Selling the Humanities - Michal Bar-Asher Siegal

In this episode of ReligionWise, we talk with Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Professor of Rabbinic Judaism in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. Though her research considers the intersections of Rabbinic thought and the development of the Talmud with early Christianity, she is also keenly interested in thinking about the role of the humanities in the context of the modern University. Through her collaborative work in a variety of institutional and governmental contexts, she has developed a novel perspective on the value of the humanities.

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:03

Welcome to ReligionWise the podcast where we feature educators, researchers and other professionals discussing topics on religion and their relevance to the public conversation. My name is Chip Gruen. I'm the director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College, and I will be the host for this podcast. In this season two of ReligionWise, we will continue to consider a broad variety of religious and cultural beliefs and practices, and try to understand their place in the contemporary conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to explore the 12 episodes from season one that are available in your favorite podcast app. Also, we would love to hear from you with your questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes. To reach us, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you will find our contact information and also have the opportunity to support this podcast and the work of the Institute. Today's guest is Michal Bar-Asher Siegel, who is professor of Rabbinic Judaism at the Goldstein Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. Her book, "Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud" is groundbreaking in a lot of different ways, in particular, on intersections of early Christianity and the development of Talmud. That being said, that groundbreaking work is not the reason that we've invited her on to ReligionWise today. I wanted to sit down and talk to her today because of her interest in the broader study of humanities in the ancient world, in the study of religion in higher education today. She has been both elected to and appointed to a number of different organizations in Israel, that lead the charge for the study of the humanities, the study of religion, in the universities of that country. So for example, she served on the National Council for the Advancement of Women in Science with the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology. She served on the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and on the Committee of the National Israeli Center for Libraries to name just a few. So she is not just interested in in her own field or her own discipline, but is also more broadly interested in the project of higher education, the project of the university, cultivating students in a broad variety of fields, working to understand the human condition and human experience in all number of ways. She's really developed an expertise in considering the ways that interdisciplinary work happens, the collision or cooperation of disciplines towards common goals. It's really interesting to hear her talk about strategies for how one does that and is a roadmap, I think, for future cooperation among disciplines, particularly in systems where those disciplines feel isolated from one another sequestered from one another. One note of context for this conversation, we recorded it in early March of 2023, at which time the political turmoil in Israel over the new legislation around the judicial system in the Supreme Court was ongoing. I think you'll hear a little bit of the trepidation a little bit of the concern, from Dr. Bar-Asher Siegal in the conversation. In fact, as the time of the recording of this introduction, I think it's still very unclear where all of that goes. Suffice it to say that progressive individuals, particularly those embedded within educational systems in Israel are very concerned, as we've seen with some of the class cancellations and so forth at some of the universities that have resulted as a form of protest. So by the time you hear this, maybe there has been more news on that, but it is sort of lurking in the background of her context as an Israeli scholar at Ben-Gurion University. In the United States, there is a reckoning that is happening around interdisciplinary study around broad liberal education. Because of the pandemic because of demographic changes, because of the high cost of higher education, university and college administrators and faculties as well as potential students and parents of those students are really thinking about the values of higher education. One of the expected and totally understandable reactions to that conversation is to emphasize skills necessary for the workplace, thinking about ways in which we can prepare students to be the workers that industry and the professions need. That being said, I think it is necessary for us to step back and to think about whether it is Is the skills that are necessary for employment that people are really after in higher education. Or if there's something else if there's something less tangible, about dealing with difficult problems, thinking about the human experience, thinking about the past, the present and the future, from a number of different disciplinary perspectives that allows people to succeed to be useful in the current environment. And so I think that these are the kinds of things that people like Dr. Bar-Asher Siegal, are really interested in thinking about and thinking about ways in the current institutions and connecting with people in other disciplines, and being creative about not only curricular structures, but research projects and collaborations that can help us sort of see how a holistic liberal education can be not only beneficial to individual students, but also to our world. So it's my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Bar-Asher Seagal to ReligionWise. Thanks so much for appearing today on ReligionWise.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 6:10

Oh, I'm so happy that you invited me. Thank you.

