Long-held plans to revitalize the Jewish studies program at the University of Manitoba have taken a positive step forward with the hiring of a new assistant professor in the Department of Religion. Justin Jaron Lewis will arrive in Winnipeg this summer with his family and begin teaching courses in both classical and contemporary Judaism in the fall of 2008.
The original Jewish studies program at the Fort Garry campus was established in the 1950s and was, at the time, the first such program in Canada. The program disbanded approximately 20 years ago due to a number of factors, ironically at a time when the academic field of Jewish Studies was taking off everywhere else.
"In the last 20 years, throughout North America, there has been an expansion of Jewish studies programs at universities," says Ben
Baader, an assistant professor of history at the University of Manitoba.
"This has partly been community driven and partly a function of universities opening up to minority studies in general. Jewish studies have now entered the mainstream of academia."
Prof. Baader, who teaches two European Jewish history courses at the university, was on the search committee that interviewed and hired Prof.
Lewis from among several highly qualified candidates. Since his own arrival in Winnipeg three and a half years ago, Baader had been making inquiries about what he perceived to be a "glaring gap" in a community that was otherwise lively and vibrant -- the lack of a Jewish studies program at the university.
During this time, the Department of Religion also had made the hiring of a Judaics expert a high priority.
Lewis arrives in Winnipeg from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., where he has been an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the director of its Jewish studies program.
California born, Lewis was raised in Edmonton and Sudbury, and received his rabbinic ordination from the interdenominational Academy for Jewish Religion in New York and his PhD in post-biblical Hebrew language and literature from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is looking forward to his move to Winnipeg and to integrating into a community with such as strong Jewish and Yiddish inspired culture and history.
"I know of the proud Jewish history of Winnipeg and have heard many good things about the city from people who live there or have lived there," he says.
In addition to teaching, Lewis's responsibilities will extend to committee work and research. He is the author of two forthcoming books, one of them a collection of Hassidic tales and the other an annotated translation of a Yiddish text about Jewish women written in Renaissance Italy. He also is a professional storyteller and teaches a non-academic online course on the Zohar, the Kabbalistic Book of Splendour.
At the U of M, Lewis hopes to assist with the further revitalization of a formal Jewish studies programs.
"For the first time in a long time the university will be offering a cluster of Jewish classes, with Dr. Lewis in religion and me in history," says Baader. These will be complemented by a course on the Holocaust, as well as Hebrew and Yiddish language classes that have been offered by the linguistic department for a number of years.
"But, what we need for a formal Jewish studies program," Baader adds, "is the creation of a third position and support for an endowed chair."
"The real engine of Jewish thought is university scholarship these days," he explains.
"There are more than 160 Jewish studies programs in the US and several in Canada. Ideally, it will only be a matter of time until there is also one in Winnipeg again.
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