Judaic Studies Hires First Director
Judith Baskin Brings Energy and Experience to Program

Judith Baskin sometimes wonders whether she might have become a rabbi like her father and grandfather if she had been born a few years later. The rabbinate wasn’t open to women when she was growing up.

But now she’s glad she took a different path, where she has opened the world of Jewish life, history, philosophy, arts, and religion to thousands of students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. As chair of the Department of Judaic Studies at the State University of New York at Albany for more than ten years, Baskin revitalized one of the country’s oldest Judaic Studies programs; won several teaching awards; published books on topics ranging from Jewish-Christian intellectual history to women in Jewish history and literature; rose to a leadership role in the national Association for Jewish Studies; and lectured and consulted all over the world.

“I was so enthralled with the intellectual experience of studying Judaism,” says Baskin, “that I often wonder, had I been a little younger, if I might have chosen a rabbinic career. I’m very glad I didn’t. I’m better suited for academic life.”

This fall, Baskin brings that academic life to the University of Oregon, where she has been named director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies. The UO Judaic Studies program was started in 1999 with a $1.5-million gift from the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, founded by Portland philanthropists Harold, Arlene, and Jordan Schnitzer. Jordan Schnitzer, a UO Foundation trustee, says he and his parents are thrilled about Baskin’s appointment. “We were extremely impressed with her academic credentials, her personality, her insight, her quickness,” he says. “All of us remember from college a professor or two who had that spark that got us all excited about learning. She has that spark, that passion to get these ideas across to you.”

Baskin says she’s excited about the opportunities and challenges of the UO position. Her primary goal is “working creatively with my colleagues to develop innovative, appealing, and substantive courses to reach the widest and most diverse group of undergraduates possible.”

She also would like to heighten the program’s visibility both on campus and off by bringing in speakers and sponsoring conferences. And she wants to help carry out the Schnitzers’ vision of a statewide consortium of Judaic Studies programs among public and private universities in Oregon.

Baskin says Judaic Studies programs are needed at universities for many of the same reasons that women’s studies and ethnic studies programs are needed. “It’s a way of including important historical, religious, gender, and racial traditions that are an intrinsic part of the human experience from which we can learn a great deal but which sometimes get pushed aside” in traditional university curricula, she says.

Baskin’s research specialties are the study of women in rabbinic literature and Jewish women in the Middle Ages. She received her bachelor’s degree in history from Antioch College in 1971 and her doctorate in medieval studies from Yale University in 1976.

Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Baskin says she was interested in history and Judaism even as a child. Her father was the rabbi of the Reformed congregation in Hamilton for forty years. Her grandfather had been an Orthodox rabbi in New York City. Baskin’s husband, Warren Ginsberg, also a medievalist and a recent Guggenheim fellow, will join the UO English department faculty this fall. Baskin and Ginsberg have two children.

Schnitzer and Russell Tomlin, CAS associate dean for humanities, say Baskin seems to be just the right fit for the UO position. “It took two years to complete a search to find someone of the caliber we believe we’ve found in Judith Baskin,” says Tomlin.“I think she has a burning desire to make this a nationally recognized Judaic Studies program,” says Schnitzer.

Photo: Judith Baskin with Jordan (l) and Harold Schnitzer (r). (Photo by Jack Liu)