Chip Gruen: 6:13

So I want to start, since the goal of the podcast is to really think about the discourse of religion within the public square and how we think about religion when we're thinking about religion. I want to start with your position in the field itself. So your your PhD is in Judaic Studies, and you study Talmud, but you also you hold position in religious studies, and particularly given your field and your sub field and your placement as an academic in Israel. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the way that Talmudic studies is understood diversely as a part of religious studies as a part of the humanities, as opposed to theological study.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 7:01

It's a good question, and I'm not sure that I have a good answer. The reason that there is a theological schools versus religious studies is a historical reason. In fact, Ivy Leagues in the United States started as theological schools, right. So when they came in Harvard, started as a divinity school basically a place to create and educate religious officials and teach them all kinds of stuff, then and university basically developed from that. So they are the core and this is why they're part of the university system, even though they are not part of what we call the critical study of religion or a text as developed later on. So that's an historical reason for that. The Department of Religious Studies, for example, here at Yale developed later when that gap between a religious agenda that works together with the study of text became something that scholars felt needed to be distinguished. A critical study of the text should be distinguished from a religious agenda or religious belief that gets in the way. And sometimes even practical training of ministers which some people thought should not take place in an academic institution. So this is when, in the 70s, the departments of religious thought developed as an individual entity with a very clear statement that this is meant to be a critical study of the text without the religious background to it. But that's kind of a new development in the study of religion. I think this is actually a place of a little bit of a tension sometimes, because some of our best scholars, critical scholars are actually situated in Divinity schools. And of course, we can have religious thinkers that are situated in religious studies department so that sometimes the the lines are not as clear as we want them to be. So this is a little bit complicated. But in terms of the methodology that's being taught and the list of courses, a lot of the Divinity schools actually cannot even bestow or prepare people for a PhD. They do something a little different a THD or an MAR so it's really still even in the terms of what's a curriculum or what's the way you're supposed to get your degree that's different between religious studies and divinity schools. But at the end of the day, I think also, the statement of religious studies being we are part of a scientific quest to study those texts critically, historically, without supposably any barrier or presuppose assumption that supposed to lead it in a certain way when we read the text. That's the agenda of a religious studies department versus Divinity school. It will be a little bit different. And I am a product of a religious studies education rather than a divinity school, especially coming from Israel, where we don't have divinity school, we have a different problem, which is, or a different issue, which is again, Jewish belief, which doesn't necessarily creates divinity schools, but it does create ordination schools for rabbis. My own connection to that is the fact that I'm a woman, in Orthodox Judaism, woman cannot be ordained or cannot be part, it's a little bit similar to some denomination in Christianity as well. Therefore, that option was never available to women. So in fact, academia was a gateway for women to actually approach the knowledge to begin with. So that's a little bit different in Israel.

Chip Gruen: 10:46

Yeah. So I want to think about that, that distinction between I mean, of course, you got your PhD at Yale, right? So you're a part of that academic context. But yet you went and you took this position at Ben-Gurion in Israel. And the, you know, the role of Talmudic studies, even in Israel seems a little bit different than the role of Talmudic studies within, you know, an academic context in the United States. And so as much as this academic pathway has been a gateway for you to have a different kind of authority than a religious authority, right? Still in Israel, it seems from the way that you're received from the way that people deal with you and your persona, that that that line, that distinction, maybe in public is not so clear as it is in your head, or as it is in, you know, the academic understandings of these things.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 11:40

Yeah, it's a good point. Because the problem is, these are texts that I'm studying, and other people are studying that some people actually are attached to them. They believe in many cases, that this is the Word of God, or this has authoritative nature to them. I, when I'm as a scholar, or critical scholar, approach these texts, I do not consider them as such, I see them as a product of humans in history, when different context historical context and their flaws and their humor and their beauty, but a very human beauty and complexity, which doesn't always align with a person who looks at it in reverence, or appreciates it as a binding text that sometimes leads to conflicts. And I feel that this is, by the way, also relevant to Christian studies. And that tension between Divinity School and Religious Studies appears as well. But I'll talk about my own field. So religious studies deals with the texts of the rabbis but the religious world or milieu, or some part of it, at least the Orthodox part of the Jewish milieu, really believe that those rabbis carry the Word of God. And what they say is binding. And my state Israel state, I don't know if you're familiar with the crisis we're at at the moment in Israel is very much connected to that, because some fraction of the government believes that these texts that was composed by people 1500 years ago are binding and the State of Israel should abide by them. The State of Israel does abide by them in certain areas, such as marriage and divorce and others. This is this is a conflict because these texts were composed 1500 years ago, and what do you do with a gap and with liberalism that appeared and feminism that appeared on the stage. And so this is this is a tension that I'm experienced very, very sharply and sadly, in Israel as we speak, because what do we do when people actually see this as a binding text? So that's something that's very apparent. And so when I teach and I my own field of study is the connection between Jews and Christians and these rabbinic texts. And sometimes, I would reach the conclusion that the rabbis knew about Christian traditions were conversing with with it, sometimes they agreed with some of the ideas that appear in Christian texts and vice versa, Christian texts that talk about Jewish context. And that can sometimes be very threatening to people who want to think about these texts as being developed on their own or in some kind of a vacuum and some kind of divine inspiration, and how can I say that they were influenced or in conversation with Christian tradition. So that's something something's very, very threatening. I should say that the fact that I'm a woman and the fact that I am secular is helpful, because sometimes they can just disregard what I'm saying. I find that the internet and the you know, the recent 10 years where making my lectures available to wider audience brings my scholarship to audiences that never, you know, in the past wouldn't have had access to it. And among them, Orthodox Jews or very religious Jews, and sometimes I get emails from them, and sometimes they approached me. And it's an interesting conversation to have about the medium, how I talk about this material, what do I learn from that. So that's an interesting so but the tension between a religious world and a critical appraisal of these texts is a real tension for some people.

