Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies: GTU-UCB

The Joint Ph.D. Program stresses an innovative, pluralist, and nonparochial conception of the field of Jewish Studies. Several of its faculty have been among the pioneers of new approaches in the field: literary study of the Bible, the investigation of Jewish sexuality and gender roles, the application of postmodernist theory to classic Jewish texts, the inscription of Jewish exegesis and thought in European intellectual history, and the rethinking of Yiddish and Hebrew literature in the context of comparative literary history. The program balances a broad interdisciplinary approach with grounding in a specific discipline. Students are encouraged to design their own course of study but are provided with rigorous training in a major period of their choice (biblical, late antiquity, medieval and renaissance, or modern), an additional minor period, and one academic discipline (history, philosophy, literature, religious studies, or women, gender, and sexuality).

The program’s faculty is drawn from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the Center for Jewish Studies of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU). UCB is one of the world’s leading research universities with many distinguished programs in the humanities. Situated only one block from the UC campus, the GTU, a consortium of nine seminaries and a number of research centers, is the preeminent graduate school for the study of religion in the western United States. Its Center for Jewish Studies has long been one of its most intellectually distinguished components.

Program of Study
The intellectual appeal of an interdisciplinary program in Jewish studies is precisely its large chronological, geopolitical, and topical sweep. The Program, however, seeks to counterbalance this intrinsic breadth, with its danger of superficiality, by the curricular requirements of specialization in one historical period, with an additional minor period, and in one discipline. By the time a student launches on his or her dissertation, he or she should have a reasonably detailed knowledge of both primary and secondary materials for one of the four periods stipulated below, and should have competence in using one set of disciplinary tools.

Students must arrange their programs to both major and minor periods of specialization and a major discipline of specialization.

Periods

1. Biblical (First and Second Temple period)
2. Late antiquity (Hellenistic period to early Middle Ages)
3. Medieval and Renaissance
4. Modern (1700 - present)

Disciplines

1. History
2. Philosophy
3. Literature (may include legal, exegetical, homiletic literature)
4. Religious studies
5. Women, gender, and sexuality

Application and Admissions
Applicants must be accepted by both the University of California, Graduate Division and the Graduate Theological Union. Separate admission committees from each institution make recommendations to the Executive Committee for the Joint Doctoral Program. The Executive Committee then makes recommendations to the GTU and UCB Deans, who make final decisions and who notify the applicants. The applicants will receive two separate admissions letters, one from UCB and one from GTU.

Applications are considered only once a year for admission to the following fall semester. Separate applications on the appropriate forms must be filed in each school. The applications to both institutions must be postmarked or hand-delivered by December 15. Applications are accepted online at www.grad.berkeley.edu/prospective and www.gtu.edu/admissions/applications.

Only students who intend to work toward the Ph.D. degree will be considered for the Program. Undergraduate preparation must include the following:

• at least six university-level courses in Jewish studies (not required if the applicant holds an MA in Jewish Studies or related field);
• at least two years of university-level Hebrew language courses or the equivalent;
• a minimal proficiency in another foreign language;
• an undergraduate degree in a relevant field of the humanities or social sciences, such as:
  • Jewish Studies
  • History
  • Near Eastern Studies
  • Philosophy
  • Comparative Literature
  • Anthropology
  • Religious Studies
  • Linguistics
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

An undergraduate major in a related field may also be deemed acceptable at the discretion of the admissions committee. Interested applicants may contact the Program prior to submission of application material to verify if a particular field may be considered in lieu of the above.

All applicants from a country in which English is the official language are required to take the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) within a five year period prior to submitting an application to the Joint Program. The GRE results are but one factor in determining acceptance to the Program, and they are critical in the determination of certain grants and fellowships granted on a competitive university wide basis.

Applicants from countries in which the official language is not English are required to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

Fellowships, Grants and Financial Aid
Students register in alternate years at the two institutions (e.g., first year GTU, second year UCB, or vice-versa). The exact expenses within a given year will vary somewhat, depending on the institution of registration and particular needs. Fees are subject to change. Because of the higher tuition at the University for students who are not residents of California, a student is ordinarily advised to register with the GTU for the first year of residence.

The Program has limited funds to disburse to entering and continuing students; to date most students have received funding sufficient to assist with program and living expenses. Students who apply to the program will also receive forms and information on various institution wide competitive fellowships. These forms should be filled out and returned with application materials. Those applicants who are accepted and are deemed competitive for such grants will have the forms submitted to the institution by the Program's admissions and grants committee.

Program Faculty

Robert Alter
Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
UCB

Professor Alter has taught at Berkeley since 1967. He has published widely on the modern European and American novel, on modern Hebrew Literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible.

The 1995 recipient of the Scholarship Award for Social and Cultural Studies of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Prof. Alter is the author of two prize winning volumes on literary aspects of the Bible, his works include Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The World of Biblical Literature (1992) and Hebrew and Modernity (1994). His most recent works are Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (2000) and Imagined Cities (2005).

