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Spring 2019
Spring 2019
A Home for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia:
On the History and Mission of the IIJS
Solomon Wiener
The author wishes to thank all those mentioned in this essay and more for their help with the history of the IIJS and for sharing their perspectives on its mission. Any shortcomings or inaccuracies that remain belong to the author.
One of the cornerstones of the modern university has been the explosion of humanistic inquiry. Although these fields have faced thorny political issues—such as the power relations between the studier and the studied, or debates over who is worthy of being studied in a full department—these subjects all reflect a humanistic desire, at times more innocent than others, to appreciate historic cultures in an academic setting. The emergence of Jewish studies at Columbia and the center that houses it—the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS)—is no exception.
On the one hand, the story of Jewish studies at Columbia touches on several elements of the university’s past: Christian Hebraism, Columbia politics, Jewish philanthropy, the impact of the State of Israel, to name a few. But in other ways, each generation of the IIJS can be viewed as an interpretation of the mission of its founder—the inescapable legacy of Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989). Salo Baron was not just a scholar. He was a leader, possessed by a vision for how scholarship would enrich an appreciation for the Jewish people and their heritage, both within Jewry and outside it. He took to the university to accomplish this mission, for, as he wrote, “Only in a university can be found the range and diversity of disciplines and intellectual strengths that are necessary components of contemporary Judaica—history, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages and literatures.”[1] These varied disciplines would bring an unprecedented breadth and quality of insight to the study of Jewry throughout its history.
The history of Jewish studies at Columbia encompasses forgotten chapters in Columbia’s early history, historic professors who laid the foundations for the study of Judaism in the American academy, and timeless contributions to the study of Jewry in our day. But of the several pioneers of Jewish studies at Columbia, Baron’s impact has been the most profound. The questions that he grappled with—does the scholar of Jewry belong in a Jewish studies department, or in the department that anchors their discipline? What is the role of the State of Israel at an academic institution concerned with the legacy of the Jewish people?—continue to inform the IIJS and its leaders to this day.
Christian Hebraism and the Birth of Jewish Studies
The pre-history of Jewish studies at Columbia goes back to the very beginning of the university. Samuel Johnson, the founder of King’s College, was a Christian Hebraist—one of the many of his faith who embraced Hebrew as an equally foundational language for Christianity. Like several universities at the time, Johnson and his followers required that students of King’s College learn Hebrew alongside Greek and Latin, and they developed university seals with the Hebrew tetragrammaton (like the three above the entrance to Hamilton Hall). While no longer as pervasive, the early prominence of Hebrew in Columbia’s curriculum and public life provides the backdrop against which a storied legacy of Jewish studies would eventually grow and flourish.
It is not until 1887 that Jewish studies at Columbia can be properly said to begin. Following a donation from Temple Emanu-El—a Reform congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—Richard James Horatio Gottheil (1862-1936), the son of the Temple’s rabbi, assumed the post of Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Semitic Languages at Columbia. Temple Emanu-El included a written explanation of their decision to fund a chair in Semitic languages. Feeling like their intellectual palette had expanded in light of their professional education and experience, members of New York’s elite temple wanted a Jewish intellectual whose style of scholarship could match their modern epistemic sensibilities. Members of the congregation wanted to release the study of foundational Jewish texts from the constraints of the rabbinic seminary, and evaluate biblical and rabbinic literature to the same degree of scrutiny that was common to an academic environment.
What makes Gottheil the first Jewish studies professor at Columbia is not only that he was hand-picked to represent Jewish academic pursuits on campus, but that his activities intersected with a burgeoning class of Jewish interests in America: the academic study of Jewish literature and history. Unlike his counterparts at seminaries in Germany or the US, Gottheil would be among the first to represent such study outside the confines of a rabbinic institution, and with the full resources of a leading American university—a new step in the cultural emancipation of American Jewry. Operating as an independent professor but endowed (in both senses of the term) with a specific purpose, Gottheil was hugely instrumental in representing a new kind of Jewish interest on campus. The Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Semitics oversaw the publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia, and held affiliations with the Jewish Publication Society, established in 1888, and the Society of Biblical Literature.
Gottheil’s arrival also precipitated the monumental donation of rare Jewish books and manuscripts to Columbia’s library collection. In recognition for the endowment of a chair in rabbinic literature, Temple Emanu-El offered a gift of rare Judaica, comprising the library of the famed Talmudist Jacob Emden of Altona (1697-1776), among others. Having received several other contributions along the way, Columbia’s collection became “the largest in the country,” according to an 1896 New York Times article. The new collection placed Columbia squarely on the map as an advanced center for the study of Judaica.
These notable achievements notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to understand Gottheil’s impact on a purely academic register. The professor was an active member of the American Zionist movement. He served from 1898-1904 as President of the American Federation of Zionists, a job which sent him to the Second Zionist Congress, organized by Theodore Herzl in 1898. There is some speculation as to how passionate he was about such political activism, but his personal records indicate his support for the Zionist cause, despite his ties to the Reform movement and preference for the life of academia.
A professor of rabbinic literature and Semitic languages, Gottheil stood at the intersection of a nascent academic Jewish subfield, and salient Jewish social and political issues. To be clear, Gottheil’s academic post was by no means a pulpit for advocacy. Nevertheless, Gottheil’s example speaks to the complex relationship between academic and political Jewish interests that emerged alongside Jewish studies at Columbia. It would not be the only instance of such a tension in Columbia’s history of Jewish studies.
Baron and the Center for Israeli Studies
The arrival of Salo Baron at Columbia is well documented.[2] In 1928, Linda Miller, a recently widowed member of Temple Emanu-El, donated a generous sum from the fund of her late husband towards the establishment of the Nathan Miller Chair in Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions. Miller had her own premonitions as to whom would receive the appointment—she had been impressed with the academic and religious temperament of the rabbi of her temple, and wrote the president of Columbia with her intentions that Rabbi Hyman Enelow become the first professor of Jewish history at his university.
As per university policy, Nicholas Murray Butler could not choose a professor at this donor’s request, but he did agree to consult Miller’s opinion when it came to the final few candidates. Many remember Butler as infamous for the quotas he set against Jewish students at Columbia, and for other intimations of antisemitism to be found in Trustees minutes from his tenure. Nevertheless, Butler’s correspondence with Miller reveals a sincere determination to “secure the most eminent scholar available for the Chair,”[3] which would be “the chief instrument on this side of the Atlantic for the promotion of the subject matter with which it deals.”[4] The only problem is that Butler’s final choice was not the scholar Miller had in mind.
In a letter to Butler accompanying the donation, Miller had made her preferences for the chair clear: she did not want the appointee to have any ties to the new Jewish movement “which construes Judaism chiefly in political terms.”[5] In her reaction to Baron’s appointment, Miller warned Butler that his selection represented this nationalistic strain of Judaism: “I do hope he [Baron] will pay some deference to my wishes on the subject of the so-called ethnic Jew. This is the doctrine which, above all in the world, I believe most dangerous to Judaism as a spiritual force in the world.”[6] However, Miller’s private wishes were probably too obscure and sectarian to Butler, who saw in Baron nothing but a promising academic (an impression informed by Baron’s “foreign training” in Vienna, which seems to have aroused Butler’s Germanophilia). Although Baron’s arrival was acclaimed by a number of prominent academics, it also met the disappointment of Richard Gottheil, who somewhat presumptuously envisioned a fellow scholar of rabbinic literature and Semitics. In 1930, the newly installed Professor of Jewish History came to Columbia University, without the support of his philanthropic sponsor or elder Jewish colleague, amidst an administration tightening its grip on the influence of Jews at Columbia.
Despite these setbacks, Baron hit the ground running, proving his worth to the Columbia community and beyond. This began with his innovative approach to the study of an old people, which culminated with his sweeping three-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews in 1937. Throughout his career, Baron decried the tendency among scholars of Jewish history to consider the Jews in cultural isolation, and to place too great a weight on their sufferings and displacements as the prime movers of their history. These historians, Baron argued, “are wont to draw the picture solely in black. Isolating the Jews from other social groups, they stress the severe disabilities imposed upon them and the insecurity which has pervaded their life. The time has come,” Baron continues, “to revise these traditional notions.”[7] Baron would later term the position of his adversaries “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” By contrast, the Miller Professor urged that the Jewish people and religion, like all peoples and their cultural output, needed to be studied alongside their neighbors and broader environments. Baron believed that Jews enjoyed a vigorous interaction with their historical environments, which played a more primary role than passive suffering in shaping the contours of their fate.
The influence of Baron’s worldview extends not only to the method and spirit of his scholarship, but to the very role of the Jewish scholar that Baron established at Columbia. Although many remember Baron for his insistence on being placed in the history department, the earliest records indicate that he was actually prepared to enter the Department of Religion or Oriental Studies.[8] The final decision to place Baron in History apparently belongs to, above all, President Butler. However, Baron would eventually embrace his position in the Department of History, and became known for the belief that scholars of Jewish studies have the most to learn and teach by being based in their respective foundational disciplines.[9] Baron’s position continues to inform the employment of Jewish studies faculty at Columbia until today: scholars of Jewish history are based in the history department, Yiddish in Germanic languages, sociology in sociology, etc. Nevertheless, almost two decades after his arrival, Baron would seek a more centralized location for Jewish studies at his home university.
It remains to be determined exactly how and why Baron started the Center for Israeli Studies—the forerunner to our present-day IIJS. In fact, there was no one (to the best of my knowledge) currently involved in IIJS who knew the precise title of Baron’s Center at its founding. With the help of Jewish Studies Librarian Michelle Chesner, we were able to identify a trail of conversations between Baron and other university administrators that mention a “Center for Israeli Studies” as early as 1948—which is, tellingly, the year during which the State of Israel was founded. Since Columbia has a policy not to purchase the papers of its employees, the details of Baron’s correspondence, along with his remaining papers from his tenure at Columbia, are sitting in an archive at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
A Columbia Spectator article from September 29, 1950 remains the most informative source at our disposal. By our standards, the title of Baron’s early center is somewhat of a misnomer: it was not devoted to what is now called “Israel studies,” the study of modern Israel, but to Jewish studies more broadly, including those periods of time in which the Jews inhabited the the Land of Israel, or Palestine. But, as the Spectator article suggests, the Center intended to sponsor courses in the history of Jewish communities outside Israel as well. “Among the courses to be taught,” the author writes, “are: Political and Social Institutions of Israel, the Prophets and Sages of Israel, and Jews in Eastern Europe.” The Spec piece also includes an endorsement from Schuyler Wallace, Director of the Institute for International Affairs, who looked to the Center as a harbinger of Columbia’s scholarship of the Middle East.
