“What is a yiddish poet?” the bard Yaakov Glatstein once quipped. “A Yiddish poet is someone who reads Auden, but Auden doesn’t read him.”
As a historian who reads Russian, Hebrew, Polish, German, French and, yes, Yiddish, Steven Zipperstein has spent much of his career translating the miraculous-story approach to Jewish studies—the Exodus, the coming of the Messiah—into events and themes that are relevant to a broader audience. “Jewish studies is like religious studies in some respects, but not entirely,” says Zipperstein. “It’s also like ethnic studies, but not entirely. So what my colleagues and I are trying to do is open up these wonderful topics and make them of intrinsic interest to the widest range of students.”
The September launch of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies should make that task easier. It includes three endowed professorships (two in history and one in religious studies), a fund for five annual lectures, an endowed library curatorship and a Judaica collection of more than 80,000 books, and office space on the outer Quad in the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. “With the creation of a center, the University is committing itself to a long-term relationship,” says Zipperstein, who will co-direct the center with history professor Aron Rodrigue. “It’s saying it has faith that this field will exist at Stanford indefinitely.”
Bay Area philanthropist Tad Taube, ’53, MS ’57, a longtime adviser to the program who also serves on the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers, provided a $2.5 million lead gift for the center, which is supported by a broad base of donors. It will be the first project to draw matching funds from the Hewlett Foundation’s donation to the School of Humanities and Sciences. The establishment of the center signifies that Jewish studies has come a long way from the first half of the 20th century, when Stanford was perceived by many as an unfriendly campus for Jews. Even in 1991, when Zipperstein joined the faculty, friends and family were surprised. “My father, who holds six graduate degrees, said to me just before I was hired, ‘Why are you going to that place if it’s unfriendly to Jews?’”
Today more than 800 undergraduates, half of whom are not Jewish, enroll in more than 30 Jewish studies courses taught by 10 faculty from six different departments. The program also brings together an average of 20 graduate students, mostly from history and religious studies, providing opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, exposure to scholars from around the world and funding for language studies and overseas research. “Stanford’s program in Jewish studies stands among the very best,” says Frances Malino, professor of Jewish studies at Wellesley College. “Its leadership is dynamic, its curricular offerings rich and diverse and its faculty stellar.”
Zipperstein thinks professors from many fields will continue to support the center: “The program was built by colleagues who actually get along.”
