Jewish History: The Early Historical Writings of Salo Baron,” AJS Review 39, no. 1 (2015): 27–47.

One phrase that echoes through generations of Jewish historical scholarship in particular, and Jewish Studies scholarship more generally, is “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” coined by Salo Baron, a professor at Columbia University from 1930 to 1963. Chazan presents an introduction to Baron’s approaches, crediting him with having “led the way in replacing…simplistic presentations of the assumed phases of the Jewish past with a more rigorously and consistently descriptive portrayal of the varied experiences of the Jews,” and thus precluding “prescriptive stances for improving Jewish life.” Dozens of books and articles, including many recent ones, invoke Baron to argue for and against particular approaches to the writing of Jewish history.

Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 693–725.

This well-known article, co-written by two brothers who are both noted Jewish Studies scholars—one a professor of “Talmudic culture,” the other an anthropologist (who later received a law degree)—offers a provocative sense of what Jewish Studies scholarship can be. The Boyarins offer claims based on readings of “the dialectic between Paul and the rabbis,” contemporary critical theory, and a statement from a Yiddish newspaper to make the argument that “Zionism is a subversion of rabbinic Judaism” and to advocate for “Diaspora as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determination.”

Ella Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 5–20.

In an exploration of the experiences of “people of Jewish faith historically linked to the Arab Muslim world,” Shohat critiques the way that, in pursuit of “national unity, contradictions having to do with class, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, region, sexuality, language, and so forth tend to be erased or glossed over.” Noting that the term “Mizrahim…began to be used only in the early 1990s,” Shohat calls for “a new field of inquiry: Mizrahi studies, alongside and in relation to Palestinian studies.” Whether or not scholars have agreed with all the aspects of Shohat’s analysis, her call for Mizrahi studies certainly pointed toward that subfield’s subsequent expansion.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.