The Center for Israeli Studies—also called “the Israeli Center”—was primarily an academic forum, but its existence came from an impetus to display the historical Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. Evidence of this, in addition to the raison d’être articulated by the Spec article, is the Center’s early sponsorship: university archives indicate that the first few waves of its funding, in 1950 and again in 1955, came from the Jewish Agency for Palestine, an organization devoted to the settlement of Jews in British Mandatory Palestine and then Israel. Minutes from Trustees meetings in 1955 indicate that the title of the organization was changed to “Center for Israel and Jewish Studies,” apparently in order to appeal to a wider variety of funders and to accommodate a broader selection of Jewish studies courses.
For many contemporary Columbia professors associated with IIJS, Baron’s activities come as somewhat of a surprise. As Michael Stanislawski, the present occupier of Baron’s Miller chair, recalls, the decision to include Israel in the title of the center was “idiosyncratic,” since there was not yet such a thing as Israel studies. Further, the decision for Baron to associate publicly with Israel was shocking, since Baron himself was hardly a Zionist, but “more of a Diaspora nationalist.” Nevertheless, it seems that Baron’s nationalistic sensibilities—which had aroused the ire of his chair’s donor—did find some expression on Columbia’s campus, albeit through a more focused academic medium.
For the remaining thirteen years of his career, Baron turned his burgeoning institution into a veritable center for Jewish studies during the middle of the twentieth century. Baron was one of the only scholars of Jewish studies at an elite university who could boast of a rigorous program in Jewish history. He trained the next generation of scholars, hosted world-renowned professors—including Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber—and expanded the scope of the Center by overseeing the emergence of what would become another hallmark of Jewish studies at Columbia: Yiddish.
Yiddish at Columbia and the Tumultuous 60s
1952 saw the appointment of Uriel Weinreich, an eminent scholar of Yiddish and linguistics, as Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. Weinreich brought with him a project of monumental significance: by interviewing 1600 Yiddish speakers with over 2500 questions on usage and pronunciation, Weinreich was able to create a linguistic map of the different dialects of Yiddish across the Ashkenazic world. At the same time, Weinreich authored a foundational textbook on an academic dialect of Yiddish, so that the language (or one such version of it) could continue to be studied in institutions of learning throughout the world. Weinreich was a pioneer in creating an academic forum for the study of Yiddish language, literature, and culture.
The Yiddishist’s expertise in linguistics dovetailed perfectly with Baron’s vision for the scholarship of Jewish studies. Jewish scholars were not to be siloed from other departments, treating their subject in isolation from other cultures and disciplines; as such, Weinreich’s multifaceted erudition made him a hallmark of both the budding CIJS as well as Columbia’s linguistics department. This mission hardly detracted from Weinreich’s success at Columbia: his was the first Yiddish program in the United States to award doctoral degrees. The program attracted some of the brightest minds in Yiddish studies, and served as an integral column to the growing curriculum of the CIJS.
While Gottheil introduced the study of Judaism to Columbia that was to be free of all "religious bias,"[10] it was not until Baron and the incipient Center for Israel and Jewish Studies that Columbia would expand the scope of its teaching and training into previously unexplored disciplines. Despite these advancements at the Center, however, Columbia’s wider struggles in the 60’s and 70’s curtailed the growth of its Jewish studies program.
To be sure, there were several leaders during these years who kept the Center going, consolidating courses and procuring funds for qualified graduate students. Professors such as Arthur Hertzberg and Marvin Herzog anchored the Center and Jewish studies during this troublesome era. Notable young scholars, such as Ismar Schorsch and Paula Hyman, would even receive part-time appointments. But no incoming recruits received tenured positions. Baron’s esteemed Miller chair, the appointment responsible for springing the CIJS into existence, lay vacant for years. The financial resources necessary to sustain a non-departmental institution like the CIJS, whose vitality was essentially secured by external contributions, crumbled slowly along with the blow to Columbia’s reputation among the elite schools.
The CIJS would have to endure this period of decline to resume the momentum that carried it during Baron’s heyday. It needed a burst of life—and funds—to restore its former vibrancy, to once again enshrine Columbia as a bona fide center of academic Jewish research. Already by the late 1970s, plans were underway to revitalize the Center. Trustees and donors knew that their campus had the legacy and material resources (like its library collection) to reinvigorate its Jewish studies program. What they lacked was a personality, a magnet who could draw the critical attention, students, and funds to put Columbia’s CIJS back on the map.
Yerushalmi and the Renaissance of Jewish History
By the late 1970s, Columbia had received a donation of $1.5m from the National Endowment for the Humanities towards the development of Jewish studies at the university. Trustees used this as the grounds upon which to launch a capital campaign for $7.5m, which would secure funding from private donors for professorial chairs, graduate students, and various academic programming.
A 1977 pamphlet prepared by university trustees and leaders of the Center, sent to me by Michelle Chesner, tells the story of the campaign that would launch the CIJS on a new course. The tenor of the pamphlet is unmistakably Baronian, specifically in its celebration of the humanistic achievement of the Jews. A quotation by University President William McGill on the second page touts the “extraordinary Jewish cultural heritage” for its “intellectual achievement,” explaining that “It is, therefore, incumbent upon an institution devoted to the advancement of learning to study the history of a people who have so magnificently contributed to civilization and society.” While the publication celebrates Columbia’s Hebraist founders and Profs. Gottheil and Weinreich, the pamphlet bespeaks a longing for a figure like Baron: someone who not only promised towering scholarship, but demonstrated a commitment to the integrated role of Jewish studies and its scholars in a university setting. It is therefore no surprise that, only three years later, Columbia’s history department and trustees would target a budding Harvard professor to rehabilitate the Center—a coveted scion of the Baronian scholarly lineage.
In the Fall of 1980, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi arrived in Fayerweather Hall. As if welcoming the return of an old spirit, the brand-new Salo Wittmayer Baron chair of Jewish History, Culture, and Society had been established in his honor. Yerushalmi had studied at Yeshiva University as an undergraduate, received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and completed his doctorate under Baron’s supervision in 1966, before making his professorial debut at Harvard.
Like Baron, Yerushalmi hit the ground running at Columbia. He practically ran the CIJS out of his own office, supplemented by a modest conference room in 513 Fayerweather. He brought scholarly expertise in relatively uncharted territory—the late medieval and early modern history of Sephardic Jewry—in addition to the gravitas of someone who had been immersed in some of the highest levels of Jewish and scholarly education. He attracted top graduate students, began working on funding for the Center, and already introduced young scholarly blood to Jewish studies at Columbia: a student of Yerushalmi, who had studied with the new Baron Professor from freshman year through graduate school, named Michael Stanislawski.
There were strong points of continuity between Baron’s and Yerushalmi’s styles of teaching and administration. Channeling the vision of his predecessor, Yerushalmi was insistent on being rooted in the history department. Stanislawski remembers that Columbia had offered Yerushalmi a proper building for the CIJS, a generous offer which Yerushalmi declined, since he believed it was most appropriate for him to be enmeshed in the same environment of his scholarly counterparts—historians. As a historian, too, Yerushalmi had internalized the ethos of his teacher, who had argued vociferously against the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. Elana Stein Hain (CC ‘04, GSAS ‘14), a history major who “basically majored in Yerushalmi,” remembers that Yerushalmi once asked his classroom why many Jews of Eastern Europe had relocated to the United States. “Because of pogroms,” one student suggested. “No,” Yerushalmi said. “They had aspirations. They wanted to make a living; they were sick of being poor.” In Yerushalmi’s view, agency and imagination are what propelled Jewish history from one era to the next, not passive reaction to oppression. One imagines that Baron must have had a similar moment with his own students in those very halls.
Despite the continuity between Yerushalmi and Baron, the Center developed in the 80s and 90s in accordance with Yerushalmi’s distinct vision and capabilities. This meant that, in Stanislawski’s words, the CIJS was “essentially a program in Jewish history.” Anchored in the history department, the Center primarily expanded by acquiring professorships in modern Jewish history.
Stanislawski worked alongside Yerushalmi as the associate and later the assistant director of the CIJS. While Yerushalmi worked on fundraising, attracting and teaching graduate students, and acquiring new professors, Stanislawski handled administrative work and budgeting. Following Yerushalmi’s arrival was a $4.3 million grant from anonymous donors in 1981 whom Stanislawski believes to be Russell and Bettina Knapp, the former having been a relative of Baron and his lawyer. Through this contribution and others, the Center was able to fund two new chairs and revive an older one. Yerushalmi had wanted to preserve the Miller chair for a scholar of Eastern European Jewish history, which made Stanislawski—given his background in Russian history and the fates of Jews in that empire—a perfect fit. In subsequent years, Dan Miron was inaugurated as Leonard B. Kaye Professor of Modern Hebrew and Comparative Literature, followed by Arthur Goren’s appointment to the Russell and Bettina Knapp chair of American Jewish history.
Yerushalmi was not alone in his preference of medieval and modern Jewish history as the linchpin of academic Jewish studies. As Seth Schwartz puts it, Yerushalmi and others, such as the no less prominent Isadore Twersky of Harvard, gave off the impression that “Jewish history begins in the middle ages, and before that was mythic time.” The study of Jews and Judaism in the ancient period was considered the domain of theology, since the texts produced during this time formed the doctrinal backbone of Judaism and Christianity.
Nor did Yerushalmi pay much attention to newly established fields in the social sciences, which would allow for innovative approaches to Jewish history, religion, and contemporary life. This was Baron’s vision: he had hoped for a “Jewish social studies,” which would encompass a variety of disciplines—including “history, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages and literatures.” The CIJS also lacked an authority on Jewish philosophy, a curricular vacancy which lingers to the present day. And aside from Prof. Miron and the very title of the Center, there were no proper “Israel studies” to be found at Columbia, since Yerushalmi did not believe the nascent subject to be constitutive of a discrete field. Robust as it was, the efflorescence of Jewish history at Columbia did come at the expense of a number of other Jewish sub-disciplines.
At the end of the day, Yerushalmi did what he knew best, which was to teach, attract, and inspire through his inimitable command of medieval and modern Jewish history. One of his students, Elisheva Carlebach, recalls that Yerushalmi was a “wonderful professor and mentor,” which made him an “astonishingly prolific trainer of the next generation of people who are teaching history.” Indeed, the success and influence of Yerushalmi and the Center are still felt today, with dozens of leaders in Jewish history having received their training from the Center and its affiliate faculty. Yet, having served for almost two decades in this specialized capacity, the CIJS was due to break out of this more restricted role. This was a task for someone more intimate with the labyrinth of Columbia’s administration to accomplish.
Stanislawski and the “Institute”
Stanislawski had absorbed a great deal from his experience in diverse capacities at Columbia. He taught courses in Russian as well as Jewish history; he regularly taught in Columbia’s Core Curriculum; he served as the chair of the undergraduate program in human rights; he ran the interdepartmental committee on Yiddish studies; and he had handled a significant amount of administration and fundraising during Yerushalmi’s directorship.
