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History of the Program in Jewish Studies at CU

Following World War II, Jewish studies course offerings proliferated at American universities and by the 1960s the young field was widely accepted as an academic discipline. It was part of similar growth in other area studies, such as African American studies, Chicano studies, and Asian American studies. By 1969, Jewish studies scholars had formed the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) and began debating the best way to grow this new interdisciplinary and multicultural field. The broad goal of the AJS at its inception was “to make a place in American higher education for the studies in the life, thought and culture of Jews, past and present.”

Launched in 2007, the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado began with the initiative of Professor Thomas Hollweck.  Hollweck, who had joined the University of Colorado’s German department in 1976, was a staunch advocate for hiring a faculty member whose research interests included Jewish studies. He also pushed for CU’s proposed Hebrew program to be housed in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. In 2004, when a position opened in the department, Hollweck successfully argued in favor of hiring Hebrew instructor Dr. Zilla Goodman. Hollweck didn’t stop there. Determined to make Jewish studies a reality at CU, he would head the Dean’s Advisory Committee charged with this objective, formed after advocacy on the part of both Goodman and Hollweck.

The committee with Hollweck at the helm, is composed of Professors Goodman, Janet Jacobs, Robert Schulzinger, Paul Shankman, Graham Oddie and David Boonin among others, would come to establish the Program in Jewish Studies with Professor Shankman serving as director and Professor Goodman as the program’s associate director.  Professor Hollweck, who had given his heart and soul to establishing the program decided to step aside and not take the director’s position, though he stayed active in the advisory committee that ran the program and continued to teach Jewish studies classes until he retired from the university in the fall of 2010. 

By 2007, the program had received support from the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to hire a permanent director. Professors Goodman, Jacobs and Shankman formed a search committee that would eventually bring to campus professor of history David Shneer to build the Program in Jewish Studies from its 15 original certificate students to new heights. Professor Shneer came from the University of Denver where he had spent the previous seven years and had served as director of the Center for Judaic Studies. At DU, Professor Shneer might have had 15 students enrolled in a Jewish studies class, but when he taught his inaugural semester of Introduction to Jewish Studies at CU, a class that at the time fulfilled no core requirements, he rapidly topped the class limit of 70 students and was forced to waitlist 16. The demand for Jewish Studies at CU had hit critical mass. 

In the three years following the committee’s hiring of Shneer to the program and Jewish Studies directorship, the program hired an additional full-time tenure-line faculty, increased the number of classes offered nearly three fold and tripled the number of students pursing a Certificate in Jewish Studies. All this was accomplished despite economic collapse in 2008. In 2010, the program hired Dr. Caryn Aviv who incorporated a service-learning element into the Jewish Studies curriculum and helped develop groundbreaking courses on secular Jewish studies on the CU campus.