With a new $1.5 million grant, U.C. Santa Cruz is expected to get its Jewish studies program off the ground soon.
The seed grant, awarded last month by the Helen and Sanford Diller Family Philanthropic Fund through the S.F.-based Jewish Community Endowment Fund, will establish an endowed chair for an annual visiting professor. Administrative details are expected to be completed by mid-March.
Planned classes for the Jewish studies program will include seminars on Jewish identity in visual art, as well as science and Jewish thought, and Judaism, ecology and evolution.
“Most Jewish studies programs don’t have this kind of depth,” said Murray Baumgarten, a professor of comparative literature at the university.
“Historically, we’ve had the largest population of Jewish students at any U.C. campus,” added Baumgarten, who teaches modern Jewish literature and Holocaust studies.
Until now, however, the university had offered only a smattering of classes on Jewish topics, taught by a dozen teachers in several departments.
The grant will help to unify the Jewish studies program, which the school hopes to expand in the future with other grants, university officials said.
“Stanford already has such a wonderful Jewish studies program,” said Helen Diller, a south Peninsula resident who earmarked the gift to the university. “We figured, why not establish Jewish studies at UCSC? We are very interested in Jewish education and we wanted to make a difference for the future of Judaism.”
The grant will enable an informal Jewish studies program to become more “coherent and focused,” said Baumgarten. The grant will also be a boon to non-Jewish students, who often comprise about half of the those in Jewish studies classes. Those classes can satisfy the university’s “ethnicity requirement.”
The expanded program, he said, “makes it possible to move forward into the 21st century with a curriculum that can meet the needs of the California population.”
Baumgarten said the university wants to network with the other area Jewish studies programs. “We want a small and focused program of the highest quality. By sharing with other universities we can cover a lot more,” he said.
Complimenting the groundbreaking grant, Dean of Humanities George Hankamer said the university is “very pleased and we hope it will be a foundation for an even larger endowment.”