Deena Aranoff
Assistant Professor of Medieval Jewish Studies
GTU

Prof. Aranoff teaches courses on Jewish society and culture in the medieval and early-modern European context. Her interests include rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. She is particularly interested in linguistic speculation as a means by which Jewish scholars articulated cultural affinities and boundaries in ancient, medieval and modern times. She completed her Ph.D. in 2006 in the department of history at Columbia University with a dissertation titled, In Pursuit of the Holy Tongue: Jewish Conceptions of Hebrew in the Sixteenth Century.

Chava Boyarin
Lecturer in Hebrew
UCB

Chava Boyarin is interested in Biblical Hebrew and Literature. She is currently studying the Syriac (Aramaic) langauge, and developing a course for the language and culture of Mishnaic Hebrew. Chava continues to teach Modern Hebrew and tries to bring to the course new movies, cartoons and newspaper articles.

Daniel Boyarin
Taubman Professor of Rabbinic Culture
UCB

Talmud, cultural studies in rabbinic Judaism, including issues of gender and sexuality, the Jews as a colonized people and Diaspora theory, Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity.

Author of Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (1990), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993), and A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994), Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1996). His most recent books are Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999) and Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2004).

Yael Chaver
Lecturer in Yiddish Language
UCB

Prof. Chaver works at the intersection of modern Yiddish and Hebrew cultures and literatures, with a particular interest in the Zionist Yiddish culture of pre-statehood Israel and in interwar European Yiddish poetry.

John Efron
Koret Professor of History and Jewish Studies
Chair, Program in Jewish Studies
UCB

His academic focus is on the cultural and intellectural history of modern Jewry, with emphasis on the Jews of German-speaking Europe. He is interested in the history of Jewish anthropology, the intersection of medicine and Jewish identity and the role that sceince has played in the modernization of the Jews.

Author of Medicine and the German Jews: A History (2001), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1998), and Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (1994).

Bluma Goldstein
Professor of German
UCB

Interests include Jewish life and culture in 19th and 20th century Austria and Germany. German-Jewish and Yiddish literature, and women's studies.

Author of Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in the European Wilderness (1994).

Emily Gottreich
Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies
UCB

Erich Gruen
Professor of History and Classics
UCB

Focus includes Roman and Greek history, Jews in the Greco-Roman world.

Author of Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (1998), Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (1992), The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (1984), and Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (1990). His most recent work, Diaspora: Jews Amidst the Greeks and Romans, was published in 2002.

Ronald Hendel
Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies
UCB

Author of The Epic of the Patriarch: The Jacob Cycle and the Narrative Traditions of Canaan and Israel (1987) and The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (1998). His most recent work, Remembering Abraham : Culture, Memory, and History in the Hebrew Bible, was published in 2005.

Chana Kronfeld
Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
UCB

Hebrew, Yiddish and Comparative Literature with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She is interested in modernism, minor literatures, the politics of literary history, feminist stylistics, intertextuality, and translation studies.

Professor Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism (1995), which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1998 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open (2002), won the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marie Syrkin Awards. In 2005-06 Kronfeld and Bloch received the top NEA award for their translation of The Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Chana is currently preparing for publication a monograph titled The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and a collection of essays in collaboration with graduate students titled Rewriting the Land as Woman.

Miryam Sas
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies
UCB

Miryam Sas is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Japanese in 1995 from Yale. Her first book Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism was released by Stanford University Press in 2001. Areas of interest in include Japanese, French, and English twentieth century literature, performance, film, and critical theory; gender studies, performance studies, theories of subjectivity, and messianism. Related to Jewish studies, she regularly teaches courses on Walter Benjamin's critical writings, memorial and trauma, and post-Holocaust literature and film. She is completing a book on postwar experimental Japanese arts.

Naomi Seidman
Koret Professor of Jewish Culture and Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies
GTU

Yiddish, modern Hebrew literature and the Midrashic imagination, feminist and literary theory and their applicability in literary analysis.

Prof. Seidman is the translator (and co-editor with Prof. Chana Kronfeld) of The First Day and Other Stories by Dvorah Baron, and Conversations With Dvora by Amia Lieblich. In addition, she is the author of A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, all published by University of California Press.

Holger Zellentin
Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Late Antique Judaism, Graduate Theological Union
GTU

Holger Zellentin is Assistant Professor of Rabbinics and Late Antique Judaism at the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His dissertation, in the Department of Religion at Princeton University , was titled Late Antiquity Upside Down - Rabbinic Parodies of Christian and Jewish Literature (2007). He is the editor, together with Eduard Iricinschi, of Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity (2007), and has published several articles on Jewish adaptations of Greco-Roman literature.

For more information and materials, please contact:

• Program in Jewish Studies
  4333 Dwinelle Hall #2380
  University of California
  Berkeley, CA 94720-2380
  510/643-2995
  Email: info@jewishstudies.berkeley.edu
  
  
• Admissions Office
  Graduate Theological Union
  2400 Ridge Road
  Berkeley, CA 94709
  510/649-2460
  800/826-4488
  E-mail: gtuadm@gtu.edu