Jewish Studies

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The Graduate Cluster Program in Jewish Studies provides students with a rigorous training in text-based and historically-shaped sub-fields. The JS Cluster Program emphasizes text-based education in the languages of the original (from Hebrew and Aramaic through Yiddish, Ladino, and Polish) in conjunction with a broad contextualization and comparative cross-cultural approaches to the key trends in Judaism, events in Jewish History, and Jewish literary pursuits. This multi-disciplinary approach allows future Ph.D. holders to be highly competitive on the academic market and helps them to acquire skills indispensable in communal service should they seek public sector careers.

The Jewish Studies Cluster equips students with the skills necessary to teach a range of courses in Judaic Studies, including, but not limited to, Introduction to Bible and Judaism, Rabbinics, survey courses in Medieval through Modern History, and Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. For this purpose the program will provide students with one of two core seminars (two quarter sequence), one in Text and Interpretations (Biblical and Rabbinic texts) and another Documents and Narratives (Historical sources and historiography), focused on analytical methodologies and historiographic approaches to classical Jewish texts and/or Jewish history from Medieval to Modern. The Cluster program also offers an array of non-core courses in various fields, including Jewish Philosophy, Early Modern Jewish History, Jews and Christians, and others. Students will take one obligatory core course and three non-core courses of their choice to complete the Cluster requirements. Non-core courses can be tailored to satisfy specific needs of the Cluster graduate students.

The Program creates a productive intellectual environment that accommodates graduate students from any discipline across the Humanities and Social Sciences seeking to enhance their own scholarship by engaging a corresponding subfield in Jewish Studies. The cluster  faculty includes, but is not limited to, Professors Mira Balberg and Barry Wimpfheimer (Religious Studies), Peter Hayes, David Shyovitz, and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (History), Peter Fenves and Marcus Moseley (German). The faculty will stand at the graduate students’ disposal to bolster any part of their knowledge or skills that they and their principal advisers see as critical to their study.

Core courses such as Texts and Interpretations or Documents and Narratives will be offered through Religious Studies and History and involve 4-5 students, while most of non-core courses will be individual studies involving 2-3 students. Cluster students will participate in the extra-curricular programs offered through the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies and will TA and teach their own courses contributing to the development of Jewish Studies at NU.

Potential candidates are encouraged to contact the faculty with whom they would like to work, and discuss their academic/research interests with the Cluster Director prior to the application process. For any other questions, contact Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern at yps@northwestern.edu