Chip Gruen: 15:13

So I want to push a little bit more on that distinction between, on the one hand, you being the the transmitter of authority, and in claims and knowledge about these texts, as a woman, and your presentation of self and your identity, and all of that, as distinct from the claims themselves. So I want to think like a little thought experiment, right? If we remove one or the other of those and leave the, you know, where, where does the conflict lie? So on the on the one hand, if you had very kind of Orthodox understandings of these texts, and describe them that way, with your current identity and current presentation of self, versus if you have your current claims, and the current, you know, your books and your scholarship, but yet you are a, you know, 50 year old man, right? Like, where do you see that this is just sort of a amalgamation of everything? Or do you think one or the other of those provides more tension in your life or provides more conflict for the reception of some of your work with those religious communities?

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 16:24

So first, I have a sordid past I actually used to be I was raised Orthodox, I come from that milieu, I was taught that the texts that I study today, were not fit for women to study, so I didn't have access to them, until I was 19. So I know that way of thinking, and I was raised up this way. And I was raised in the certain ideas and agendas about the women role in the study of those texts. And where do they fit within the text talk very openly about the fact that the community needs to do something. And then the community refers to male adult, you know, Jewish, we go to synagogue, and there's a prayer that talks about the the well being of the community and prayers for it, and it says, this prayer prayer that you know, the community is going to be well, and everything, everyone is going to be healthy and everything they their wives and their children's. So the text is infused with the fact that the community, the imagined community of the Orthodox Jew is a male, Jewish man. So an Orthodox man, so this is this is the community I came from. So I know that way of thinking, sometimes people who know that background, and who knows about that would approach me and say, and by the way, I speak to different audiences. And I do we in Israel, we have a religious also religious university in Israel called Bar-Ilan that actually teaches that in a religious milieu, and when I teach them that question, that kind of sort of question appears there more often, they will say to me, how can you say, so for example, if I read a text and say, Okay, so the name of the stage, that's mentioned there, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is actually historical, it could be made up it could be a literary creation. So you would see people say, But wait, the name is meant.. how can you you know, not believe what the text is saying, as historical or? So I have to stop and say, you know, this, this is the way and delineate this is the way critical thinking goes, you, you doubt, you you raise question. And, and I try to explain that this is the it doesn't always appease them and doesn't always, you know, reaches good conclusion. I have to say, though, that even in the field of religious studies we have gone through phases, because we realize, at some point that even critical thinkers that are supposedly above agendas of personal agendas, have agendas, obviously, when I'm a woman reading a text and a Jewish at that I have certain biases towards the text, and we need to acknowledge them. I'm a straight woman reading, you know, Jewish texts reading a certain text and I will have biases towards it. So no one is above, you know, biases toward the text. So we all have our religious beliefs or religious agenda in some way or other just based on the fact that we were raised a certain way and brought to think a certain way. And in recent years, we have gone you know, through a fate a few phases of at least doubting our assumption, rethinking them in conversation with others who have different points of view diversity is extremely important when looking at the text. I don't think that's a coincidence that I had to write my PhD here at Yale and not in Israel and go out of my comfort zone. I'll talk a little bit about that too. In Israel, we have faculties or departments for Jewish thought or Jewish you know, a faculty for Jewish studies that Hebrew U. This is where I got my education. So we take all the Jewish subjects and put them aside and study them on their own. When I came to the United States I studied first at Harvard, I took some classes in Syriac, there were the Jewish Studies program is part of NELC, Near Eastern Studies. And then I wrote my dissertation at Yale, where Judaic Studies is part of religious studies. So this is a whole different way of looking at rabbinic texts as part of their Near Eastern world, or as part of other religions, I would sit in classes with, you know, Buddhist studies and Islamic Studies and Christian studies, obviously. And so this is a whole different way of looking at the text as opposed to the one we get in Israel. So that definitely blew my mind and looking at the biases I had, and the way of looking at the text. So we have learned that we cannot, you know, say we are, you know, above these things that those religious people, no, we're not. But at least I think there is an attempt in the critical study of text from the 19th century, when you read scholars such as [older photo], or you read others, and there is an attempt to try and at least be aware of that and try to correct this or talk about that more openly and make our scholarship better.