The new director was therefore well-equipped to handle the beginnings of a now-familiar public image crisis pertaining to Jews and Israel at Columbia. In 1977, Edward Said had joined the Columbia faculty as the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In 1979, he published Orientalism, in which he argued that certain Western discourses had constructed a fantastical notion of the Orient based on imagined prejudices against the East, and that the reproduction and reinforcement of this caricature served to justify centuries of colonial oppression over “uncivilized” Eastern peoples. In the work of Said and his supporters, the modern State of Israel and its dealings with the Palestinian people figured as a prominent contemporary instantiation of this centuries-old oppressive Western bias. In response, rumors began to circulate that Columbia was an anti-Zionist and antisemitic institution, claims which are surely familiar to many students today. Joining in a widespread concern over the status of Jewish and Israel-supporting students at Columbia were supporters of the CIJS, who were agitated by their impression of the climate for Jews on Columbia’s campus.
Throughout Yerushalmi’s and Stanislawski’s tenures, this uproar never quite subsided. In response, Stanislawski began working with the university president to manage the recurring crisis facing Columbia’s reputation. Stanislawski knew that such sweeping allegations did not accurately capture the experience of Jewish faculty and students on campus. He knew that the response he received from certain supporters of the Center—to hire Israeli professors to come teach “the truth” about Israel as a way of countering anti-Zionist sentiment—was not very sophisticated, not in the spirit of an academic institution, and not even likely to achieve the impact that devisers of such a plan intended. Nevertheless, Stanislawski did want to show that Jewish studies could thrive at a place like Columbia, and he did feel it was appropriate to showcase what nuanced and academic discussion of Israel could look like on this controversial campus. Finally, Stanislawski’s experience as the chair of the human rights program had taught him that “institutes” at Columbia were more powerful than “centers,” since they could fill faculty lines and host greater public programming. A non-departmental institution like the CIJS would better fulfill its purpose, even without the crisis of Columbia’s public image, by functioning with the powers of an institute.
It is against this backdrop that Stanislawski pushed to change the CIJS to an institute, which was finally accomplished in 2005. Following this titular transformation, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies started acting truer to its name: Stanislawski established a visiting professorship for Israeli scholars, which has featured, among others, Israeli historian Anita Shapira, politician and law professor Amnon Rubinstein, and the acclaimed Bible scholar Yair Zakovitch. The Institute also began offering the type of public programming that it continues to host today—such as book talks, public lectures, and informal conversations—though Stanislawski would continue to resist pressure to curate events that were more overtly political.
In addition to boosting the central presence of the Institute, Stanislawski began to expand outward into new disciplines, beginning with the study of Judaism in antiquity. The Talmudist David Weiss-Halivni had been teaching as Professor of Rabbinics since 1987 when he arrived at Columbia from JTS, and Stanislawski felt that there should be a permanent endowment supporting the field of Halivni’s expertise. Stanislawski recalls many discussions with the president of the Littauer foundation in the mid-90s, a Jewish philanthropic organization with a special interest in academia, moments which reflect “the deep imbrication of philanthropy and academic interests,” as Stanislawski puts it. Stanislawski secured the endowment for the chair, and changed Halivni’s title from “Professor of Rabbinics” to the “Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization,” reflecting a more encompassing and Baronian approach to the study of Jewish material in its historical context.
Stanislawski also turned an eye to the social sciences. When trustees decided to fund a Yosef H. Yerushalmi chair in Israel and Jewish Studies, Stanislawski motioned for the position to be placed in the sociology department, since, in his words, “we didn’t need a fifth Jewish historian.” Finally, a lingering absence from earlier years needed to be filled: the Yiddish chair, which had been vacant following the dissolution of Columbia’s linguistics department. The leaders of the interdepartmental committee on Yiddish—Stanislawski and Andreas Huyssen, a Germanist with an interest in Yiddish—decided to preserve the Yiddish program even with the abolition of linguistics. They were able to raise funds for an Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, a title soon bestowed upon the young Oxford graduate Jeremy Dauber.
In over two decades working for the Center and Institute, Stanislawski had done all he could to secure the prosperity of Jewish studies at Columbia. Stanislawski improved on several shortcomings of Yerushalmi’s leadership, augmenting the status and impact of the Institute, expanding the chairs outside medieval and modern history, and establishing a hardline stance against the intrusion of advocacy into the academy. His leadership would help set the ideological and institutional contours of the contemporary IIJS, save its bright new space in 617 Kent Hall.
The IIJS in Recent Memory: Dauber and Carlebach
New Life to Jewish Studies
The hiring of Professors Dauber and Cohen signaled a transformation for IIJS faculty, who did not come from the Baron-Yerushalmi-Stanislawski lineage, and who settled outside the boundaries of Columbia’s Department of History. Even within the halls of Fayerweather, there was new life associated with the Institute: Rebecca Kobrin became the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History in 2006. Kobrin is the first historian of the Institute not to have studied with Baron or Yerushalmi. Yet, her multidisciplinary activity in Jewish and American Studies echoes Baron’s call for scholars of Jews and Judaism to be nested in the disciplines that anchor their research.
Jewish studies at Columbia received an added blessing in 2008, upon the arrival of a $4 million donation to the CU Libraries. The funds were allotted to serve three purposes, including the endowment of a Jewish studies librarian. Columbia and the IIJS welcomed Michelle Chesner shortly thereafter, the first librarian to be devoted to Columbia’s legendary collection, and a role that Chesner quickly proved to be indispensable.
“It was a desert before she came,” Carlebach says of Chesner. Although Columbia had possessed a massive collection of manuscripts since Gottheil in the 1890s, Carlebach notes that “there was no way to know what manuscripts we had here without getting on a plane and looking at the catalogue in the basement of the Hebrew University.” Columbia faculty could hardly begin to unpack the hoards of treasure they were sitting on.
Much of Chesner’s work at Columbia has been bringing these treasures to light. Recently, she curated an exhibit called “The People in the Book” that was displayed in Butler Library. Chesner also arranges tours of the manuscript collection with Jewish studies classes, and she co-leads a graduate seminar on the history of the Jewish book with Carlebach, which meets in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Butler. On top of this, Chesner has begun an undertaking of her own, what Carlebach calls “the next frontier in the history of the book.” Known as “Footprints,” Chesner’s project is to trace the individual movements of old books by documenting their historic journeys. The aim is both to expose the fascinating trajectories of these touchstones of Judaica, and determine the reach of early printing technologies along the way. When completed, “Footprints” promises to be a landmark achievement in the Jewish Digital Humanities.
New Home, New Purpose
Professor Dauber was the first, and is still the only, director of the IIJS from outside the history department. He had arrived at Columbia in 2001 and was asked by Stanislawski to become assistant director around 2007, before succeeding the latter as director in 2008. Although Dauber had not trained under a Columbia professor, the influence of the university and its CIJS were not totally removed from his background: Dauber’s teacher at Harvard was Ruth Wisse, who had completed her doctorate in Columbia’s Yiddish program. But Dauber brought elements of his unique background and interests to the IIJS, including an enhanced vision for the presence of the Institute, and a new focus on undergraduates.
The most dramatic transformation to the IIJS was its move in 2016 to a chic, new space on the sixth floor of Kent. “We could not have gotten this space without the vision that [Dauber] had,” says Dana Kresel, who had joined the Institute as assistant director in 2013. Kresel herself is an integral part of the “exponential” expansion of the IIJS in the last decade. “Dana’s been the glue that holds the Institute together,” says Dina Mann, Communications Manager since 2019. The increased responsibilities that the Institute has adopted would not be possible without Dauber’s and Kresel’s contributions. As with Stanislawski, however, the enhanced platform of the Institute only added to the challenge of fostering academic discussion amidst a supportive public curious about modern Israel.
“What we see ourselves as,” in Dauber’s words, “is an institute committed to substantive, nuanced, intellectual, and academic discussion about the breadth of Jewish literature, history, culture, and texts.” For Dauber, “Israel is an important part of that story.” Events or talks about Israel at the IIJS should always come with a clear academic focus, including on topics such as Israeli film, literature, and even politics. As Dauber says somewhat facetiously, “We don’t need to be a 92nd Street Y because there already is a 92nd Street Y.”
Dauber also broadened the impact of the Institute on Columbia undergraduates with the establishment of a special concentration. Although Yerushalmi held undergraduate teaching in high esteem, he was opposed to having a formal undergraduate program, probably since he was not sure what the requirements would be. He and Baron preferred awarding degrees at the graduate level, after students had acquired the requisite breadth, linguistic training, and immersion in a more established discipline. However, by Dauber’s time, as he puts its, Jewish studies had become “a firmly established field in the American University,” which made the decision as to what type of courses to include less nebulous and more realistic. The new director saw the coalescence of Jewish studies at Columbia “as an opportunity to think more about the undergraduate population, which had not been a prime focus of the Institute and Center.”
University administrators suggested the IIJS begin by offering a special concentration, and gauge whether there would be sufficient interest to start offering a major. But the question of interest is not the only lingering concern about the institution of a formal undergraduate program. Seth Schwartz, who served as assistant director during Dauber’s tenure, remarks that the prospect of a major is still beleaguered by doubts as to what the “set of requirements would look like for a major,” or whether there should be “a canonical focus outside one’s area of expertise.” Regarding the former, it should probably entail a language, but Schwartz is not convinced that Hebrew is the only appropriate language in conducting Jewish studies, as opposed to “Yiddish or Judeo-Persian,” for example. As for a canonical breadth, Schwartz feels that those types of conversations are beset by the “jowel-wagging” of professors and their personal inclinations: for example, “How could someone graduate without reading the 11th-century poetry of Shlomo ibn Gabirol?” Given the plethora of literatures, languages, time periods, sub-disciplines and methods, the debate over what constitutes a canon of Jewish studies is surely intractable.
Dauber shares Schwartz’s concern over a major whose impossibly large scope undermines its easy packaging into a neat curriculum. As a solution, Dauber is open to the idea of having multiple tracks within a Jewish Studies major or minor, each of which contains a unique set of requirements. On this view (though Dauber himself did not specify), one track would be devoted to modern Jewish history, for example, and would require a corresponding set of courses in the history department, and perhaps a relevant language, say Arabic or Russian. The same program could be outlined for Yiddish studies, modern Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and so on. Whether such an idea ever materializes is up to a future director to decide.
Dauber would continue to devote much of his attention to undergraduates, launching the most successful IIJS program in terms of students impacted: the Undergraduate Israel Fellowship. The program attracts students of a wide academic and personal background, offering a stipend of up to $1,000 for those who plan to work, study, or conduct research in Israel over the summer. Now in its eleventh year, the program can count 195 students among its fellows.
