Culture and the Classroom

Reading James Loeffler’s masterful diagnosis of the failure of cultural Judaism, I was reminded of my first meeting, nine years ago, with the newly arrived director of an Orthodox educational center in Portland, Oregon. We were walking out of synagogue services together when he introduced himself by saying: “I hear we’re in the same line of business.” Without wanting to be rude, I felt I had to correct him. “No,” I said, “we’re not. You teach Torah. I teach Jewish studies.”

The difference between the two is an important part of the story Loeffler tells so cogently, and it sheds a light of its own on his claim that secular cultural programs, despite their often admirable achievements, are a shaky substitute for the “thick, expansive, and holistic identity” promised by the term “Jewish culture.” Scholarship, in the form of academic Jewish studies, has frequently been enlisted in attempts to build just such a modern Jewish identity. It was, as Loeffler notes, an important element in the portfolio of the now-defunct Foundation for Jewish Culture, an organization that funded my own university department quite generously. Even more directly, the Posen Foundation has sought to promote its own vision of a “thick, expansive, and holistic” secular Jewishness by funding courses in this area on American and Israeli college campuses. The fact that it froze its American initiatives a few years ago may simply indicate a shift to other means toward the same end, like the projected multivolume Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization; or it may be yet another sign, at least outside of Israel, of cultural Judaism’s poor return on investment.

Like cultural Judaism, its frequent partner, the academic study of Judaism also has a backstory, in this case going back to the emergence in Germany of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the modern “science” of Judaism. Throughout the 19th century, the fruits of this scholarship were enlisted in such non-academic endeavors as making the case for Jewish citizenship, justifying internal religious reform, and retrieving from the Jewish past certain elements (like national identity) that had become particularly useful or desirable in the conditions of the present.