By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Jewish ethics will jump out of the historical texts and bust out of the lecture halls of the University of Washington’s Stroum Jewish Studies Program next year. Jewish Studies has teamed up with the Jewish service organization Repair the World, which has funded the development of a new undergraduate course based in community service scheduled for this coming spring.
Two Seattle scholars, Noam Pianko, the Samuel and Althea Stroum assistant professor of Jewish Studies and the Jackson School of International Studies, who will be teaching the course, and Rabbi Will Berkovitz, the national vice president of partnerships and rabbi-in-residence at Repair the World, say they can’t wait to challenge the students.
“The questions that I think are really important for students to start to grapple with are, ‘What am I going to do with my privileged life? What is my task in the world?’ and “What am I going to do to repair the world?’” Berkovitz told JTNews. “If we aren’t challenging students to ask those questions, then I think we’re missing the mark.”
Registration for the course will open in spring 2011. Pianko envisions the Jews and Social Justice course as a large lecture-hall-type course enrolling anywhere from 150 to 200 students.
When students sign up for the course, they will spend part of their time learning about the tradition of helping others, found throughout ancient and modern Jewish literature. The rest of the time will be spent “in the field.”
“We’re the first school doing this in Seattle and at the University of Washington,” said Gad Barzilai, the Lucia S. and Herbert L. Pruzan professor of Jewish Studies and chair of the Jewish Studies Program at UW. “It offers a type of synergy between the practical aspects of Judaism and the more intellectual aspects of Judaism.”
Although the course is offered in Jewish Studies and explores Jewish thinkers, rabbis, and philosophers, it will not be a religiously based course, nor is the department, for that matter, added Barzilai. It is strictly scholarly and academic.
“We are interested in the student’s brains, not in the student’s religious affiliation,” Barzilai said. “We would like to approach non-Jewish students as well as Jewish students.”
In the lecture portion of the course, Pianko plans on studying Jewish religious texts and modern Jewish thinkers like Abraham Joshua Heschel. The class will also examine the role that Jews have played in social movements.
“As service learning grows, I think there’s a recognition that service has very broad possibilities,” Pianko said, “whether it’s poverty or housing, environmental questions, or working with a synagogue in their community or the world.”
The class will tackle current issues such as homelessness, child literacy, and assisting refugee populations. Students will also explore more personal moral dilemmas such as how to balance and prioritize competing communal or global obligations that may conflict with their personal lives.
The service component of the course includes spending 20 to 40 hours of the quarter volunteering in a social service agency, on community a service project, or for a social justice campaign.
It will be facilitated through The Carlson Leadership and Public Service Center on campus. The center offers service-learning, community-based research and leadership opportunities for UW students.
Hoping to carry on the example set by UW Hillel students, Berkovitz recalled the work he did there that involved students in groups such as Teach for America, American Jewish World Service, Doctors Without Borders, and Engineers Without Borders in Central America.
Berkovitz left his job as the executive director of UW Hillel this past summer to work for Repair the World.
Now, he envisions this service-learning class as a collaborative effort with UW Hillel. There, students can find similar service projects.
“The number of students that attend and participate in service programs and social justice programs sponsored by Hillel shows that it is something that students are absolutely gravitating toward,” Berkovitz said.
Pianko and Berkovitz are not ending their mission there. The two are also in the process of developing a study group with other Jewish Studies professors beyond Seattle who might be interested in teaching the same program at their universities.
“The UW is a pilot,” Berkovitz said. “The ultimate goal is to create a field of study which is Jewish service learning that is embedded in Jewish Studies courses.”
Repair the World is funding both courses.
“More and more, universities are recognizing the importance of their students and faculty being involved in pressing communal issues in addition to scholarly ones,” Pianko said. “This course is a wonderful opportunity for us to engage in the local Seattle Jewish community….We’re very excited about it.”
For Berkovitz, this course is the next step in accomplishing his dream. From his experience at UW Hillel, when the social services program didn’t exist, to today, where a full-time Repair the World campus director is developing programs, it’s all coming to fruition.
“I want students to be able to make the connection and to understand the deep roots in the Jewish community of service, of civic engagement, and of social justice, and that these things are deeply Jewish things,” Berkovitz said.