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Jewish studies courses engage students in critical questions of history, religion, culture, language, literary and textual studies, social and political science, law, education, and women’s and gender studies, as well as rich experiential learning opportunities.
Exploring Judaism's Rich History and Culture
Brandeis University offers an extremely broad array of courses, training programs and research centers that explore Jewish history, societies and cultures, political and communal concerns, and texts, literatures and artistic expressions from ancient times to the present.
The university’s faculty represents diverse disciplines. Brandeis students can encounter over 3,000 years of the Jewish experience with scholars of the Bible and ancient civilizations, rabbinics, American Jewish history and sociology of contemporary Jewish communities. They can learn about medieval Judaism in the Christian and Muslim worlds, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, early modern Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia. They confront the multicultural nature of Jewish studies in Sephardic studies, Israel studies, Hebrew literature, American Jewish literature, Holocaust studies, Yiddish literature, Jewish film, theater and other arts, women’s and gender studies, and Jewish education.
The Hebrew language program is the largest in the United States. Instruction in Hebrew is top quality, with a plethora of lively classes, and can be enhanced at summer institutes.
Brandeis recognizes that Jewish history, societies, intellectual trends and cultural expressions always evolved through interaction, creative contact and tension with other civilizations. Hence the faculty includes specialists in ancient Near Eastern religions, early Christianity and Islamic studies.
Cooperative enterprises between faculty in Jewish studies and other Brandeis researchers and teachers are rich and varied, bringing perspectives from history, literature and philosophy, women’s and gender studies, and cutting-edge social scientific research to bear on Jewish topics.
Brandeis research is being used to illuminate the challenges of Jewish life internationally, in collaboration with colleagues in the United States and abroad, as Brandeis researchers share policy recommendations with academics and political and communal leaders. Brandeis' Jewish professional programs train an elite Jewish communal leadership, from teachers to heads of major communal organizations.