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
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
No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging
This book begins with an audacious question: Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada?
Author/Lead: Vardit LightstoneThis book begins with an audacious question: Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada? By certain measures, Canada might be the most socially welcoming, economically secure, and religiously tolerant country for Jews in the diaspora, past or present. No Better Home? takes this question seriously, while also exploring the many contested meanings of the idea of "home."
Contributors to the volume include leading scholars of Canadian Jewish life as well as eminent Jewish scholars writing about Canada for the first time. The essays compare Canadian Jewish life with the quality of life experienced by Jews in other countries, examine Jewish and non-Jewish interactions in Canada, analyse specific historical moments and literary texts, reflect deeply personal histories, and widen the conversation about the quality and timbre of the Canadian Jewish experience. No Better Home? foregrounds Canadian Jewish life and ponders all that the Canadian experience has to teach about Jewish modernity.
Co-edited by Vardit Lightstone, Post-Doc fellow for Jewish Studies