Chip Gruen: 21:13

So something that you've alluded to, and I want to sort of broaden our conversation out a little bit is the idea that, you know, religion is a part of or religious studies, I should say, is a part of the humanities. And I think there are a couple of ways to approach that one way is to say, well, yes, of course, what else would it be a part of? And the other way is, actually, there's a pretty bold claim there, right? That we think about humanities disciplines, study of languages and literature's and you know, art history, and that they're all the, you know, thinking about cultural production, right? We're thinking about things that humans do. And so if you sort of slow down and think a little bit about saying, yes, religious studies is a part of the humanities, it is sort of backing up and saying, so therefore, what religion is, is it something that humans do, right, rather than something that is handed down something that is divine, right, something that should be accepted on on other premises, rather than as a product of human culture. And so on the one hand, I want to think about, then that broader field of humanities, right and the imperiled nature of humanities at a lot of institutions. And I wonder if that is similar, right, similar in Israel, as well. But then also think about, Does the study of religion undercut itself? Right, when it claims to be yet another part of the study of human culture? Right, rather than as you said, traditionally, the sort of impetus for that study is something that is a little more, and I nobody can see my, my scare quaotes here, but it's a little more grand, right, that you one studies religion, because it's the most important thing, right? Because it is a matter of more serious than life and death, right? You've said, Well, it's a product of human culture, you know, is there some way in which sort of the, the study of religion becomes less less immediate, less urgent, right? And how do we think about that, in the context of humanities? I know, there's a lot going on there. But if you could just echo that, that'd be great.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 23:20

You know, it's hard to ask people who study religion is your, you know, is your field different from all other fields and more important than all its fields? Because obviously, yes, because I chose that from all other fields. And I love what I do. That's my bias for today speaking of biases, but I do believe that the study of religion is a little bit different from the study of other humanities, professions. And I think I can make the claim for almost every of that, but I'll say up the I'll talk about religion a little bit. There's something about the study of religious thought, or that involves a lot of other disciplines, right? To study religion, you have to do first history, right? The history of the religion, but you also have to do philosophy, right? Because you have to connect the ideas that found in the religion to other philosophical ideas or the way these ideas influence philosophy in general or in letter. So it's history and philosophy. It's also archeology obviously, because it has to do with material objects as well. It has to do with social sciences very, very strongly, right? It has to do with wars all of the wars almost right. And it has to do with you know, genocide and it has to do with the industrial revolution so religion is everywhere. It's so this is social science at its best or political science. It has to do with languages of course, because you have to deal with languages and languages are the core of religious studies and all religious studies majors know that because not just because of access to the text, but because of language playing a very important part in the history and the philosophy and the social sciences, because how do you transmit religious ideas in which words, words matter in this way more than almost in any other field. So words, so the linguistic quest of what words mean and how they mean and how they're used and how they're interpreted. So interpretation of the study of interpretation, this is a huge one. So look at how many fields we covered, I think an art obviously, because art is all over the place. So I think religious studies in a sense, combines almost all of the fields of humanities in one field, because religion has always been there. As far as we know, it's always been there as part of humanity, always. So we talk about technology technology, you know, was, so this is all part of one big field. And I would even suggest that even exact sciences, you know, at least in the beginning in the history have had direct influence with with religion and a direct connection to religion. So how did that we all know obviously about, you know, the medieval controversy with a church or a science, but that that was a big deal of a very big deal. And so, all of that to say that there's something about religious studies, in order to study it, you have to be familiar with many fields of study, that's one, you know, trying to be interested in it, you need to be interested in many fields of study. Third, its relevance is to many fields of study. So when others do something that touches upon religion, they are in need of religious studies, insight or input or or, you know, scholarship. So this is why I think this is what makes religious studies a little bit different, I think from the other fields. I don't think it undercuts it's importance . I think it's the other way around, I think it really puts religious studies in a very important role. However, when you say religious studies, what do you mean? So and this is this is a little bit tricky. And that kind of has to do with a conversation you and I had before about which religious studies. So when I talked about history, and I talked about languages, and I talked about material evidence, a lot of it has to do with the past. And where we're talking a lot about scholarship today with modern time, the question is, how is that relevant? Or why is it important? Or why should we study it? Fine. Okay, so there is a history there, Why does it matter? What, why should we study it? And sometimes the case is made for religious studies that we need to know our past in order to understand our future better, which is a good claim. And I can stand by it and explain why it's true. But the question is, is that the real reason or that's the real way to present why religious studies is important as a field to all other fields? And that's a question to ask in itself. So what do you mean, when you say religious studies, you only mean, its development? You only mean its interaction with other fields in the past? Or do you mean, its relevance for today? Or what do we do with it as ideas and thought that integrate or come in contact with other fields now?

