How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
NYU's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies recently declined a potential $50,000 grant from the Posen Foundation, an international organization that provides schools with grants to teach courses about Jewish culture through an exclusively secular point of view.
Other schools, including Harvard University, Brown University, Brandeis University and The New School, have accepted the grant.
Under the grant, the university would be required to incorporate courses in Jewish thought and history and other related topics into the Judaic studies curriculum. Myrna Baron, the executive director of the Center for Cultural Judaism, which administers Posen Foundation projects and grants in North America, said some professors think ancient Jewish texts have been emphasized too heavily and that the past 300 years of secular Jewish culture were not being studied at all.
Baron said the grant was not intended to shift the focus of Jewish studies but instead to enable universities to include Jewish contributions from the ancient period up to today.
But according to Lawrence Schiffman, the chair of the department of Hebrew and Judaic studies, the department "doesn't accept the notion that you can categorize Judaism."
Schiffman thinks an exclusively secular curriculum would represent only a single part of Judaism. He said his department allows professors to teach the way they prefer to teach and that separating the religious and the secular would be an interference.
"They were offering a small amount of money for us to teach the way they want," Schiffman said. "We don't want outsiders being a part of that process."
According to Baron, rather than imposing a "cookie cutter method" on teaching, the foundation encourages creativity in course descriptions while exploring the "breadth and depth of scholarship."
Nonreligious Jews represent about half of the world's Jewish population, and some NYU students do not see an issue with accepting the grant.
"It seems foolish to reject free money," LSP freshman Sam Freiberger said. "I don't really appreciate religious messages, but for extracurricular classes, it was a waste not to use something that was offered."
While Yehuda Sarna, an NYU chaplain and rabbi at the Bronfman Center, supports the department's decision to reject the grant, he believes that all history is secular from an academic standpoint. According to Sarna, religious Jews often welcome challenging new ideas and approaches in the classroom.
"That's partly why they're at NYU and not at a religious college like Yeshiva University," Sarna said.
