• Azzan Yadin, the first graduate from the GTU/UCB Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies, reflects on his studies and his University of Minnesota appointment.
  
  
• CJS alum Matt Hoffman's class on the "complex and charged intersection between Judaism and Christianity"
  
  
• En route to Harvard to teach modern Hebrew literature, Shachar Pinsker discusses his experience at CJS and his plans for the future.

CJS Graduate Teaches Course on Jesus

This story appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of the CJS newsletter Zeramim.

No program, of course, can be all things to all people. Every once in a while, though, there emerges what would seem to be a perfect fit between an educational institution and one of its students. For the Graduate Theological Union and the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies, this perfect match came along in Matthew Hoffman, who received his M.A. in Jewish Studies from the Center in 1995 and in May 1999 earned a Ph.D. from the Joint Doctoral Program in Jewish Studies of GTU and the University of California, Berkeley.

Matt's dissertation, "Reclaiming Jesus and the Construction of Modern Jewish Culture," was completed under the directorship of Professor David Biale and benefited enormously from the GTU's rich ecumenical offerings. "Reclaiming Jesus" takes shape at the complex and charged intersection between Judaism and Christianity, exploring, in particular, the widespread fascination with and reevaluation of the figure of Jesus and Christian motifs among nineteenth and twentieth-century European Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists, including, most famously, the artist Marc Chagall.

In 2000-01, Matt served as the Koret Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Davis, where he taught courses on modern Jewish history and Yiddish literature; his teaching resumé, even as a graduate student, has always been impressive, including a stint teaching at San Quentin, for instance. So it was with full confidence that we asked Matt to help us out by teaching a course on Jesus in the Jewish tradition, a course Matt co-taught a few years ago with David Biale.

The class, with its mix of students in Jewish studies and seminary students, represents what is most exciting about the Graduate Theological Union. As Matt describes it, "the seminar seems to consistently attract the most fascinating people at GTU: Jewish students with Christian backgrounds, or vice versa; seminary students with serious critiques of Christianity they find mirrored in the works of such nineteenth-century Jewish philosophers, and which they don't always find in their other classes; Jewish studies students looking for a more nuanced approach to Christianity than those they encounter elsewhere." The course, in other words, serves as an intellectually rigorous but often also personally exciting encounter not only between Judaism and Christianity, but also between Jews and Christians.

Matt continues: "The experience of both studying and teaching the complex, troubled, and vital history of Jewish-Christian relations in such a religiously diverse and intellectually powerful setting has been profound and rewarding for me." Matt's teachers (now colleagues) and students count ourselves lucky that we can participate in this experience as well.

CJS Grad Takes Harvard Position En Route to Israel

This interview with CJS alum Shachar Pinsker was conducted by Dina Stein. Pinsker is a 2001 graduate from CJS who at the time of the interview was en route to Massachusetts to take a position at Harvard teaching modern Hebrew literature.

This story appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of the CJS newsletter Zeramim.

I met Shachar just a few days before he was about to leave to Cambridge, MA. For both of us it was completing a circle, in a way: when I first arrived to teach at the GTU, three years ago, Shachar interviewed me for the newsletter. Now, working on the last draft of his dissertation, in the midst of the last minute packing and moving, I had an excuse to ask him to reflect back, briefly.

Q. What made you choose to come to Berkeley, to the joint doctorate program, while you were already writing your M.A. at the Hebrew University? (Or: why leave a perfectly good and known place and travel so far?)
A. It was a mixture of things, as it is usually the case. First of all, the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies in Berkeley wasn't so alien to me, since two of my teachers at the department of comparative literature at the Hebrew University were themselves Berkeley graduates (David Fishelov and Ilana Pardes). At the same time I was also studying at Elul (a place where "secular" and "religious" students discuss Jewish sources together), and I came to realize that I was looking for a way to combine critical theory, modern Hebrew literature and classical Jewish texts. The Joint Program of UC Berkeley and the GTU offered the open intellectual horizons that would enable that.

Q. Is your work reflective of what you were initially looking for (or: was it worth it)?
A. I think so. My dissertation addresses the issues of intertextuality, rabbinic literature and the making of modernist Hebrew fiction. I have tried to suggest a different approach to the literature of authors such as Genesin, Fogel and Baron (who wrote in Europe and Palestine in the first three decades of the twentieth century). Instead of viewing Hebrew modernism in terms of imitation (of the European model), or as an expression of an assimilation process, I identify it with cultural processes which are almost diametrically opposed to "assimilation" and "normalization". That is, the crisis in language, which is so central to European modernism, is what lies at the heart of Hebrew modernism, albeit in a very specific form: the use of rabbinic sources, and the complex ways in which those intertexts cut through this literature, is what constitutes it as a culturally-unique example of modernism.

Q.: How would you summaries your five years in Berkeley (or: did you do anything else besides studying)?
A. A lot has happened in this short time. First and foremost, my wife, Amanda, and I had a baby, Yotam, who is now almost three. We've both have taken on different jobs. Amanda, who is a chef, has been doing an amazing variety of things-from working in gourmet restaurants to catering for three or four Passover "Seders" (including the GTU one) each year. I myself taught at UC Davis for two years. Although the teaching and the commute weren't easy at the time, I now appreciate having had the experience. We've enjoyed a very strong sense of community here, not only the academic/intellectual side of it. In fact, I'm already "homesick." I know we will miss Berkeley.

Q. What are your plans now (or: is there life after graduate school)?
A. This coming year I'll be teaching modern Hebrew literature at Harvard. After that I plan to be at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel.

We all wish Shachar good luck!