Chip Gruen: 28:12

Yeah, so and I think the conversation you're alluding to is is, you know, more, again, more generally, right? Whichever one of those tracks we take, is about the relevance not only of religious studies, but the relevance of the study of humanities. And you you sort of allude to something that is a concern to me. I mean, it's a concern to both of us, I think, I mean, if you study a world of 1500 years ago, and I study a world, you know, primarily of maybe 17 or 1800 years ago, that there's a push towards presentism. Right, that if the study of religion is useful at all, it might be useful in explaining or thinking about the contemporary world, right? We see that argument. You know, I think that you see that argument, sort of more generally, right? In the humanities, where, where you have a, a denigration of, of things from the past. I mean, I think about what I do for a living and I think about colloquialisms in our language. You know, if you want to say something is irrelevant, you can say, well, it's just academic. Or you can say it's ancient history, right, both of which mean, you know, in one shape or form irrelevant. So, I mean, how, how much do you think that that presentism is a part of the issue with humanities? And maybe I'm making assumptions? I mean, do you feel that pressure for a need to legitimize the study of humanities in Israel the way that I think a lot of us feel it here on this side of the ocean?

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 29:39

I think Israel is safer than what I see here in the United States. So this sabbatical year has been like a moment of awakening when I realized that a lot of department are cutting very strongly back on fields of study of the past and focus much more on the 19th and 20th century and that was new to me, and a little bit sad, I think In Israel, we are very strong still in the study of the past. But I have to say the study of the Jewish past, less so about other religion, and I think it has to do with nationalism and has to do with cultural studies. So that's a little bit different. But still, there is some reverence to that the study of the past. Now, I think that's something that I find extremely hard to understand first, because it's fun. And this is what I alluded to, it's true that you should study the past, because it's useful because it's helpful because you can't understand the future without understanding the past. Because people are people, and they tend to repeat patterns. And you can detect, I don't know, traces of fascism, and how they start and be prepared, if you are familiar with past examples. And you can learn from other people's mistakes. And you can also understand what's happening and give it greater context, once you have that, the all that is true. But that's not why I study the past, I study the past because it's fun and interesting. And it's, it's a portal into us as human beings. It's kind of like looking at chimpanzees or bonobo monkeys to see how we evolved as human beings. It's interesting to see what we used to be in how we...And we have text that actually describe to us what our forefathers thought, and how they looked at things. And it's funny, because it's, it's familiar, but it's not. And it's connected to our world. And it's different. And, and it's not different at all, and it's complex. And so, and I think we keep saying that the humanities are in trouble and the university are trying to deal with that. But the truth is podcasts that talk about religion and talk about history, I just saw, like a statistics in Israel, that out of the, you know, the top 20 podcasts, I think, I think something like seventeen are about history. So there's something people want to hear that but because it's fun, and it's interesting, and it's about the past, not just about the future. So I don't understand that tendency to say that it's not, let's start with that. And second, I think also, there's something and it's not not related to Israel, and the study of the past in Israel, people feel emotionally connected to certain issues. It's like people doing their, you know, family tree, or you want to learn about your past and your history that has a lot of emotional reasons, and a lot of historical reasons. And this is where we as academia come into place. And we can tell people about the past or countries or minorities that look for their, you know, paths. This is also part of our role in history to to supply people with that knowledge. And I don't understand why would anyone reach the conclusion that it's not needed? Everything that I see with my students, and people from outside of academia tell me the opposite. I think what university confused is the ability to make money and to earn a living by studying this as a profession. That's a different question. Do you need to study this in order to be a good lawyer? I think you do. But obviously, you can be even without that, or, you know, when you have a degree in history, what can you make with that? Especially in in university, when it's not a liberal arts? When you have to choose a profession? Why would you choose humanities when it's very, very hard then to make a living? That's a different separate issue, but it shouldn't be connected to the question, should we study history? Should we study religion? Should we study religious studies or the history of, of religion? These are two different things. And I think we kind of got mixed up at some point, and lost track of that. So yes, we should deal with the fact that humanity is no longer a valid, you know, substantial way to educate and give degrees that will allow people to make a living long term for a lot of people. That's true. That's something that has changed when we became a certain society that makes money or produces products in a certain way. That's okay. But it's not it's not the same as saying no one cares about history, decline in the interest of religion No, not at all. Everything we see that people, you know, project to us in their free time, suggest look at just Netflix and how many series are about you know, historical drama or, or people being dressed in, you know, high hats and people want to learn about the past. It's part of who we are as a society. And I think universities you know, misunderstood that.

