Judaic Studies scholars letter to University of Oregon administrators

If you are an academic worker (any rank) in Judaic Studies (broadly construed), or a graduate student in Judaic Studies (again broadly construed), and you would like to add your name to this letter, please fill out this form. The letter will be sent to the addressees on Wednesday, August 27, but we will continue to add signatories for a while afterwards. Please share with your colleagues and networks in Judaic Studies. Thank you for your support of our UO colleagues!

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Open Letter to the University of Oregon Administration from Judaic Studies Scholars

August 24, 2025

Dear President Scholz, Provost Long, Dean Poulsen, Dean Bornstein, and Members of the Board of Trustees:

We are over 100 scholars of Judaic Studies from around the United States and the world, of every professional rank and every type of institution of higher education, writing to express our distress over the proposed faculty layoffs and unit eliminations within the College of Arts and Sciences and its Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages at the University of Oregon (UO). The dismantling of key programs and tenure protections in the name of budgetary restructuring signals an abandonment of the university’s academic mission and its responsibilities to its students, its employees, the Oregonian public it serves, and the global intellectual community.

Each unit targeted by the proposed cuts deserves support in its own right, and all of our colleagues whose employment is threatened deserve to be able to continue their vibrant careers as leading researchers and teachers. However, when we look at this list of programs and departments we cannot help but observe that it also comprises the entire academic foundation and institutional infrastructure for the Judaic Studies program at UO. All faculty in the Department of German and Scandinavian, including core faculty in Judaic Studies, as well as the program of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) are targeted, including the chair of Holocaust Studies split between these two units. The Department of Religion is threatened with closure, which would eliminate key Judaic Studies positions. But these direct cuts to Judaic Studies itself are only the beginning.

Spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Arabic, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish are vital gateways to understanding Jewish life across continents and centuries. Students who go on to become leading scholars of Judaic Studies regularly begin their careers as students of these languages. The closure of REEES erodes knowledge of diverse Yiddish cultures from medieval Ashkenaz, to the Pale of Settlement, to the Soviet Union. The shuttering of German and Scandinavian undermines access to a rich German Jewish intellectual and cultural tradition. With a further reduction of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, it becomes more difficult to bring Sephardi and Mizrahi histories and cultures to students and to advance research in these crucial, long under-supported areas of Judaic Studies. Where are UO students going to go to become informed about, to give just one example, the history of Palestine and Israel?

Without course offerings in Religion, where will students learn about Judaism and its relationships to other religions like Islam, Christianity, or Hinduism? Without Classics, how can UO faculty answer the latest, field-defining questions about ancient Jews in their Mediterranean contexts? Without Holocaust Studies, who will teach UO students about the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews and millions of other victims including Sinti and Roma people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and political dissidents—at precisely the moment when white supremacist political forces afoot in the United States and abroad are trying to erase or distort the memory of those crimes? Perhaps some teaching and research about these matters, and other topics in Judaic Studies, could take place under the aegis of History, or Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies? Alas, no: these units, too, now face personnel reductions.

Each of the proposed changes is outrageous on its own. Taken together, they lead us not only to fear for the professional futures of our UO colleagues and despair for their students, but also to wonder: Why don’t UO’s administrative leaders want UO students to learn about Jews? Why don’t they want UO faculty to study Jews?

For that is indeed the message. Even if Judaic Studies as such were somehow to remain, there is no way that UO could claim to value the production and transmission of knowledge about Jews without robust support for units like Classics, German and Scandinavian, History, Holocaust Studies, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Religion, and REEES. The work our colleagues do in these areas makes teaching and research in Judaic Studies possible. Our field cannot exist in isolation from theirs. Judaic Studies is necessarily interdisciplinary and multilingual, as Jewish history is intrinsically global and diasporic. This is well attested by the diversity of departments and programs represented among the signatories to this letter.

What is needed today is not the destruction but the intentional strengthening of Judaic Studies, through the cultivation of all those fields that constitute it. Universities, especially public ones, have a heightened obligation to foster historical literacy and critical inquiry in an alarming era of rising bigotry, including racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. When the university weakens or closes those programs that best equip students to understand these phenomena in the past and present, and removes the tenure protections that allow faculty to speak freely about them, it suggests that UO has in fact acquiesced to those very forces. The proposed changes create a depleted academic environment increasingly unable to resist erasure: of languages, of memories, of complexities. History—including but not limited to Jewish history—teaches us that this type of erasure is often a step down the road to something far worse.

