The Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is proud of the accomplishments of its first twenty years. Each year, our Center touches thousands of lives, promotes greater awareness of Jewish history, culture, and thought, and fosters understanding among people from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. By providing a strong academic program covering all aspects of Jewish history, language, and culture, we’ve begun to create a generation of young people who understand a rich intellectual and historical tradition that encompasses Jewish language and the arts, Judaism’s religious and cultural contours, and the social and political circumstances that shaped and continue to shape Jewish engagement with the non-Jewish world. In the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, our program serves its students beyond the borders of the university as they become full participants in their communities.
While our accomplishments to date are significant, we believe we can and should do more. The Center is embarking on a bold strategic plan, which has two principal aims:
First, we plan to establish an endowment that will fully fund our current academic program at a level that will protect us from the uncertainties of state funding. Such an endowment will ensure that we can open our classrooms to all students who want to take our courses, that we continue to develop our curriculum, that we are able to support our faculty’s research and teaching, and that we continue to have the support of excellent staff. A healthy endowment will give the Center an unshakable foundation so that the legacy of George Mosse and Laurence Weinstein is perpetual.
Second, we aim to move our program to the next level by expanding our faculty and academic offerings in key areas that will allow us to assume a leading position in Jewish education and make Jewish Studies at Wisconsin a resource for students and scholars from across the country. Here, our goal is to endow new professorships and fellowships that expand the intellectual range of our scholarship, teaching, and outreach to be inclusive of all of the disciplines and methods that inform Jewish studies today.
These are ambitious undertakings. But we are committed, as a faculty, to making sure that students who come to Wisconsin for Jewish Studies are not only exposed to the basics of Jewish culture and its tradition of learning, but are also taught the most innovative approaches in a wide array of disciplines so that they understand the powerful legacy of Jewish life—a legacy that includes serious attention to language and its impact on ethics, that includes a strong commitment to social justice, that involves understanding the consequences of living as a minority in a larger culture, and that values vigorous intellectual exchange.
Thank you for your continuing support of the
Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies.
Michael Bernard-Donals, Director