New Humanities and Academic Disciplines: The Case of Jewish Studies

This book is about social change as it is even now being revealed in the creation of a new field of learning in an unprecedented setting and for an as-yet-unknown cultural and intellectual purpose. It is about how a field of learning moves from one kind of institution to another is practiced by new people (women not only men and outsiders as well as insiders) and for new purposes (secular not only religious) and in new ways. Out of these minute particulars in our imagination we may reconstruct the whole of modern history -- the universe out of a grain of sand. Perhaps no group in the past two hundred years of revolutionary change has moved so far so fast and in so many directions as the Jews.... from the Introduction