Carnal knowledge
ChaeRan Yoo Freeze
Associate Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women’s and Gender StudiesPh.D., Brandeis University
ChaeRan Yoo was 5 when her parents moved from Seoul, Korea, to Addis Ababa, where she acquired an ear for Russian from her father’s Soviet and Cuban colleagues in the government hospital where he worked. A gift of tapes from a friend in the American embassy sparked a love of Israeli music.
At boarding school in Nairobi, she discovered Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Potok and Leon Uris.
She came to Brandeis for graduate school because she wanted to combine her Russian and Jewish interests. She studied under Professor Jehuda Reinharz, now Brandeis’ president, and married a specialist in Russian history, now dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences.
Her first book overturned conventional wisdom about Jewish marriage and divorce in Imperial Russia. Her work in progress explores the shtetl. A favorite course to teach? Carnal Israel: Exploring Jewish Sexuality from Talmudic Times to the Present.
Qu’ran Crusader
Joseph Lumbard
Assistant Professor of Classical IslamPh.D., Yale University
Joseph Lumbard is on a mission to lift the veil of misunderstanding around the Qu’ran and its relationship to Islamic law through teaching courses on the ancient text and through research.
As editor of the "HarperCollins Study Guide to the Qu’ran," the first such study guide produced in western academia, Lumbard says his goal is to help “reinstate the truth” about the Qu’ran, and thereby help recapture Islam from extremists.
He brings a unique perspective on Islam to the classroom, having been the first royal adviser on interfaith affairs to Jordan’s King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein before coming to Brandeis in 2006.
Says Lumbard, “Brandeis is one of the places where a better understanding of Islam will help America to better interact with the Islamic world in the future.”
Covering four centuries and more
Jonathan Sarna
Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish HistoryPh.D., Yale University
Jonathan Sarna bestrides the field of American Jewish history and more. He is a prolific author of books and articles on contemporary as well as historic issues.“I see my realm as the entire American Jewish experience, from the 17th century to the present,” says Sarna. Among his priorities, he says, are “bringing the study of Judaism into the world of American religious studies, and bringing the study of American Jewry into the too-often Eurocentric world of Jewish studies.”
In progress is a book on Ulysses S. Grant, who as a general issued the most anti-Semitic order of the Civil War, and who as president “bent over backward in the other direction,” he says.
Sarna’s greatest joy as a teacher? “The large number of senior theses I’ve overseen. This really is what makes Brandeis distinctive: students working one-on-one with a faculty member. Those who take it seriously find it very exciting.”