Secular studies

From Eric Herschthal of The New York Jewish Week:

The latest skirmish in the halls of Jewish academia has, surprisingly, nothing to do with Israel. But the new discord over academic grants made by the Posen Foundation concerns a charged topic just the same — the growing trend of teaching about Jewish culture through an exclusively secular lens.

Six years ago, the British energy magnate Felix Posen created a foundation to fund, at universities worldwide, courses that focused solely on secular Jewish culture. The mission of the Posen Foundation was to engage secular Jews, who represent about half of the Jewish population, by explicitly teaching about the 400-year history of the Jewish people’s entry into the modern world — which is to say, their history.

The academy, Posen felt, was ignoring that history.

This fall, the foundation added four new American universities to its roster, including The New School in New York and one prominent Jewish school, Brandeis University.

But as the foundation’s reach grows — it will award grants to about 25 American universities this year, up from five in 2003 — also likely to grow is the debate about the foundation’s mission, its potential for skewing the teaching of Jewish studies and whether Jewish studies departments should even take grants with such ideological strings attached. …

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