Judaic Studies given $4.5 million donation

Peter Schafer, director of the Program in Judaic Studies, said that the grant, which will launch the Tikvah Project on Jewish Thuoght, will make Judaic Studies a “lasting force for Princeton.”

A significant part of the fund is geared toward improving teaching, and Schafer will focus his energies on creating new courses.

The Tikvah project, dedicated to promoting Jewish ideas, specified that the University’s grant should be used to bring visiting scholars and fellows to campus, sponsor new courses, host summer institutes and workshops, and increase the interdisciplinary approach of courses that focus on Judaism or Jewish thought.

Michael Fishbane, a visiting research scholar from the University of Chicago and the inaugural Tikvah fellow, will be teaching a freshman seminar titled “The Problem of Evil and the Book of Job” this semester.

“We are very grateful to the Tikvah Fund for their generous support,” Leora Batnitzky GS ’96, project coordinator and religion professor, said in a recent statement. “Any educated person, Jewish and non-Jewish, ought to know something about Jewish thought and civilization. And we hope that the implementation of this kind of curriculum will have long-lasting effects for the future of Jewish studies and the humanities.”

Fishbane’s yearlong fellowship precedes the launch of the visiting fellows program next year. His seminar will focus on primary sources with the goal of linking these historical texts with contemporary phenomena, he explained.

He added that the goal is to not focus on these readings as “narrow parochial texts,” but to draw out the larger cultural questions and consider what it means to be a person.

The Tikvah donation will lead to the creation of a number of new courses with an interdisciplinary approach to Judaism, such as “God and Politics,” “Faith and Drought,” and “What is Human Nature?”

In addition to increasing course variety and availability, the donation is intended to increase the research capabilities of professors in the field.

Schafer has already benefited from the new donation.

Though Schafer initially planned on carrying out his study of cosmology and creation for only the three years using a grant from the Mellon Foundation, he will now be able to continue this research using the Tikvah Fund’s donation.

Schafer and Fishbane will join forces next semester to teach a seminar on cosmology and ancient Judaism.