The fellowship has changed the way that undergraduates interact with IIJS. As part of the program, students of diverse majors are required to attend a number of events at the Institute, an opportunity for them to meet with visiting scholars, Columbia faculty, and get a sense of what IIJS is doing for the study of Israel and Judaism on campus. However, there is something about the fellowship that feels a bit more political than the typical IIJS stance. The fellowship’s goal is not to directly support the study of Israel and Judaism, but to support a summer experience in Israel, whether it be working, taking a class, or conducting individual research. To be sure, though, the IIJS is interested in lending further support to undergraduates in Jewish studies beyond the Holy Land: The Naomi Prawer Kadar Fellowship sends students to study Yiddish in Poland as well as Israel. And going forward, Kresel wants the Institute to provide financial support for “students who want to do research for Jewish studies theses, or present papers they’ve written for Jewish studies classes” at conferences across the US.
The Next Stages
Elisheva Carlebach assumed the role of director in the summer of 2017. Carlebach joined the Columbia faculty upon the retirement of Yerushalmi—her doctoral advisor—filling his chair as the new Baron Professor in 2008. The first female head of the IIJS, Carlebach has brought a renewed focus on the academic presence of the Institute. If Dauber oversaw the latest transformations in infrastructure, Carlebach is taking great pains to supply the Institute with the trappings of a robust academic center.
For Carlebach, this begins with the Institute’s student trainees. “Elisheva is a powerhouse,” says Dina Mann. “She creates opportunities for her students,” instead of focusing solely on her own research. In addition to securing additional sources of funding, Carlebach has revived an old practice among graduate students, organizing events for them to exchange and comment upon each other’s dissertations and papers. The Baron Professor has also begun a collaboration with Fordham University to sponsor a post-doc fellowship and the “New Voices in Jewish Studies” program. Both initiatives provide an opportunity for emerging scholars to present their research at Columbia, and offer advice to graduate students on navigating early academic life. Carlebach has also increased the number of University Seminar meetings (regular academic convenings with guest lecturers) to twice a semester—closer to the pace of a bona fide Columbia department.
One of the more significant developments has been the Institute’s increased communication with its supporting base and alumni. “The vibrancy that we have could not be without alumni who believed in this space,” says Kresel, underscoring the importance of communicative outreach for the Institute. To this end, Carlebach and Mann have introduced a newsletter to be disseminated every semester, detailing the various developments among multiple groups at the IIJS. Contrast this with Elana Stein Hain’s impression as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, that the IIJS was limited to “little brochures” that listed the course offerings. Carlebach states that she is “proud to be putting out the word about the many things we do.”
In its next stages of development, Carlebach believes that the Institute must continue to invest in the lives of undergraduates. For starters, Carlebach has her own thoughts about the Israel fellowship. She hopes to raise the profile of the summer award and its potential funding, in order to send more Columbia students to Israel, and to allow select candidates to engage in “more meaningful work” during their experience. Engagement with undergraduates during the school year is among Carlebach’s top priorities as well. She responds carefully to undergraduate demand for courses and programming, and wants to ensure that “no matter who you are on campus, you’ve got to find something here that excites your interest.” “Talk to undergraduates,” she encourages me in researching about IIJS, “because that’s the most important population that we want to have a greater impact on that we don’t.”
Setbacks of the Institute
In spite of its storied legacy and increased vibrancy in recent years, the IIJS faces a number of recurring challenges, mostly owing to its location at Columbia and in New York City.
A number of faculty attribute some of the struggles of the Institute with its placement in New York City. As Schwartz notes, it can be difficult to identify a unique programming niche, since NYC contains an abundance of institutions devoted to Jewish cultural and intellectual content. More significantly, the IIJS has to compete with those institutes for funds, as opposed to Jewish academic centers in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are pretty much the only sites of intense Jewish intellectual activity on their respective markets.
From another angle, Dauber sees the Institute’s location in New York as an untapped asset, albeit one that would require a great deal of effort to exploit. “One thing I think we never really cracked was,” Dauber thinks, “we’re Columbia University in the City of New York, and I would have really loved to give undergraduates and graduate students the opportunities to explore careers with other partners in the New York space.” With the right connections in place, a Columbia student or alum could work as a “museum educator or curator, non-profit worker, archivist, librarian,” and more, says Dauber. Although he was not able to see it through, Dauber envisions that the IIJS can connect students with rewarding experiences that are not limited to academic study, including “internship opportunities, some possibly leading to jobs.” “There are so many institutions in New York that would benefit,” he says.
Another challenge facing the Institute stems from its position within Columbia academics, which has been both a blessing and a curse. The IIJS is an institute—not a department—and as such, its affiliated faculty are scattered throughout departments across the university. There are certainly upshots to this arrangement: Carlebach notes that at other universities, professors in Jewish studies departments often feel “siloed” from scholars and students with whom they share overlapping methods and material, but lack a means of engaging with each other across a departmental boundary.
There are also downsides to the scattered organization. Stanislawski and several others note that faculty leaders of the IIJS are often encumbered with departmental obligations, which means that plans for the Institute can sometimes be overlooked in favor of more imminent demands. On top of this, the IIJS does not receive the same budget from the university with which regular departments are equipped. Instead, the Institute must solicit donations from private supporters if it wishes to launch new initiatives, or hire its own professors. “It’s kind of like Jewish emancipation,” Stanislawski jokes, referring to the dissolution of corporate Jewish communities with collective funds in 19th-century Europe. If scholars of Jewish studies prefer being rooted in their respective disciplines, then they are going to be forced to sacrifice the autonomy that comes with a collective budget.
The IIJS is also limited in the amount of graduate students it can attract. Since there is no discrete department, there is no central graduate program to which prospective students may apply. Those wishing to work with an advisor in Jewish studies at Columbia apply straight to the professor’s department, but these departments are limited in the number of spots they can reserve for students in Jewish studies. Carlebach notes that while the history department admits 18-20 new graduate students a year, only 1-2 of those are admitted who intend to work with a Jewish studies professor. Departments with fewer candidates in general are even more limited in their intake for Jewish studies.
Of course, the graduate students who do wind up pursuing Jewish studies at Columbia reap the benefits of immersion in a general discipline, as opposed to a more confined Jewish studies program. For Jordan Katz, the advisee of Prof. Carlebach, it was the prospect of working on Jewish history from within the history department that drew her to Columbia to begin with. “I wanted to be a historian first, and I wanted to be a historian of a specific field, but I didn’t want to be just Jewish Studies. I liked that Columbia had this entrenched Jewish History in the history department, because of Baron and Yerushalmi.”
A graduate of Columbia College (‘11), Katz returned to CU to pursue a doctorate with Prof. Carlebach. The aspiring historian is writing her dissertation on Jewish “wise women” in the early Ashkenazic world, and she feels a greater kinship with her colleagues from the history department, who use similar methods and material to her, than she does with researchers in Jewish studies who do not overlap with her work. “I have more to say about the work of my peers who do African Studies than someone who does something in modern American Jewish immigration,” she explains.
Katz is also involved with the Center for Science and Society (CSS), a subset of the history department led by Pamela Smith, which has helped Katz appreciate and articulate the relevance of her work to domains of inquiry not immediately related to Jewish studies. “The questions I have to present in my Jewish Studies group versus my CSS group are totally different, like, ‘Why does this matter to the history of science?’” By contrast, Katz notes, “If you’re in a traditional Jewish Studies framework, you don’t have to answer the question of why it matters.” When it comes to her exposure to multiple spheres of inquiry and academic support, Katz would not have it any other way. “It makes me a better scholar,” she says.
For all its setbacks, the IIJS has come a long way over the last number of decades. What began as an umbrella center for courses related to Israel and Jewish studies at Columbia transitioned to an esteemed program that pioneered the way in academic Jewish history, and has accumulated a cast of endowed chairs to be filled by world-renowned professors. Most recently, it has metamorphosed into an outward-facing academic and intellectual institute, looking to more comprehensively satisfy a demand for Jewish studies across multiple populations, ranging from Columbia undergraduates to members of the broader New York community.
As for its graduate program, although the IIJS does not admit students in high numbers, the cross-fertilization that results from the immersion of its graduate students in broader departments permits, in Katz’s words, “a more discerning view of what is encompassed by Jewish Studies,” than what is available at other institutions. And as Katz’s advisor emphasizes, this vestige of Baron’s ideology also allows professors in Jewish studies to have stronger relationships with their departmental colleagues, in addition to a Jewish center of intellectual exchange and academic fellowship.
Lessons from an Institute
Whether we are curious about Jewish studies or simply invested in the success of our university, the example of the IIJS offers us much to learn from.
First, the Baronian philosophy that underpins the Institute does not only raise provocative questions about the limits of Jewish studies as a discrete discipline; it also calls into question the viability of any subject to cloister itself within the enclave of a department. The structure of the IIJS challenges scholars within Jewish studies and outside it not to recede into the comforts of their own field, but to constantly examine the relationship between their subject and another focus of study. As Katz describes, it demands of scholars of Jewish material to articulate why their studies are relevant to other researchers in their department, and similarly demands scholars of other domains to consider how their work may relate to Jews or another minority. The situation of IIJS at the intersection of multiple fields encourages its faculty and students to recognize the utility of numerous disciplines to the pursuit of Jewish studies, and, along with several comparable institutions, challenges the university-wide community to recognize the interrelatedness of so much of our academic inquiry.
Since its inception under Baron, the Center-turned-Institute has also wrestled with how to incorporate the growing importance of the State of Israel into the IIJS’s identity as an academic institution. Rather than keep Israel out of the academy, the IIJS has recognized the significance of the State since the Institute’s founding, but not at the expense of critical study and discussion. At times, members of the Institute have felt pressure from outside to do more than would be appropriate in an academic setting.
Despite these tensions, the IIJS views engagement with the public as one of its primary roles. “We’re not some type of ivory tower,” says Kresel. “The public is just as important in the work that we do . . . everything that we explore is relevant to the American Jewish community,” and beyond. Indeed, for academics to realize that they are accountable to a broader audience can be an important lesson in assessing what type of impact their work can have on society, beyond the limits of the university. The IIJS reminds us that the ivory tower is never that far off from the rest of us down below.
Through its historic personalities, manuscripts, or intellectual achievements, the IIJS reserves a chapter in multiple stories—of Christian Hebraism in the US, of Columbia’s institutional history, of the origin and development of academic Jewish studies, and of an enduring belief in the humanistic fruits of academic labor. For those Columbians with a stake in the Jewish past and its intellectual future, the legacy of the IIJS leaves an indelible mark on the Columbia experience.
One of the cornerstones of the modern university has been the explosion of humanistic inquiry. Although these fields have faced thorny political issues—such as the power relations between the studier and the studied, or debates over who is worthy of being studied in a full department—these subjects all reflect a humanistic desire, at times more innocent than others, to appreciate historic cultures in an academic setting. The emergence of Jewish studies at Columbia and the center that houses it—the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS)—is no exception.
