University of Maryland Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies Home
University of Maryland's Jewish Studies degree combines a liberal arts education with practical career skills that last a lifetime.
Jewish Studies offers opportunities to follow your own intellectual interests to explore everything from ancient archaeology to modern politics in Jerusalem, from the narratives of the Bible and the intricacies of medieval philosophy to the complex ambitions of film makers working in English, Yiddish or Hebrew.
The interdisciplinary nature of Jewish studies provides opportunities to analyze texts, read critically, and argue persuasively in speech and in writing—qualities crucial for any career or advanced academic work.
Explore Jewish and Israel Studies
Centers and Programs
Centers and Programs
The Jewish and Israel Studies programs at the University of Maryland are centers for intellectual inquiry about Jews, Judaism and Israel.
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate Students
The Meyerhoff Center offers many opportunities for student engagement with Jewish studies and related fields. Students studying Israel studies explore the history, culture and political structure of Israel and its place in the Middle East, including Hebrew and/or Arabic language.
Graduate Students
Graduate Students
The Meyerhoff Center and Gildenhorn Institute both offer graduate programs for students to further their exploration into Jewish and Israel studies.
Faculty and Staff
Faculty and Staff
Access resources for faculty and staff, or find someone in the directory.
Research & Innovation
The Meyerhoff Center and Gildenhorn Institute are dedicated to producing scholarly research that will inform and inspire today’s thought leaders and decision makers.
Explore our Current ResearchPublications and Activities
Why Deterrence Failed on October 7, 2023?
This article employs lessons from cases of both successful and failed deterrence in a longitudinal study of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Author/Lead: Elli LiebermanIsraeli policymakers have relied on cumulative deterrence strategies to combat terrorism. However, Israel has consistently failed to deter Hamas’ attacks, not only on October 7 but also in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and 2021. A critical yet often overlooked observation is that cumulative deterrence strategies coupled with robust denial capabilities can lead to an attrition trap, which serves as a victory strategy for weaker actors, ultimately resulting in deterrence failure rather than success.
INSS The Institute for National Security Studies Strategic, Innovative, Policy-Oriented Research
A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature.
In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.
Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.
This volume aims to shed new light on the history of the Jews in Italy between the early modern period and the emergence of a unified Italian state, explicitly placing Jews within the history of the state-building process. It seeks to reconsider Jewish history systematically by stressing the relation of Jews and the state and to trace how Jews and their communities were reshaped in the early modern period.
Volume Editors: Bernard Cooperman, Serena Di Nepi, and Germano Maifreda