Challenging Humanism: Jews, Theory, and Yale during the Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, a group of second-generation Jewish literary critics, scholars, and poets at Yale University developed theory from a social standpoint originating outside white, male, Christian-Protestant perspectives and norms. Informed by changes at the university and across American higher education then decentering humanist culture, these pioneering Jews uncovered and reworked the principles of literary scholarship, then helped inaugurate an array of curricular and intellectual changes. These included the establishment of an undergraduate major in Jewish Studies, the opening of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, contributions to the Midrash-theory link, and the founding of Orim. With this (anti-)humanist—often de-Christianizing—work, Jews at Yale theorized and helped enlarge the scope and mission of the academic humanities.

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