No short-term financial calculus can justify the long-term consequences these cuts will have on public education, critical thought, and ethical civic engagement, not to mention future scholarship in the affected fields. It is especially troubling to learn that UO recently accepted a $25 million gift to strengthen global studies and languages, yet now attacks tenure and destroys the institutional infrastructure and language instruction required for any “global studies” worthy of the name. These moves undermine UO’s credibility and raise grave concerns about its long-term vision, its academic integrity, and its commitments to public education and academic freedom.

We urge you, the administration of the University of Oregon, to immediately reverse course and not only preserve, but bolster its support for Judaic Studies, Holocaust Studies, Religion, Classics, REEES, German and Scandinavian, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, History, the Schnitzer School, the study of ancient and modern global languages, and all the other potentially affected academic units. At an uncertain moment in US higher education, we hope you will demonstrate leadership by affirming academic freedom, recommitting to tenure protections, retaining and growing the faculty, and making the case to your students that the global, multilingual humanities are valuable fields of study in public higher education—now more than ever.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Alpert, Professor of Religion Emeritus, Temple University
Sonja Anderson, Associate Professor of Religion, Carleton College
Jessica Andruss, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Ofer Ashkenazi, Professor of History and Director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Nicolaas Baar, Part-Time Lecturer of the Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington
Benjamin Balthaser, Associate Professor of Multi-Ethnic US Literature, Indiana University–South Bend
Stacy Beckwith, W. I. and Hulda F. Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Director of Judaic Studies, Carleton College
Doris Bergen, Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto
Natalie Bernstien, PhD Candidate in History, University of California–Los Angeles
Henry Bial, Professor and Chair of Theatre and Dance, University of Kansas
Miriam Bilsker, PhD Candidate in the Divinity School, University of Chicago
Hadas Binyamini, Doctoral Candidate in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Samuel Hayim Brody, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Kansas
Darcy Buerkle, Professor of History and Chair of Jewish Studies, Smith College
Samuel P. Catlin, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College
Gabriel Chazan, PhD Candidate in Art History, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Vitaly Chernetsky, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Kansas
Sandra Chiritescu, Clinical Assistant Professor of Yiddish, New York University
Jeremy Dauber, Director Emeritus, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University
Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies, New York University
Sophie Edelhart, PhD Candidate in Yiddish, University of Toronto
Beth Epstein, Professor of Nursing, University of Virginia
Rebecca Epstein-Levi, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Vanderbilt University
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Emerita Professor of Comparative Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Marjorie N. Feld, Professor of History, Babson College
Sara Feldman, Preceptor in Yiddish, Harvard University
Jordan Finkin, Deputy Director of Libraries, Hebrew Union College
Francesca Freeman, PhD Student in Peace Studies and History, University of Notre Dame
Ken Frieden, B. G. Rudolph Professor of Judaic Studies, Syracuse University
Michal Friedman, Jack Buncher Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Carnegie Mellon University
Sheer Ganor, Assistant Professor of History, University of Minnesota
Jennifer Geddes, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Jewish Studies, University of Virginia
Jay Geller, Professor of Judaic Studies and History, Case Western Reserve University
Daniel Gilfillan, Associate Professor of German Studies, Arizona State University
Abigail Gillman, Chair and Professor of World Languages and Literatures, Boston University
Zohar Gitlis, PhD Student in Religious Studies, Brown University
Greg Schmidt Goering, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Lucy Onderwyzer Gold, PhD Student in Religious Studies, Brown University
Evan Goldstein, Assistant Teaching Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee–Knoxville
Rebecca Gross, PhD Candidate in Literature, University of California–Santa Cruz
Jeffrey Grossman, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia
Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union
Jason Groves, Associate Professor of German Studies, University of Washington
Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History, University of Southern California
Anna Hájková, Reader of Modern European Continental History, University of Warwick
Liora R. Halperin, Professor of International Studies and History and Distinguished Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, University of Washington
Martien Halvorson-Taylor, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Sarah Hammerschlag, John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism, University of Chicago Divinity School
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Associate Professor of German, University of Mary Washington
Jacob Hermant, PhD Candidate in Yiddish, University of Toronto
Andrew M. Jambol-Petz, Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy, Fordham University
Eli Jany, PhD Candidate in Yiddish, University of Toronto
Matthew Johnson, Assistant Professor in German, Nordic, and Slavic+, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Sophia Johnson, Postdoctoral Research in Hebrew Bible, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Mayer Juni, Bruce Slovin Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Cornell University
