Regarding my recent posting about what students want from Jewish Studies at Syracuse, Brian Small, Director of Programming and Student Engagement, and also Interim Executive Director of Hillel at Syracuse University had this to say. As always, I defer to his better expertise in regards to all things student related. His take is far more granular than mine, reminding us that different students are going to want different things from Jewish Studies relating to (other) major and minor areas of study. At a time when students double major, this should be pretty easy to finesse. Here’s what Brian had to say in a private email about what he hears from students every day at Hillel. Brian has graciously permitted me to pass along:

The “trick” is to figure out how to integrate Jewish Studies into broader areas of intellectual and professional interest as either a complement or as a supplement. It It sounds cynical, but it’s not. Wouldn’t any academic want to want one’s own more specialized area of primary interest to branch out and speak to other people for whom this interest is not necessarily or at first primary? And if we can’t, then what’s the point? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge? We can’t make them listen to us if they’re not interested, and if they’re not interested, well, maybe there’s plenty of fault to go around for that, in Jewish Studies and the Humanities writ large.

I’d like to say that I use the term “supplement not unaware of Derrida’s insight in Grammatology about how a secondary point of interest, in this case Jewish Studies, might always have already worked to dis-place or even overtake the first term or interest, onto which it comes to add. But frankly, I’d be happy enough if Judaic Studies or any other humanistic inquiry remained a secondary point of interest for even the majority of our minors and even majors. Ideally, one could get them to work together –in tandem, at critical intersections, or along parallel tracks.