By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
The students are interested — in fact, they’re being turned away. The instructors are interested — they see it as their mission to teach as many people as possible in as wide a breadth as possible about the study of the Jewish people. Even the university is interested — of the approximately 80 languages offered at the University of Washington, Hebrew is considered strategically important. So why can’t all the people who want to learn modern Hebrew enter the courses? The answer, in a word, is money.
“Right now we don’t have money for Hebrew,” said Prof. Gad Barzilai, the new chair of the UW’s Jewish Studies Program. “We need to have a permanent endowment or permanent budget, or at least a budget for the next few years regarding studying Hebrew.”
The program currently offers two sections to 25 students each of beginning modern Hebrew, but that’s not enough to satisfy demand, and the program’s current financial situation won’t allow that level of instruction to sustain itself beyond the academic year that just began.
“Our capacity to teach is very limited and the university has no money for more,” said Prof. Paul Burstein, the program’s former chair.
Grants from the Rosen Foundation, a local foundation administered by local community members Michele and Stan Rosen through the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, and the Rosens themselves, will run out after this academic year. According to Michele Rosen, decisions on further allocations have not yet been made.
But, she said, as a key to peace in the Middle East as well as for performing outreach outside of the Jewish population, “the community can’t let the language die,” she said.
The Rosen grants did make a difference, say Jewish Studies faculty.
“Just as we imagined, when we got the funds to provide for more students, it immediately filled up,” Burstein said.
Hebrew is popular. According to Prof. Naomi Sokoloff, who runs the university’s modern Hebrew program, the elementary-level course has consistently filled since the late ‘90s.
“It reached the point where as many people were being turned away as were being accepted into the class,” she said. This school year, she added, is “the largest second-year class that I’ve seen in my time here.” Sokoloff has taught at the UW since 1985.
Hebrew is also an entrypoint for non-Jewish students to better understand the religion and culture.
“Our mission is to tell as many people as possible, as well as possible, about Jews and the Jewish people,” Burstein said. “We are the way in the university and in the wider community for people to come to an understanding of the Jewish people.”
Barzilai said the program had not yet figured out a budget for the 2009-10 academic year, and he didn’t know at this point whether, absent private donations, elementary Hebrew could be offered at all. Because students who major in Jewish Studies must take two years of Hebrew language credits, if the classes fill up before they are able to register, they are unable to declare Jewish Studies as their major.
“To study Hebrew literature, Israeli politics, the Bible, without knowing Hebrew is like to compete for the Olympic games in swimming without being in the pool,” Barzilai said.
When the additional section for the course was added, the program’s majors jumped from five students to 15, Burstein said, but the program will never know how many got discouraged because they couldn’t get into the Hebrew course.
Bob Stacey, the dean of the Arts & Humanities division of the UW’s College of Arts and Sciences, said the college had done an assessment of the bottleneck and agreed that the backlog for the Hebrew courses discouraged students from pursuing the major was “inescapable.”
But, he added, it’s not a problem exclusive to Jewish Studies. One example he gave was in American Sign Language.
“We have 300 students trying to get into that class, and as yet we have not funded a second section of ASL,” he said. “So Hebrew is a high-demand course, it would certainly not be money wasted, but there are other things that are in even higher demand.”
The funding for the program comes from the same budget that funds nearly all of the programs, like English literature, that reside in Arts and Sciences.
“I sometimes describe the funding situation as the six-foot bed and four-foot sheet problem,” said Stacey. “We keep tugging it from side to side on the bed, and we tug it over to one side and cover Hebrew, and that opens up a space on the other side of the bed, where English Comp. or American Sign Language or first-year Korean or whatever it is [are], and then we tug it back over to cover up those, and Hebrew is exposed. We need a bigger sheet.”
One possible option could be Hebrew classes outside of the UW. Intensive ulpan courses in either Israel or at a handful of other universities around the country, such as Brandeis, could be a reasonable substitute, Sokoloff said. And while some instruction is offered locally at synagogues and Jewish organizations, none meets the standards and class hours necessary to reach the level needed to fulfill course requirements.
“You can’t just hire anybody who’s a native speaker,” Burstein said. “To be a good college teacher in any subject, you have to know a lot about how to teach, how to teach Americans in the language, how to set up a curriculum. It’s something that requires a lot of training and a lot of skill.”
First-year languages “[open] up new worlds to the students,” Sokoloff said. “It’s not just a matter of skill, it’s becoming aware of their own cognitive processes [and] discovering a different part of the world, and about themselves.”