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

Abstract:Jews used theory from the early 1970s to the late 80s at Yale University to revise humanism, a collection of intellectual traditions in the American academy until then largely shaped by a white, male, and Christian-European perspective. Jews, first, uncovered and reworked the philosophical principles of literary scholarship. Jews subsequently employed theory, often in anti-humanist ways, to help inaugurate a number of curricular and intellectual changes, from the reorganization and expansion of a Judaic Studies program at Yale to the housing of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project to contributing to the midrash-theory link, that had wide influence in the American academy and beyond. A chapter in the "Age of Theory," Jews' anti-humanist challenges renewed humanism and were illustrative of the intellectual and cultural effects of the increasing Jewish presence in American humanities departments.