On the one hand, the story of Jewish studies at Columbia touches on several elements of the university’s past: Christian Hebraism, Columbia politics, Jewish philanthropy, the impact of the State of Israel, to name a few. But in other ways, each generation of the IIJS can be viewed as an interpretation of the mission of its founder—the inescapable legacy of Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989). Salo Baron was not just a scholar. He was a leader, possessed by a vision for how scholarship would enrich an appreciation for the Jewish people and their heritage, both within Jewry and outside it. He took to the university to accomplish this mission, for, as he wrote, “Only in a university can be found the range and diversity of disciplines and intellectual strengths that are necessary components of contemporary Judaica—history, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages and literatures.”[1] These varied disciplines would bring an unprecedented breadth and quality of insight to the study of Jewry throughout its history.
The history of Jewish studies at Columbia encompasses forgotten chapters in Columbia’s early history, historic professors who laid the foundations for the study of Judaism in the American academy, and timeless contributions to the study of Jewry in our day. But of the several pioneers of Jewish studies at Columbia, Baron’s impact has been the most profound. The questions that he grappled with—does the scholar of Jewry belong in a Jewish studies department, or in the department that anchors their discipline? What is the role of the State of Israel at an academic institution concerned with the legacy of the Jewish people?—continue to inform the IIJS and its leaders to this day.
Christian Hebraism and the Birth of Jewish Studies
The pre-history of Jewish studies at Columbia goes back to the very beginning of the university. Samuel Johnson, the founder of King’s College, was a Christian Hebraist—one of the many of his faith who embraced Hebrew as an equally foundational language for Christianity. Like several universities at the time, Johnson and his followers required that students of King’s College learn Hebrew alongside Greek and Latin, and they developed university seals with the Hebrew tetragrammaton (like the three above the entrance to Hamilton Hall). While no longer as pervasive, the early prominence of Hebrew in Columbia’s curriculum and public life provides the backdrop against which a storied legacy of Jewish studies would eventually grow and flourish.
It is not until 1887 that Jewish studies at Columbia can be properly said to begin. Following a donation from Temple Emanu-El—a Reform congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—Richard James Horatio Gottheil (1862-1936), the son of the Temple’s rabbi, assumed the post of Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Semitic Languages at Columbia. Temple Emanu-El included a written explanation of their decision to fund a chair in Semitic languages. Feeling like their intellectual palette had expanded in light of their professional education and experience, members of New York’s elite temple wanted a Jewish intellectual whose style of scholarship could match their modern epistemic sensibilities. Members of the congregation wanted to release the study of foundational Jewish texts from the constraints of the rabbinic seminary, and evaluate biblical and rabbinic literature to the same degree of scrutiny that was common to an academic environment.
What makes Gottheil the first Jewish studies professor at Columbia is not only that he was hand-picked to represent Jewish academic pursuits on campus, but that his activities intersected with a burgeoning class of Jewish interests in America: the academic study of Jewish literature and history. Unlike his counterparts at seminaries in Germany or the US, Gottheil would be among the first to represent such study outside the confines of a rabbinic institution, and with the full resources of a leading American university—a new step in the cultural emancipation of American Jewry. Operating as an independent professor but endowed (in both senses of the term) with a specific purpose, Gottheil was hugely instrumental in representing a new kind of Jewish interest on campus. The Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Semitics oversaw the publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia, and held affiliations with the Jewish Publication Society, established in 1888, and the Society of Biblical Literature.
Gottheil’s arrival also precipitated the monumental donation of rare Jewish books and manuscripts to Columbia’s library collection. In recognition for the endowment of a chair in rabbinic literature, Temple Emanu-El offered a gift of rare Judaica, comprising the library of the famed Talmudist Jacob Emden of Altona (1697-1776), among others. Having received several other contributions along the way, Columbia’s collection became “the largest in the country,” according to an 1896 New York Times article. The new collection placed Columbia squarely on the map as an advanced center for the study of Judaica.
These notable achievements notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to understand Gottheil’s impact on a purely academic register. The professor was an active member of the American Zionist movement. He served from 1898-1904 as President of the American Federation of Zionists, a job which sent him to the Second Zionist Congress, organized by Theodore Herzl in 1898. There is some speculation as to how passionate he was about such political activism, but his personal records indicate his support for the Zionist cause, despite his ties to the Reform movement and preference for the life of academia.
A professor of rabbinic literature and Semitic languages, Gottheil stood at the intersection of a nascent academic Jewish subfield, and salient Jewish social and political issues. To be clear, Gottheil’s academic post was by no means a pulpit for advocacy. Nevertheless, Gottheil’s example speaks to the complex relationship between academic and political Jewish interests that emerged alongside Jewish studies at Columbia. It would not be the only instance of such a tension in Columbia’s history of Jewish studies.
Baron and the Center for Israeli Studies
The arrival of Salo Baron at Columbia is well documented.[2] In 1928, Linda Miller, a recently widowed member of Temple Emanu-El, donated a generous sum from the fund of her late husband towards the establishment of the Nathan Miller Chair in Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions. Miller had her own premonitions as to whom would receive the appointment—she had been impressed with the academic and religious temperament of the rabbi of her temple, and wrote the president of Columbia with her intentions that Rabbi Hyman Enelow become the first professor of Jewish history at his university.
As per university policy, Nicholas Murray Butler could not choose a professor at this donor’s request, but he did agree to consult Miller’s opinion when it came to the final few candidates. Many remember Butler as infamous for the quotas he set against Jewish students at Columbia, and for other intimations of antisemitism to be found in Trustees minutes from his tenure. Nevertheless, Butler’s correspondence with Miller reveals a sincere determination to “secure the most eminent scholar available for the Chair,”[3] which would be “the chief instrument on this side of the Atlantic for the promotion of the subject matter with which it deals.”[4] The only problem is that Butler’s final choice was not the scholar Miller had in mind.
In a letter to Butler accompanying the donation, Miller had made her preferences for the chair clear: she did not want the appointee to have any ties to the new Jewish movement “which construes Judaism chiefly in political terms.”[5] In her reaction to Baron’s appointment, Miller warned Butler that his selection represented this nationalistic strain of Judaism: “I do hope he [Baron] will pay some deference to my wishes on the subject of the so-called ethnic Jew. This is the doctrine which, above all in the world, I believe most dangerous to Judaism as a spiritual force in the world.”[6] However, Miller’s private wishes were probably too obscure and sectarian to Butler, who saw in Baron nothing but a promising academic (an impression informed by Baron’s “foreign training” in Vienna, which seems to have aroused Butler’s Germanophilia). Although Baron’s arrival was acclaimed by a number of prominent academics, it also met the disappointment of Richard Gottheil, who somewhat presumptuously envisioned a fellow scholar of rabbinic literature and Semitics. In 1930, the newly installed Professor of Jewish History came to Columbia University, without the support of his philanthropic sponsor or elder Jewish colleague, amidst an administration tightening its grip on the influence of Jews at Columbia.
Despite these setbacks, Baron hit the ground running, proving his worth to the Columbia community and beyond. This began with his innovative approach to the study of an old people, which culminated with his sweeping three-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews in 1937. Throughout his career, Baron decried the tendency among scholars of Jewish history to consider the Jews in cultural isolation, and to place too great a weight on their sufferings and displacements as the prime movers of their history. These historians, Baron argued, “are wont to draw the picture solely in black. Isolating the Jews from other social groups, they stress the severe disabilities imposed upon them and the insecurity which has pervaded their life. The time has come,” Baron continues, “to revise these traditional notions.”[7] Baron would later term the position of his adversaries “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” By contrast, the Miller Professor urged that the Jewish people and religion, like all peoples and their cultural output, needed to be studied alongside their neighbors and broader environments. Baron believed that Jews enjoyed a vigorous interaction with their historical environments, which played a more primary role than passive suffering in shaping the contours of their fate.
The influence of Baron’s worldview extends not only to the method and spirit of his scholarship, but to the very role of the Jewish scholar that Baron established at Columbia. Although many remember Baron for his insistence on being placed in the history department, the earliest records indicate that he was actually prepared to enter the Department of Religion or Oriental Studies.[8] The final decision to place Baron in History apparently belongs to, above all, President Butler. However, Baron would eventually embrace his position in the Department of History, and became known for the belief that scholars of Jewish studies have the most to learn and teach by being based in their respective foundational disciplines.[9] Baron’s position continues to inform the employment of Jewish studies faculty at Columbia until today: scholars of Jewish history are based in the history department, Yiddish in Germanic languages, sociology in sociology, etc. Nevertheless, almost two decades after his arrival, Baron would seek a more centralized location for Jewish studies at his home university.
It remains to be determined exactly how and why Baron started the Center for Israeli Studies—the forerunner to our present-day IIJS. In fact, there was no one (to the best of my knowledge) currently involved in IIJS who knew the precise title of Baron’s Center at its founding. With the help of Jewish Studies Librarian Michelle Chesner, we were able to identify a trail of conversations between Baron and other university administrators that mention a “Center for Israeli Studies” as early as 1948—which is, tellingly, the year during which the State of Israel was founded. Since Columbia has a policy not to purchase the papers of its employees, the details of Baron’s correspondence, along with his remaining papers from his tenure at Columbia, are sitting in an archive at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
A Columbia Spectator article from September 29, 1950 remains the most informative source at our disposal. By our standards, the title of Baron’s early center is somewhat of a misnomer: it was not devoted to what is now called “Israel studies,” the study of modern Israel, but to Jewish studies more broadly, including those periods of time in which the Jews inhabited the the Land of Israel, or Palestine. But, as the Spectator article suggests, the Center intended to sponsor courses in the history of Jewish communities outside Israel as well. “Among the courses to be taught,” the author writes, “are: Political and Social Institutions of Israel, the Prophets and Sages of Israel, and Jews in Eastern Europe.” The Spec piece also includes an endorsement from Schuyler Wallace, Director of the Institute for International Affairs, who looked to the Center as a harbinger of Columbia’s scholarship of the Middle East.
The Center for Israeli Studies—also called “the Israeli Center”—was primarily an academic forum, but its existence came from an impetus to display the historical Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel. Evidence of this, in addition to the raison d’être articulated by the Spec article, is the Center’s early sponsorship: university archives indicate that the first few waves of its funding, in 1950 and again in 1955, came from the Jewish Agency for Palestine, an organization devoted to the settlement of Jews in British Mandatory Palestine and then Israel. Minutes from Trustees meetings in 1955 indicate that the title of the organization was changed to “Center for Israel and Jewish Studies,” apparently in order to appeal to a wider variety of funders and to accommodate a broader selection of Jewish studies courses.
For many contemporary Columbia professors associated with IIJS, Baron’s activities come as somewhat of a surprise. As Michael Stanislawski, the present occupier of Baron’s Miller chair, recalls, the decision to include Israel in the title of the center was “idiosyncratic,” since there was not yet such a thing as Israel studies. Further, the decision for Baron to associate publicly with Israel was shocking, since Baron himself was hardly a Zionist, but “more of a Diaspora nationalist.” Nevertheless, it seems that Baron’s nationalistic sensibilities—which had aroused the ire of his chair’s donor—did find some expression on Columbia’s campus, albeit through a more focused academic medium.