Chip Gruen: 34:58

Yeah. And you say part of who we are as a society. I totally agree. I wouldn't I guess also, argue you part of who we are as humans, right, that there's something about, you know, about being human that asks a lot of those questions as well. So I, you know, you find a dozen humanities professors, and you'll find two dozen arguments on why the humanities are important, right, that we all have our our take on this. But you have kind of a special role here that I want to talk about as well, within the State of Israel, that you have some official placement in, in consulting with, giving advice to, helping the State understand the importance of these issues. Can you talk a little bit about that, and then I want to follow up by thinking about the strategies that you might employ in such a situation.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 35:57

So first of all, we have to talk about Israel, Israel is a very small country where we have 9, 9 million people it's a small country, which makes it easier to get to policymakers. In two phone calls, you can get to whoever makes the decision and whoever gives them money. And from my experience, if you're well placed, you can talk to whoever needs to be talked, and that's an advantage. The hierarchy is is much less structured in Israel also. So that makes it easier to change things. For better or for worse, as we see, sometimes we just change things all of a sudden in Israel. So this is this is for better or worse. But there's there's something good and also in academia. So I'm actually part I was part and I'll tell you a little bit about my activities in Israel, I am first in my own university, but also on a national level, I'm part of a few committees that discuss those bigger issues and try to influence policymakers on a few topics. So first I was an elected member of the Young Academy of Sciences, which is on an under the Academy of Sciences in Israel, which is where the all the fancy professors are elected, the prize winners and the very established scholars, and they created a Young Academy, where every so every year, there's 30, of what we call the the brightest minds in Israel, that are from all universities in Israel, and from all fields of diverse selection, and you're elected for four years. And the idea is basically to use your prominence and scholarship to do good in Israel to use to do this. So I was part of that I was elected as that as the representative again of, of my field. And in my university, that also served as the as part of the governing board of that thing for two years. And basically, we worked on many fields, among them, you know, making a knowledge accessible, especially when COVID hit in the middle. And we had to, we had this series, for example of talks about COVID, making this information accessible in the beginning, when people didn't know, we helped young, you know, scholars who had extreme difficulties during COVID. But we also talk about first generation of education in Israel and Arabs and ultra-Orthodox people, we talk about the promotion of women in sciences, we talk about humanities, and how to promote this in Israel. So we had a few those things. What's important about the Young Academy more than what it does, I think, is that it's create a network of scholars, from other universities from other fields, I have best friends now from the physics departments, and from computer sciences and from chemistry, from the arts with and from other university, which otherwise I wouldn't have a chance to meet. We're very segregated in our own, you know, departments. And sometimes you don't know the people from the other side of your campus. So there's something about that collecting, you know, good people who want to do good in Israel from different universities in different fields. And that's, well after that I'm done with my four years, I'm no longer considered Young Academy, I call myself an"old academy" now. So now we're now we're continuing this collaboration and doing other things as well. That's number one. And they feel that's extremely important, the technique and the strategy to do that you have to have good partners from other fields. And I think humanities have to join forces. And I've seen this many times. If I want to talk about the promotion of humanities, it's always better to do that when on my side as a physicist and a biologist who say the same thing as me, it's not just us talking about our own field, but others who support us as well. And I think that's extremely important to show that this is across the board and not just us talking about ourselves. So the strategy in that is extremely important. And again, using our excellence in science to promote ideas outside of our field as well. That's I think is extremely important with policymakers. When you have a you know, very important prize winner in chemistry coming and saying, we need this. It's heard differently. So I think that strategy is extremely important. Second, I'm also part of the MOLMOP, which is a committee that advises the government on funding. I