Earlier in January, Gratz College in Melrose Park announced that it will begin courses in the spring for a doctoral program focused on training experts in rabbinic, educational, nonprofit and public policy positions in the Jewish community.
The school says that this program is the first of its kind. Dr. Brendan Goldman is leading the program as the Dr. Saul Philip Wachs Chair of Jewish Life and Learning, and he said it was imagined, along with his hiring, as a way to reinvigorate the Jewish studies program at Gratz.
“A relatively small part of the student body had actually been engaged in Jewish Studies [in recent years], and part of the establishment of this program is to bring Jewish studies back to the central part of what Gratz does,” Goldman said.
The program emphasizes a pragmatic approach to educating adult Jews.
“This program is going to enable [students] to be able to pursue their education while continuing to do their full-time jobs. And that’s really what we’ve been envisioning,” he said.
Goldman added that Gratz aims to do more than just prepare students to be professors or academics.
“The added value of a Jewish studies Ph.D. [includes] the deep research skills associated with the type of analytical thinking that one gets from a program like this, as well as the profound content knowledge of Jewish tradition,” he said. “All of those are of tremendous value to Jewish professionals: to educators, people in advocacy positions, to rabbis, to people in lay leadership positions.”
Goldman, who began his tenure in September, is in charge of public programming, community education and Jewish studies program leadership.
He received his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He also served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. Goldman has a book scheduled for release that focuses on documents found in the Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storehouse with more than 40,000 medieval writings, and how they can bring light to how state-shaped violence influenced the lives of everyday Jews in Muslim-controlled regions in the Middle Ages.
Prior to Gratz, Goldman served as associate director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the School of International Studies at the University of Washington.
The new Gratz program requires 48 credits to earn the degree. That includes requirements for seminars, colloquia, electives, a master class and defense, a proposal and a doctoral project. Tuition is $914 per credit, with a 60% scholarship available to students who are accepted in the first cohort.
Goldman said that traditional academia is purposefully narrow in its appeal, and that that hasn’t necessarily served the Jewish community in the context of today’s heightened danger. He said this program will afford the chance for crucial information to become more ubiquitous.
A spokesperson for Gratz said the program has already garnered attention, applications and a cohort that is starting this summer. The program is open to Jews and non-Jews while offering tracks that appeal to specific denominations. For example, the school has a cohort of Orthodox women starting in the coming months.
The Walder Fellowship will help six of those women study for free, Goldman said.
The school said in a news release that rising antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks inspired a communal effort to act on behalf of the Jewish community.
“After Oct. 7, we’ve seen how institutions of higher learning have become places that are really uncomfortable for many people interested in pursuing degrees in Jewish Studies,”
Goldman said. “The politicization of Jewish studies on many campuses made [many spaces] inhospitable to those in the Jewish community,” he said. “The post-October 7 world demands a new kind of Jewish leader deeply informed about what is going on.”