For the remaining thirteen years of his career, Baron turned his burgeoning institution into a veritable center for Jewish studies during the middle of the twentieth century. Baron was one of the only scholars of Jewish studies at an elite university who could boast of a rigorous program in Jewish history. He trained the next generation of scholars, hosted world-renowned professors—including Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber—and expanded the scope of the Center by overseeing the emergence of what would become another hallmark of Jewish studies at Columbia: Yiddish.
Yiddish at Columbia and the Tumultuous 60s
1952 saw the appointment of Uriel Weinreich, an eminent scholar of Yiddish and linguistics, as Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture. Weinreich brought with him a project of monumental significance: by interviewing 1600 Yiddish speakers with over 2500 questions on usage and pronunciation, Weinreich was able to create a linguistic map of the different dialects of Yiddish across the Ashkenazic world. At the same time, Weinreich authored a foundational textbook on an academic dialect of Yiddish, so that the language (or one such version of it) could continue to be studied in institutions of learning throughout the world. Weinreich was a pioneer in creating an academic forum for the study of Yiddish language, literature, and culture.
The Yiddishist’s expertise in linguistics dovetailed perfectly with Baron’s vision for the scholarship of Jewish studies. Jewish scholars were not to be siloed from other departments, treating their subject in isolation from other cultures and disciplines; as such, Weinreich’s multifaceted erudition made him a hallmark of both the budding CIJS as well as Columbia’s linguistics department. This mission hardly detracted from Weinreich’s success at Columbia: his was the first Yiddish program in the United States to award doctoral degrees. The program attracted some of the brightest minds in Yiddish studies, and served as an integral column to the growing curriculum of the CIJS.
While Gottheil introduced the study of Judaism to Columbia that was to be free of all "religious bias,"[10] it was not until Baron and the incipient Center for Israel and Jewish Studies that Columbia would expand the scope of its teaching and training into previously unexplored disciplines. Despite these advancements at the Center, however, Columbia’s wider struggles in the 60’s and 70’s curtailed the growth of its Jewish studies program.
To be sure, there were several leaders during these years who kept the Center going, consolidating courses and procuring funds for qualified graduate students. Professors such as Arthur Hertzberg and Marvin Herzog anchored the Center and Jewish studies during this troublesome era. Notable young scholars, such as Ismar Schorsch and Paula Hyman, would even receive part-time appointments. But no incoming recruits received tenured positions. Baron’s esteemed Miller chair, the appointment responsible for springing the CIJS into existence, lay vacant for years. The financial resources necessary to sustain a non-departmental institution like the CIJS, whose vitality was essentially secured by external contributions, crumbled slowly along with the blow to Columbia’s reputation among the elite schools.
The CIJS would have to endure this period of decline to resume the momentum that carried it during Baron’s heyday. It needed a burst of life—and funds—to restore its former vibrancy, to once again enshrine Columbia as a bona fide center of academic Jewish research. Already by the late 1970s, plans were underway to revitalize the Center. Trustees and donors knew that their campus had the legacy and material resources (like its library collection) to reinvigorate its Jewish studies program. What they lacked was a personality, a magnet who could draw the critical attention, students, and funds to put Columbia’s CIJS back on the map.
Yerushalmi and the Renaissance of Jewish History
By the late 1970s, Columbia had received a donation of $1.5m from the National Endowment for the Humanities towards the development of Jewish studies at the university. Trustees used this as the grounds upon which to launch a capital campaign for $7.5m, which would secure funding from private donors for professorial chairs, graduate students, and various academic programming.
A 1977 pamphlet prepared by university trustees and leaders of the Center, sent to me by Michelle Chesner, tells the story of the campaign that would launch the CIJS on a new course. The tenor of the pamphlet is unmistakably Baronian, specifically in its celebration of the humanistic achievement of the Jews. A quotation by University President William McGill on the second page touts the “extraordinary Jewish cultural heritage” for its “intellectual achievement,” explaining that “It is, therefore, incumbent upon an institution devoted to the advancement of learning to study the history of a people who have so magnificently contributed to civilization and society.” While the publication celebrates Columbia’s Hebraist founders and Profs. Gottheil and Weinreich, the pamphlet bespeaks a longing for a figure like Baron: someone who not only promised towering scholarship, but demonstrated a commitment to the integrated role of Jewish studies and its scholars in a university setting. It is therefore no surprise that, only three years later, Columbia’s history department and trustees would target a budding Harvard professor to rehabilitate the Center—a coveted scion of the Baronian scholarly lineage.
In the Fall of 1980, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi arrived in Fayerweather Hall. As if welcoming the return of an old spirit, the brand-new Salo Wittmayer Baron chair of Jewish History, Culture, and Society had been established in his honor. Yerushalmi had studied at Yeshiva University as an undergraduate, received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and completed his doctorate under Baron’s supervision in 1966, before making his professorial debut at Harvard.
Like Baron, Yerushalmi hit the ground running at Columbia. He practically ran the CIJS out of his own office, supplemented by a modest conference room in 513 Fayerweather. He brought scholarly expertise in relatively uncharted territory—the late medieval and early modern history of Sephardic Jewry—in addition to the gravitas of someone who had been immersed in some of the highest levels of Jewish and scholarly education. He attracted top graduate students, began working on funding for the Center, and already introduced young scholarly blood to Jewish studies at Columbia: a student of Yerushalmi, who had studied with the new Baron Professor from freshman year through graduate school, named Michael Stanislawski.
There were strong points of continuity between Baron’s and Yerushalmi’s styles of teaching and administration. Channeling the vision of his predecessor, Yerushalmi was insistent on being rooted in the history department. Stanislawski remembers that Columbia had offered Yerushalmi a proper building for the CIJS, a generous offer which Yerushalmi declined, since he believed it was most appropriate for him to be enmeshed in the same environment of his scholarly counterparts—historians. As a historian, too, Yerushalmi had internalized the ethos of his teacher, who had argued vociferously against the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. Elana Stein Hain (CC ‘04, GSAS ‘14), a history major who “basically majored in Yerushalmi,” remembers that Yerushalmi once asked his classroom why many Jews of Eastern Europe had relocated to the United States. “Because of pogroms,” one student suggested. “No,” Yerushalmi said. “They had aspirations. They wanted to make a living; they were sick of being poor.” In Yerushalmi’s view, agency and imagination are what propelled Jewish history from one era to the next, not passive reaction to oppression. One imagines that Baron must have had a similar moment with his own students in those very halls.
Despite the continuity between Yerushalmi and Baron, the Center developed in the 80s and 90s in accordance with Yerushalmi’s distinct vision and capabilities. This meant that, in Stanislawski’s words, the CIJS was “essentially a program in Jewish history.” Anchored in the history department, the Center primarily expanded by acquiring professorships in modern Jewish history.
Stanislawski worked alongside Yerushalmi as the associate and later the assistant director of the CIJS. While Yerushalmi worked on fundraising, attracting and teaching graduate students, and acquiring new professors, Stanislawski handled administrative work and budgeting. Following Yerushalmi’s arrival was a $4.3 million grant from anonymous donors in 1981 whom Stanislawski believes to be Russell and Bettina Knapp, the former having been a relative of Baron and his lawyer. Through this contribution and others, the Center was able to fund two new chairs and revive an older one. Yerushalmi had wanted to preserve the Miller chair for a scholar of Eastern European Jewish history, which made Stanislawski—given his background in Russian history and the fates of Jews in that empire—a perfect fit. In subsequent years, Dan Miron was inaugurated as Leonard B. Kaye Professor of Modern Hebrew and Comparative Literature, followed by Arthur Goren’s appointment to the Russell and Bettina Knapp chair of American Jewish history.
Yerushalmi was not alone in his preference of medieval and modern Jewish history as the linchpin of academic Jewish studies. As Seth Schwartz puts it, Yerushalmi and others, such as the no less prominent Isadore Twersky of Harvard, gave off the impression that “Jewish history begins in the middle ages, and before that was mythic time.” The study of Jews and Judaism in the ancient period was considered the domain of theology, since the texts produced during this time formed the doctrinal backbone of Judaism and Christianity.
Nor did Yerushalmi pay much attention to newly established fields in the social sciences, which would allow for innovative approaches to Jewish history, religion, and contemporary life. This was Baron’s vision: he had hoped for a “Jewish social studies,” which would encompass a variety of disciplines—including “history, political science, economics, sociology, philology, languages and literatures.” The CIJS also lacked an authority on Jewish philosophy, a curricular vacancy which lingers to the present day. And aside from Prof. Miron and the very title of the Center, there were no proper “Israel studies” to be found at Columbia, since Yerushalmi did not believe the nascent subject to be constitutive of a discrete field. Robust as it was, the efflorescence of Jewish history at Columbia did come at the expense of a number of other Jewish sub-disciplines.
At the end of the day, Yerushalmi did what he knew best, which was to teach, attract, and inspire through his inimitable command of medieval and modern Jewish history. One of his students, Elisheva Carlebach, recalls that Yerushalmi was a “wonderful professor and mentor,” which made him an “astonishingly prolific trainer of the next generation of people who are teaching history.” Indeed, the success and influence of Yerushalmi and the Center are still felt today, with dozens of leaders in Jewish history having received their training from the Center and its affiliate faculty. Yet, having served for almost two decades in this specialized capacity, the CIJS was due to break out of this more restricted role. This was a task for someone more intimate with the labyrinth of Columbia’s administration to accomplish.
Stanislawski and the “Institute”
Stanislawski had absorbed a great deal from his experience in diverse capacities at Columbia. He taught courses in Russian as well as Jewish history; he regularly taught in Columbia’s Core Curriculum; he served as the chair of the undergraduate program in human rights; he ran the interdepartmental committee on Yiddish studies; and he had handled a significant amount of administration and fundraising during Yerushalmi’s directorship.
The new director was therefore well-equipped to handle the beginnings of a now-familiar public image crisis pertaining to Jews and Israel at Columbia. In 1977, Edward Said had joined the Columbia faculty as the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature. In 1979, he published Orientalism, in which he argued that certain Western discourses had constructed a fantastical notion of the Orient based on imagined prejudices against the East, and that the reproduction and reinforcement of this caricature served to justify centuries of colonial oppression over “uncivilized” Eastern peoples. In the work of Said and his supporters, the modern State of Israel and its dealings with the Palestinian people figured as a prominent contemporary instantiation of this centuries-old oppressive Western bias. In response, rumors began to circulate that Columbia was an anti-Zionist and antisemitic institution, claims which are surely familiar to many students today. Joining in a widespread concern over the status of Jewish and Israel-supporting students at Columbia were supporters of the CIJS, who were agitated by their impression of the climate for Jews on Columbia’s campus.
