Chances are, if you are a student majoring or minoring in Jewish Studies at an American university, you aren’t Jewish.

What was once considered a course of study almost exclusively for Jews has, in the last 40 years, evolved into a diverse and multi-faceted educational discipline attracting non-Jewish students and professors in droves.

And as Jewish Studies is becoming a more widely accepted scholarly pursuit, it is also changing the way the youngest generation of believers are educated in their own culture and religion.

According to Paul Burstein, a professor at the University of Washington, the teaching of Jewish Studies in higher education is important because it tackles a fundamental question: “What is the place of Judaism in life and in the world?”

Burstein is head of the Jewish Studies Program at the UW. The department is part of the Jackson School of International Studies, meaning it is taught alongside such subjects as Russia Studies, Canadian Studies and Comparative Religion.

“If you want to teach [Jewish Studies], it might be as a religion and that’s how they thought of it for a long time,” Burstein said. “But sometimes people would be interested in ancient Judaism, the Biblical period, archeology, or near-Eastern languages.”

As programs expanded beyond theology, interest has grown too, attracting students who normally wouldn’t take courses relating to Judaism.

“It has become a lot like studying anything else,” Burstein said of the UW program. “Because [students] have heard good things about professors, or a subject seems interesting… it’s a way of saying [Jewish Studies] is more than studying a religion, that there is life beyond religion, which is important.”

This newfound acceptance of a scholarly Judaism has grown in part through dedicated community action and interest. Since the 1960s, education in Jewish Studies has increased exponentially.

“Universities change over time resulting from outside forces. New curriculum is added all the time. Much of it is stimulated by activists and similar people, typically locally,” Burstein said.

The Jackson School program went a long way, thanks in part to donations and endowments from local Jews. Noted local philanthropist Samuel Stroum helped shore up the UW program, and the Jewish Studies lecture series at the UW still bears his name.

But, strangely enough, while Jews within the community may spearhead efforts for new university curricula, college-bound Jews usually are a minority in Jewish Studies lecture halls.

“I don’t ask students about their background, but you can sort of tell,” Burstein said. “The majority are not Jewish. It’s a very common thing around the country.”

So prevalent is the trend that Jewish Studies programs have begun breaking non-secular educational boundaries.

Jesuit universities such as Georgetown and Boston College both have budding Jewish Studies programs and will be joined this year by Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Fairfield University in Connecticut maintains the longest running Jewish Studies program of all U.S. Jesuit colleges, now well into its 14th year. This may seem surprising, since the school is over 80 percent Catholic, according to Ellen Umansky, Fairfield’s Director of Judaic Studies.

“My classes are really a mixture of students…but most of them are Christian,” said Umansky. “We close our classes at 30 and I have four Jewish students this year. That is the most I’ve ever had. Sometimes I have none, or just one.”

The program, like many around the country, was spurred on with outside funding and began with the hiring of Umansky, the only full-time faculty member dedicated to Judaic Studies, to head the program in the fall of 1994.

“When I came here, there were three preexisting courses that were considered Judaic,” Umansky said. “Now we have 22 courses.”

As the makeup of students in Jewish Studies programs has become more diverse, so too has the professorship.

The Association for Jewish Studies was established in 1969 as a society for “individuals whose full-time vocation is teaching, research, or related endeavors in academic Jewish Studies,” according to the association’s Web site. From a founding group of 35 members, the organization now includes more than 1,500 individuals from a multitude of disciplines across the U.S. and Canada.

 

“I have never been part of an organization that has grown and transformed as much,” Umansky said of the AJS. “I became a member as a grad student at Columbia… it seemed like an all-boys club at the time.”

“I would say 30 years ago, if you weren’t Jewish, I don’t know how comfortable you would have felt going [to conferences],” said Umansky who helped found a women’s caucus within the AJS in the 1980s. “The gender barrier was broken a long time ago. The whole thing has changed so radically. It’s increasingly interdisciplinary, there are a lot of young scholars, old scholars, grad students; it has become a wonderful organization, and not everyone who goes is Jewish.”

While religious boundaries are being broken at all levels of scholarly Judaism, there are still many Jews choosing to study their heritage and faith in higher education institutions.

Cindy Strauss, the chief legal officer at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center, was one of the first students to undertake Jewish Studies at the UW back in 1974.

“I went in undeclared and didn’t have a clue what I wanted to major in,” Strauss said.

Like many students she became focused after becoming inspired by one of her professors — a founding member of the UW Jewish Studies program, Deborah Lipstadt.

“She played a big role in getting me majored. She was very bright and charismatic, a mentor for me, she pulled the whole program together,” Strauss said. “Through Jewish Studies, I could take all the classes I liked; philosophy, history, language, it was a true liberal arts education for me.”

Lipstadt, now at Emory University in Atlanta, is probably best known for her victory in a libel suit filed against her by Holocaust denier David Irving in 2000.

Strauss now sits on the Jackson School’s advisory board as a community member, facilitating fund raising and acting as a liaison between the Jewish community and the university.

She is not surprised that Jewish students make up a small percentage of those enrolled in Jewish Studies. It was a trend that began forming during the program’s infancy.

 

“Over the four years I was there the course really grew and became very diverse,” Strauss said. “I remember the Introduction to Judaism course became difficult to get into. The largest classes had around 75 people.”

As classes continue to grow and diversify, Umansky believes there will be an increasing amount of Jews who choose to learn about their faith and heritage at university, away from the often-assumed rigidity of religious settings.

“I would say among those who minor, most of them are Catholics who have a Jewish parent or relative,” Umansky said. “They find their way to Judaic studies to find out about who they are.”

Umansky also believes there is a lack of adequate education within the religious sphere that appeals to young Jews, which accounts for many people studying their religion in a secular setting.

“I don’t think there is a whole lot of programming that appeal to Jews between the ages of 18 and 22 or even 22 until marriage at synagogue,” Umansky said. “I have taught adult education…If you are a 24-year-old and you go to a synagogue to learn, people there are 30 years older than you.”

While there is a decline in synagogue attendance by young Jews, the interest in the history and culture survives.

But to those looking to skate by in Jewish studies, be forewarned: taking a course is not like a native Spanish-speaker signing up for a Spanish class.

“Most students want to explore Judaism… that or they think it is an easy way to get an A,” said Umansky. “But, it doesn’t always work out so well for them.”