Kobi Kabalek, Assistant Professor of Holocaust Studies and Visual Studies, Penn State University
Amy Kaminsky, Professor Emerita of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and Jewish Studies, University of Minnesota
Jessica Kirzane, Associate Instructional Professor of Yiddish, University of Chicago
Rachel Kranson, Director of Jewish Studies, University of Pittsburgh
Adrienne Krone, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability and Religious Studies and Chair of Jewish Studies, Allegheny College
Chana Kronfeld, Professor of the Graduate School and Professor Emerita, University of California–Berkeley
David Kurkovskiy, PhD Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California–Berkeley
Eric Kurlander, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History, Chair of History, and Director of Jewish Studies, Harvard University
Gail Labovitz, Professor of Rabbinic Literature, American Jewish University
Elad Lapidot, Professor of Hebraic Studies, University of Lille
Daniel Lefkowitz, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia
Mechele Leon, Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Kansas
Mark LeVine, Professor of History, University of California–Irvine
Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University
Tsiona Lida, PhD Candidate in History, Harvard University
Ari Linden, Associate Professor of German Studies, University of Kansas
Victor Luftig, Professor of English, University of Virginia
Susan Meyer, Professor of English, Wellesley College
Ishay Mishory, Assistant Professor of Judaism and Sustainability, San Diego State University
Leslie Morris, Professor in German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, University of Minnesota
Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
Ranen Omer-Sherman, Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, University of Louisville
Natan Paradise, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Minnesota
Mo Pareles, Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia
Julia Peck, PhD Student in Linguistics, University of California–Berkeley
Bogi Perelmutter, Assistant Teaching Professor of Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies and Jewish Studies, University of Kansas
RB Perelmutter, Professor of Jewish Studies and Slavic, German, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas
Elya Piazza, independent scholar, PhD in Near Eastern Studies with Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies, University of California–Berkeley
Daniel Picus, Associate Professor of Global Humanities and Religions, Western Washington University
Shachar Pinsker, Professor of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies, University of Michigan
Lana Dee Povitz, Associate Professor of History, Middlebury College
Riv-Ellen Prell, Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Minnesota
Joshua Price, Senior Lecturer in Yiddish, Yale University
Elliot Ratzman, Research Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, University of Michigan
Leo Riegert, Jr., Associate Professor of German, Kenyon College
Lawrence Rosenwald, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor Emeritus of English, Wellesley College
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, University of California–Los Angeles
Joel Rubin, Adjunct Researcher, Institute für Judaistik and Associate Professor (retired) of Music and Jewish Studies, University of Virginia
Seth L. Sanders, McLeod Chair of Classics, Dalhousie University
Charlotte Schallié, Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Victoria
Marla Segol, Professor of Gender Studies, University at Buffalo–SUNY
Sasha Senderovich, Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish, and International Studies, University of Washington
Susan E. Shapiro, Associate Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts–Amherst
Sam Shuman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Abe Silberstein, PhD Student in Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Victor Silverman, Professor Emeritus of History, Pomona College
Chelsea Simon, PhD Candidate, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion
Dan Sinykin, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of English, Emory University
Santiago Slabodsky, Kaufman Professor of Jewish Studies, Hofstra University–New York
Erella Brown Sofer, Part-Time Instructor of Jewish Studies, Syracuse University
Richard Stein, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Oregon
Charlie Steinman, PhD Candidate in History, Columbia University
Celia Stern, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies, Brown University
Lior Sternfeld, Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Penn State University
Jessie Stoolman, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of California–Los Angeles
Mira Sucharov, Professor of Political Science, Carleton University
Joel Swanson, Assistant Professor of Religion, Sarah Lawrence College
Anna Elena Torres, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago
Chana Toth-Sewell, PhD Student in Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Alex Ullman, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
Alana M. Vincent, Associate Professor of History of Religion, Umeå University
Anika Walke, Askwith Family Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies, Carnegie Mellon University
Alexander Walther, Research Associate, Tacheles, State Museum of Archaeology, Chemnitz
David Weinfeld, Director of the Jewish Studies Minor and Assistant Professor of World Religions, Rowan University
Joseph Kaplan Weinger, PhD Candidate in Sociology, University of California–Los Angeles
Diane L. Wolf, Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California–Davis
Laura Yares, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Michigan State University
Oren Yirmiya, Assistant Professor of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto
David Zakalik, Translation Fellow, Yiddish Book Center
Saul Zaritt, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Yiddish Program Director, The Ohio State University
Sarah Zarrow, Endowed Chair of Jewish History, Western Washington University