Throughout Yerushalmi’s and Stanislawski’s tenures, this uproar never quite subsided. In response, Stanislawski began working with the university president to manage the recurring crisis facing Columbia’s reputation. Stanislawski knew that such sweeping allegations did not accurately capture the experience of Jewish faculty and students on campus. He knew that the response he received from certain supporters of the Center—to hire Israeli professors to come teach “the truth” about Israel as a way of countering anti-Zionist sentiment—was not very sophisticated, not in the spirit of an academic institution, and not even likely to achieve the impact that devisers of such a plan intended. Nevertheless, Stanislawski did want to show that Jewish studies could thrive at a place like Columbia, and he did feel it was appropriate to showcase what nuanced and academic discussion of Israel could look like on this controversial campus. Finally, Stanislawski’s experience as the chair of the human rights program had taught him that “institutes” at Columbia were more powerful than “centers,” since they could fill faculty lines and host greater public programming. A non-departmental institution like the CIJS would better fulfill its purpose, even without the crisis of Columbia’s public image, by functioning with the powers of an institute.
It is against this backdrop that Stanislawski pushed to change the CIJS to an institute, which was finally accomplished in 2005. Following this titular transformation, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies started acting truer to its name: Stanislawski established a visiting professorship for Israeli scholars, which has featured, among others, Israeli historian Anita Shapira, politician and law professor Amnon Rubinstein, and the acclaimed Bible scholar Yair Zakovitch. The Institute also began offering the type of public programming that it continues to host today—such as book talks, public lectures, and informal conversations—though Stanislawski would continue to resist pressure to curate events that were more overtly political.
In addition to boosting the central presence of the Institute, Stanislawski began to expand outward into new disciplines, beginning with the study of Judaism in antiquity. The Talmudist David Weiss-Halivni had been teaching as Professor of Rabbinics since 1987 when he arrived at Columbia from JTS, and Stanislawski felt that there should be a permanent endowment supporting the field of Halivni’s expertise. Stanislawski recalls many discussions with the president of the Littauer foundation in the mid-90s, a Jewish philanthropic organization with a special interest in academia, moments which reflect “the deep imbrication of philanthropy and academic interests,” as Stanislawski puts it. Stanislawski secured the endowment for the chair, and changed Halivni’s title from “Professor of Rabbinics” to the “Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization,” reflecting a more encompassing and Baronian approach to the study of Jewish material in its historical context.
Stanislawski also turned an eye to the social sciences. When trustees decided to fund a Yosef H. Yerushalmi chair in Israel and Jewish Studies, Stanislawski motioned for the position to be placed in the sociology department, since, in his words, “we didn’t need a fifth Jewish historian.” Finally, a lingering absence from earlier years needed to be filled: the Yiddish chair, which had been vacant following the dissolution of Columbia’s linguistics department. The leaders of the interdepartmental committee on Yiddish—Stanislawski and Andreas Huyssen, a Germanist with an interest in Yiddish—decided to preserve the Yiddish program even with the abolition of linguistics. They were able to raise funds for an Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, a title soon bestowed upon the young Oxford graduate Jeremy Dauber.
In over two decades working for the Center and Institute, Stanislawski had done all he could to secure the prosperity of Jewish studies at Columbia. Stanislawski improved on several shortcomings of Yerushalmi’s leadership, augmenting the status and impact of the Institute, expanding the chairs outside medieval and modern history, and establishing a hardline stance against the intrusion of advocacy into the academy. His leadership would help set the ideological and institutional contours of the contemporary IIJS, save its bright new space in 617 Kent Hall.
The IIJS in Recent Memory: Dauber and Carlebach
New Life to Jewish Studies
The hiring of Professors Dauber and Cohen signaled a transformation for IIJS faculty, who did not come from the Baron-Yerushalmi-Stanislawski lineage, and who settled outside the boundaries of Columbia’s Department of History. Even within the halls of Fayerweather, there was new life associated with the Institute: Rebecca Kobrin became the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History in 2006. Kobrin is the first historian of the Institute not to have studied with Baron or Yerushalmi. Yet, her multidisciplinary activity in Jewish and American Studies echoes Baron’s call for scholars of Jews and Judaism to be nested in the disciplines that anchor their research.
Jewish studies at Columbia received an added blessing in 2008, upon the arrival of a $4 million donation to the CU Libraries. The funds were allotted to serve three purposes, including the endowment of a Jewish studies librarian. Columbia and the IIJS welcomed Michelle Chesner shortly thereafter, the first librarian to be devoted to Columbia’s legendary collection, and a role that Chesner quickly proved to be indispensable.
“It was a desert before she came,” Carlebach says of Chesner. Although Columbia had possessed a massive collection of manuscripts since Gottheil in the 1890s, Carlebach notes that “there was no way to know what manuscripts we had here without getting on a plane and looking at the catalogue in the basement of the Hebrew University.” Columbia faculty could hardly begin to unpack the hoards of treasure they were sitting on.
Much of Chesner’s work at Columbia has been bringing these treasures to light. Recently, she curated an exhibit called “The People in the Book” that was displayed in Butler Library. Chesner also arranges tours of the manuscript collection with Jewish studies classes, and she co-leads a graduate seminar on the history of the Jewish book with Carlebach, which meets in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Butler. On top of this, Chesner has begun an undertaking of her own, what Carlebach calls “the next frontier in the history of the book.” Known as “Footprints,” Chesner’s project is to trace the individual movements of old books by documenting their historic journeys. The aim is both to expose the fascinating trajectories of these touchstones of Judaica, and determine the reach of early printing technologies along the way. When completed, “Footprints” promises to be a landmark achievement in the Jewish Digital Humanities.
New Home, New Purpose
Professor Dauber was the first, and is still the only, director of the IIJS from outside the history department. He had arrived at Columbia in 2001 and was asked by Stanislawski to become assistant director around 2007, before succeeding the latter as director in 2008. Although Dauber had not trained under a Columbia professor, the influence of the university and its CIJS were not totally removed from his background: Dauber’s teacher at Harvard was Ruth Wisse, who had completed her doctorate in Columbia’s Yiddish program. But Dauber brought elements of his unique background and interests to the IIJS, including an enhanced vision for the presence of the Institute, and a new focus on undergraduates.
The most dramatic transformation to the IIJS was its move in 2016 to a chic, new space on the sixth floor of Kent. “We could not have gotten this space without the vision that [Dauber] had,” says Dana Kresel, who had joined the Institute as assistant director in 2013. Kresel herself is an integral part of the “exponential” expansion of the IIJS in the last decade. “Dana’s been the glue that holds the Institute together,” says Dina Mann, Communications Manager since 2019. The increased responsibilities that the Institute has adopted would not be possible without Dauber’s and Kresel’s contributions. As with Stanislawski, however, the enhanced platform of the Institute only added to the challenge of fostering academic discussion amidst a supportive public curious about modern Israel.
“What we see ourselves as,” in Dauber’s words, “is an institute committed to substantive, nuanced, intellectual, and academic discussion about the breadth of Jewish literature, history, culture, and texts.” For Dauber, “Israel is an important part of that story.” Events or talks about Israel at the IIJS should always come with a clear academic focus, including on topics such as Israeli film, literature, and even politics. As Dauber says somewhat facetiously, “We don’t need to be a 92nd Street Y because there already is a 92nd Street Y.”
Dauber also broadened the impact of the Institute on Columbia undergraduates with the establishment of a special concentration. Although Yerushalmi held undergraduate teaching in high esteem, he was opposed to having a formal undergraduate program, probably since he was not sure what the requirements would be. He and Baron preferred awarding degrees at the graduate level, after students had acquired the requisite breadth, linguistic training, and immersion in a more established discipline. However, by Dauber’s time, as he puts its, Jewish studies had become “a firmly established field in the American University,” which made the decision as to what type of courses to include less nebulous and more realistic. The new director saw the coalescence of Jewish studies at Columbia “as an opportunity to think more about the undergraduate population, which had not been a prime focus of the Institute and Center.”
University administrators suggested the IIJS begin by offering a special concentration, and gauge whether there would be sufficient interest to start offering a major. But the question of interest is not the only lingering concern about the institution of a formal undergraduate program. Seth Schwartz, who served as assistant director during Dauber’s tenure, remarks that the prospect of a major is still beleaguered by doubts as to what the “set of requirements would look like for a major,” or whether there should be “a canonical focus outside one’s area of expertise.” Regarding the former, it should probably entail a language, but Schwartz is not convinced that Hebrew is the only appropriate language in conducting Jewish studies, as opposed to “Yiddish or Judeo-Persian,” for example. As for a canonical breadth, Schwartz feels that those types of conversations are beset by the “jowel-wagging” of professors and their personal inclinations: for example, “How could someone graduate without reading the 11th-century poetry of Shlomo ibn Gabirol?” Given the plethora of literatures, languages, time periods, sub-disciplines and methods, the debate over what constitutes a canon of Jewish studies is surely intractable.
Dauber shares Schwartz’s concern over a major whose impossibly large scope undermines its easy packaging into a neat curriculum. As a solution, Dauber is open to the idea of having multiple tracks within a Jewish Studies major or minor, each of which contains a unique set of requirements. On this view (though Dauber himself did not specify), one track would be devoted to modern Jewish history, for example, and would require a corresponding set of courses in the history department, and perhaps a relevant language, say Arabic or Russian. The same program could be outlined for Yiddish studies, modern Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and so on. Whether such an idea ever materializes is up to a future director to decide.
Dauber would continue to devote much of his attention to undergraduates, launching the most successful IIJS program in terms of students impacted: the Undergraduate Israel Fellowship. The program attracts students of a wide academic and personal background, offering a stipend of up to $1,000 for those who plan to work, study, or conduct research in Israel over the summer. Now in its eleventh year, the program can count 195 students among its fellows.
The fellowship has changed the way that undergraduates interact with IIJS. As part of the program, students of diverse majors are required to attend a number of events at the Institute, an opportunity for them to meet with visiting scholars, Columbia faculty, and get a sense of what IIJS is doing for the study of Israel and Judaism on campus. However, there is something about the fellowship that feels a bit more political than the typical IIJS stance. The fellowship’s goal is not to directly support the study of Israel and Judaism, but to support a summer experience in Israel, whether it be working, taking a class, or conducting individual research. To be sure, though, the IIJS is interested in lending further support to undergraduates in Jewish studies beyond the Holy Land: The Naomi Prawer Kadar Fellowship sends students to study Yiddish in Poland as well as Israel. And going forward, Kresel wants the Institute to provide financial support for “students who want to do research for Jewish studies theses, or present papers they’ve written for Jewish studies classes” at conferences across the US.
The Next Stages
Elisheva Carlebach assumed the role of director in the summer of 2017. Carlebach joined the Columbia faculty upon the retirement of Yerushalmi—her doctoral advisor—filling his chair as the new Baron Professor in 2008. The first female head of the IIJS, Carlebach has brought a renewed focus on the academic presence of the Institute. If Dauber oversaw the latest transformations in infrastructure, Carlebach is taking great pains to supply the Institute with the trappings of a robust academic center.
