Jacques Berlinerblau

Faculty

Director, Program for Jewish Civilization; Associate Professor of Jewish Civilization

Age: 47

Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.

Education: B.A. New York University, Psychology; M.A. New York University, Hebrew and Judaic Studies; M.A. New School for Social Research, Sociology; Ph.D. New York University, Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literatures; Ph.D. The New School for Social Research, Sociology

Area of Research: Jewish Civilization

Time at Georgetown: 10 years

Courses Taught: “American Secularism,” “Secularism, Atheism, Agnosticism,” “Secular States and Political Religions,” “Jewish-American Literature,” “Philip Roth: Secular Jewish Fiction.”

What drew you to Georgetown?
The School of Foreign Service really drew me to Georgetown, and the attractiveness of standing at an intersection between serious scholarly research and the policy implications that that serious scholarly research might have. That’s what the SFS is — almost a delivery mechanism for that sort of thing. That’s what drew me to Georgetown. It wasn’t Washington, I assure you. I’m a New Yorker. There’s only one thing in Washington I like: the Whitehurst Freeway. And Georgetown.

What is the greatest challenge in your research?
What I study is extremely controversial and often the source of great angst for Americans, French people, Canadians, Israelis, people in the Islamic world, etc. My expertise is in the area of secularism. And secularism is one of the most mangled and confused “isms” in the global political lexicon. The challenge for me is dealing with misconceptions about the term and dealing with anger on the left and the right and even support on the left and the right — the anger and support often distort the scholarship that is required to make sense of the term.

What is the most fascinating question in your field?
I teach in the SFS and also teach literature in the English department. Within the field of secularism, I think the most fascinating question is “how shall we all live together?” The religious and the irreligious, those who subscribe to traditionalist forms of religion and those who subscribe to progressive forms of religion; How will we share a democratic space together?
In terms of literature, the other side of what I do, well, literature is the only way to get at the truth. sociology, political science — God bless ’em — they can’t do that. It’s only through fiction that we can conceivably get at some semblance of the truth. I see my job as a professor of literature as sanctifying that process. When a literature professor asks, “What is this novel, short story, aphorism, etc., trying to tell us?” she or he is probing fiction’s paradoxical promise. Which is to get at the truth, and often the truth is really ugly and really unpleasant.

What led you to focus on secularism?
I have to say, living across from the World Trade Center during 9/11 was a real wake-up call. It made me think about the relation of religion to violence, the relation of religion to the public square. I’ve been writing about secularism for 15 years and I’ve written four books on secularism and it all started after 2001. So there’s no coincidence that around 9/12 I started to look at these questions of global political religious movements, violence and the necessity of a secular state.

What do you think is the greatest challenge in teaching?
The sheer, utter confusion that surrounds the term “secularism.” Many students walk in thinking it’s atheism, and for many that’s a great thing. And for others that’s the worst imaginable thing. Secularism is not atheism. That’s one major problem that as a professor, you have to be very clear about definitions. Basically, everything I’ve written in the past 15 years has been about defining the term secularism and understanding its genealogy and its history. What’s good about it, what’s terrible about it…there’s a whole checkered past there. Don’t get me started! The trick, as always, when you teach these things, is to create a space in which students can be critical of the professor’s presuppositions and critical of their own presuppositions and critical of one another, and see that as leading to a greater learning experience. That’s the whole trick of pedagogy whenever you teach politicized subjects. And that’s hard, and it takes a long time to learn how to do that, and you fail a lot in the process, but I think the older you get as a classroom teacher, the more you learn how that can be done. That’s my goal: to create this kind of open space where people are very critical of one another and critical of themselves (and critical of me). If you succeed, at a certain point, nobody in class is thinking about ideology or politics anymore, students are just thinking about what’s the right answer or what are some of the right answers to this question.

What would be your ideal course to teach?
I teach two courses that are my signature courses, and I really adore them. One is called “American Secularism” and it lets me get at a lot of the issues that fascinate me. On the other side of the curriculum, I teach a course called “Jewish American Literature.” And I feel that any student Jewish or not is going to walk out of that class having confronted maybe half a dozen mega-life problems: philosophical, sexual, existential, spiritual. I like those two courses because they are platforms for students to engage in the process of self-criticism. In my 2005 book “The Secular Bible” — and this is not my definition now — I defined secularism as a process of self-criticism. I don’t agree with that definition for politics, but in literature that’s what secular literary analysis is, a self-critical project.

Do you think that Georgetown’s Jesuit identity has affected the way you teach?
Yeah, definitely. In the Program for Jewish Civilization, the program I direct, we put an absolute premium on the student experience and mentoring students. That’s not just office hours, by the way — we mentor. Take my colleague Fr. McManus, who is not a Jesuit but a diocesan priest — he brings to our department this ethos that there is nothing more important to us than the experience of our undergraduates. We have 40 certificates and minors, and we know everything about them — we know their parents, we know their brothers and sisters, we know their views on Nabokov, we know if they’re allergic to gluten. The whole idea of the PJC is to retain very close relations with students and mentor them across four years. Where do we get that from? I guess it’s a secularization of the Jesuit ethos. So, we’re doing what the Jesuits do. But since I’m not a cleric, I don’t dare do the spiritual stuff. As for Fr. McManus, I guess if the student wants to turn to spiritual matters, I’m sure he would oblige them. Although he would never, ever impose that. So, what we take from Georgetown’s Jesuit identity is what we see as a really cardinal virtue of this university: this emphasis on dealing with the complete human being, not just as someone sitting in your courses. Making them a priority even if that means putting your research and committee work to the side for an hour. I think that’s what makes the Program for Jewish Civilization very different. All of our professors have this ethos. We have a saying: “the student come first.” I guess that’s why we’ve doubled our enrollments in the past years. Students know they’re going to get something here, something which is very much a part of what makes Georgetown what it is.

What would you be doing if you weren’t in academia?
I would be probably an actor (dinner theater most likely) or an upright jazz bassist (an instrument for which I have no talent, by the way). Or, I’d be working on building more Whitehurst Freeways across Washington.

Interview by Sheena Karkal