For Carlebach, this begins with the Institute’s student trainees. “Elisheva is a powerhouse,” says Dina Mann. “She creates opportunities for her students,” instead of focusing solely on her own research. In addition to securing additional sources of funding, Carlebach has revived an old practice among graduate students, organizing events for them to exchange and comment upon each other’s dissertations and papers. The Baron Professor has also begun a collaboration with Fordham University to sponsor a post-doc fellowship and the “New Voices in Jewish Studies” program. Both initiatives provide an opportunity for emerging scholars to present their research at Columbia, and offer advice to graduate students on navigating early academic life. Carlebach has also increased the number of University Seminar meetings (regular academic convenings with guest lecturers) to twice a semester—closer to the pace of a bona fide Columbia department.
One of the more significant developments has been the Institute’s increased communication with its supporting base and alumni. “The vibrancy that we have could not be without alumni who believed in this space,” says Kresel, underscoring the importance of communicative outreach for the Institute. To this end, Carlebach and Mann have introduced a newsletter to be disseminated every semester, detailing the various developments among multiple groups at the IIJS. Contrast this with Elana Stein Hain’s impression as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, that the IIJS was limited to “little brochures” that listed the course offerings. Carlebach states that she is “proud to be putting out the word about the many things we do.”
In its next stages of development, Carlebach believes that the Institute must continue to invest in the lives of undergraduates. For starters, Carlebach has her own thoughts about the Israel fellowship. She hopes to raise the profile of the summer award and its potential funding, in order to send more Columbia students to Israel, and to allow select candidates to engage in “more meaningful work” during their experience. Engagement with undergraduates during the school year is among Carlebach’s top priorities as well. She responds carefully to undergraduate demand for courses and programming, and wants to ensure that “no matter who you are on campus, you’ve got to find something here that excites your interest.” “Talk to undergraduates,” she encourages me in researching about IIJS, “because that’s the most important population that we want to have a greater impact on that we don’t.”
Setbacks of the Institute
In spite of its storied legacy and increased vibrancy in recent years, the IIJS faces a number of recurring challenges, mostly owing to its location at Columbia and in New York City.
A number of faculty attribute some of the struggles of the Institute with its placement in New York City. As Schwartz notes, it can be difficult to identify a unique programming niche, since NYC contains an abundance of institutions devoted to Jewish cultural and intellectual content. More significantly, the IIJS has to compete with those institutes for funds, as opposed to Jewish academic centers in Michigan and Pennsylvania, which are pretty much the only sites of intense Jewish intellectual activity on their respective markets.
From another angle, Dauber sees the Institute’s location in New York as an untapped asset, albeit one that would require a great deal of effort to exploit. “One thing I think we never really cracked was,” Dauber thinks, “we’re Columbia University in the City of New York, and I would have really loved to give undergraduates and graduate students the opportunities to explore careers with other partners in the New York space.” With the right connections in place, a Columbia student or alum could work as a “museum educator or curator, non-profit worker, archivist, librarian,” and more, says Dauber. Although he was not able to see it through, Dauber envisions that the IIJS can connect students with rewarding experiences that are not limited to academic study, including “internship opportunities, some possibly leading to jobs.” “There are so many institutions in New York that would benefit,” he says.
Another challenge facing the Institute stems from its position within Columbia academics, which has been both a blessing and a curse. The IIJS is an institute—not a department—and as such, its affiliated faculty are scattered throughout departments across the university. There are certainly upshots to this arrangement: Carlebach notes that at other universities, professors in Jewish studies departments often feel “siloed” from scholars and students with whom they share overlapping methods and material, but lack a means of engaging with each other across a departmental boundary.
There are also downsides to the scattered organization. Stanislawski and several others note that faculty leaders of the IIJS are often encumbered with departmental obligations, which means that plans for the Institute can sometimes be overlooked in favor of more imminent demands. On top of this, the IIJS does not receive the same budget from the university with which regular departments are equipped. Instead, the Institute must solicit donations from private supporters if it wishes to launch new initiatives, or hire its own professors. “It’s kind of like Jewish emancipation,” Stanislawski jokes, referring to the dissolution of corporate Jewish communities with collective funds in 19th-century Europe. If scholars of Jewish studies prefer being rooted in their respective disciplines, then they are going to be forced to sacrifice the autonomy that comes with a collective budget.
The IIJS is also limited in the amount of graduate students it can attract. Since there is no discrete department, there is no central graduate program to which prospective students may apply. Those wishing to work with an advisor in Jewish studies at Columbia apply straight to the professor’s department, but these departments are limited in the number of spots they can reserve for students in Jewish studies. Carlebach notes that while the history department admits 18-20 new graduate students a year, only 1-2 of those are admitted who intend to work with a Jewish studies professor. Departments with fewer candidates in general are even more limited in their intake for Jewish studies.
Of course, the graduate students who do wind up pursuing Jewish studies at Columbia reap the benefits of immersion in a general discipline, as opposed to a more confined Jewish studies program. For Jordan Katz, the advisee of Prof. Carlebach, it was the prospect of working on Jewish history from within the history department that drew her to Columbia to begin with. “I wanted to be a historian first, and I wanted to be a historian of a specific field, but I didn’t want to be just Jewish Studies. I liked that Columbia had this entrenched Jewish History in the history department, because of Baron and Yerushalmi.”
A graduate of Columbia College (‘11), Katz returned to CU to pursue a doctorate with Prof. Carlebach. The aspiring historian is writing her dissertation on Jewish “wise women” in the early Ashkenazic world, and she feels a greater kinship with her colleagues from the history department, who use similar methods and material to her, than she does with researchers in Jewish studies who do not overlap with her work. “I have more to say about the work of my peers who do African Studies than someone who does something in modern American Jewish immigration,” she explains.
Katz is also involved with the Center for Science and Society (CSS), a subset of the history department led by Pamela Smith, which has helped Katz appreciate and articulate the relevance of her work to domains of inquiry not immediately related to Jewish studies. “The questions I have to present in my Jewish Studies group versus my CSS group are totally different, like, ‘Why does this matter to the history of science?’” By contrast, Katz notes, “If you’re in a traditional Jewish Studies framework, you don’t have to answer the question of why it matters.” When it comes to her exposure to multiple spheres of inquiry and academic support, Katz would not have it any other way. “It makes me a better scholar,” she says.
For all its setbacks, the IIJS has come a long way over the last number of decades. What began as an umbrella center for courses related to Israel and Jewish studies at Columbia transitioned to an esteemed program that pioneered the way in academic Jewish history, and has accumulated a cast of endowed chairs to be filled by world-renowned professors. Most recently, it has metamorphosed into an outward-facing academic and intellectual institute, looking to more comprehensively satisfy a demand for Jewish studies across multiple populations, ranging from Columbia undergraduates to members of the broader New York community.
As for its graduate program, although the IIJS does not admit students in high numbers, the cross-fertilization that results from the immersion of its graduate students in broader departments permits, in Katz’s words, “a more discerning view of what is encompassed by Jewish Studies,” than what is available at other institutions. And as Katz’s advisor emphasizes, this vestige of Baron’s ideology also allows professors in Jewish studies to have stronger relationships with their departmental colleagues, in addition to a Jewish center of intellectual exchange and academic fellowship.
Lessons from an Institute
Whether we are curious about Jewish studies or simply invested in the success of our university, the example of the IIJS offers us much to learn from.
First, the Baronian philosophy that underpins the Institute does not only raise provocative questions about the limits of Jewish studies as a discrete discipline; it also calls into question the viability of any subject to cloister itself within the enclave of a department. The structure of the IIJS challenges scholars within Jewish studies and outside it not to recede into the comforts of their own field, but to constantly examine the relationship between their subject and another focus of study. As Katz describes, it demands of scholars of Jewish material to articulate why their studies are relevant to other researchers in their department, and similarly demands scholars of other domains to consider how their work may relate to Jews or another minority. The situation of IIJS at the intersection of multiple fields encourages its faculty and students to recognize the utility of numerous disciplines to the pursuit of Jewish studies, and, along with several comparable institutions, challenges the university-wide community to recognize the interrelatedness of so much of our academic inquiry.
Since its inception under Baron, the Center-turned-Institute has also wrestled with how to incorporate the growing importance of the State of Israel into the IIJS’s identity as an academic institution. Rather than keep Israel out of the academy, the IIJS has recognized the significance of the State since the Institute’s founding, but not at the expense of critical study and discussion. At times, members of the Institute have felt pressure from outside to do more than would be appropriate in an academic setting.
Despite these tensions, the IIJS views engagement with the public as one of its primary roles. “We’re not some type of ivory tower,” says Kresel. “The public is just as important in the work that we do . . . everything that we explore is relevant to the American Jewish community,” and beyond. Indeed, for academics to realize that they are accountable to a broader audience can be an important lesson in assessing what type of impact their work can have on society, beyond the limits of the university. The IIJS reminds us that the ivory tower is never that far off from the rest of us down below.
Through its historic personalities, manuscripts, or intellectual achievements, the IIJS reserves a chapter in multiple stories—of Christian Hebraism in the US, of Columbia’s institutional history, of the origin and development of academic Jewish studies, and of an enduring belief in the humanistic fruits of academic labor. For those Columbians with a stake in the Jewish past and its intellectual future, the legacy of the IIJS leaves an indelible mark on the Columbia experience.
[1] From a pamphlet entitled “Jewish Studies at Columbia University” (henceforth: "Pamphlet"), (1977), p. 2.
[2] See Chapter 2, “Jewish History Comes to the University,” in Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (NYU Press, 1995).
[3] Liberles, 71.
[4] Ibid., 75.
[5] Ibid., 60.
[6] Ibid., 82.
[7] Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (Columbia University Press, 1937) vol. 3, p. 101.
[8] Liberles, 88ff.
[9] Liberles attributes Baron’s change of heart to Lionel Trillings’s struggle to join the English faculty in 1939 (Liberles, 88). Trilling is the first tenured Jewish professor of Columbia’s English department.
[10] Pamphlet, p. 4.
[2] See Chapter 2, “Jewish History Comes to the University,” in Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (NYU Press, 1995).
[3] Liberles, 71.
[4] Ibid., 75.
[5] Ibid., 60.
[6] Ibid., 82.
[7] Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (Columbia University Press, 1937) vol. 3, p. 101.
[8] Liberles, 88ff.
[9] Liberles attributes Baron’s change of heart to Lionel Trillings’s struggle to join the English faculty in 1939 (Liberles, 88). Trilling is the first tenured Jewish professor of Columbia’s English department.
[10] Pamphlet, p. 4.
//SOLOMON WIENER is a Senior in Columbia College and Managing Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo courtesy of Google Images.
Photo courtesy of Google Images.