am in a committee as part of that I'm in a committee for examining the Excellence in Israel and the academic excellence, which has been deteriorating in recent years. And we're trying to figure out why, and how to deal with that. So I am the representative of humanities in Israel, and the other members are from different fields. And I represent humanities in that committee. And it's extremely important and interesting, we learn about what's the state of academia in Israel in different fields, what's been happening, how do we compare to other countries. So that's really interesting. And we're supposed to be a body that, you know, advises the government on how to fund and how to change funding. So I think that's extremely important as well. Also, I am part of a committee that this is not specifically about the humanities, but Vatat is the body that actually funds not just advises, but actually funds University in Israel. It's called the Budgeting Committee of Israel. And they have a subcommittee that deals with women's issues, and they allocate money for that. And I'm part of that, which I think wasn't I'm very proud of that experience, it took two years to do, do we study from other countries in the world, about the way to encourage University to promote women. And what we did is we came up with a system of basically, grading universities, according to their efforts in that field of promoting women in science and humanities, and in Israel, or in academia in general. So,a university can apply to that program, they set goals. So for example, they have certain hiring or certain program for women for supporting young women, or how many women sit in each committee. So there's like, a list of many, many, many parameters. And they can choose which one they want to, they say, set goals, and I want to set goal in that field. And over the course of five years, we grade the university accordingly, and they get funding. So we actually give percentage, so the policymakers decided to dedicate money for that they turn to us and we created that committee to judge and evaluate how to do that. And then lastly, the university collaborate with us by applying into that program, and then working towards an a five year program to promote women in academia, and I have to say, kind of, it's kind of moving, it takes a lot of my time, I spent a lot of time writing the program, and then judging the university takes hours and hours or hours of that. But it's kind of moving, because even when the university decides to set a goal, a target, it's already changes. You know, it looks around to oh, we only have very few women. And that also, we maybe it just checking of it was important. And I am the representative of humanities and the promotion of women in humanities in that, and that actually is different from the promotion of women in exact sciences. So that was an extra interesting thing to see why the difference in the promotion of women in academia in humanities versus sciences, so that another element. And lastly, and this is what this is something I want to talk about is the promotion of interdisciplinary study. So I am a strong believer in the need for humanities to collaborate with other fields to advance our toolbox of methodological ways to study humanities, huge supporter of that. I myself have a few projects that I collaborate with scholars from exact sciences, from biology, from psychology from computer sciences, and I'm a huge believer in what it can do to our field. It really can broaden our horizon give allow us to ask new questions and answer them in new ways and be very, very exciting. The problem with that is there's very little if at all funding for interdisciplinary study in Israel, it just doesn't exist, you have to apply to your discipline. And in your discipline, it's very hard to convince someone that my collaboration with a bat scholars is helped for for Talmud studies. So now try to convince that my rabbinic scholar or the bat scholar that the Talmud is important for them. So how does one go about this? So what we did is we actually, I'll tell you about this because in a week, I'm going to Israel to do this. We applied for a fund. So we went to policymakers, we reached the highest of them, the head of the Academy of Sciences, and the head of the Budgeting Committee and the Ministry of Science and the head of the Israel Science Foundation that gives money to all the scientists, we talked to everyone. Everyone agreed that this is something that needs to be done. For my data from the committee that I told you about about excellence. We saw that Israel is very low on inter...interdisciplinary collaboration, we need to do this. There's just no money and there's no way to fund it because the system doesn't know how to deal with complex you know, interdisciplinary study. And then with that in mind, we went and got a grant from the Rothschild Foundation for 2.2 million shekels for a three year experiment called the Forum for the Promotion of Interdisciplinary Study in Israel. And the idea is this, we do two runs of this, and I'm going in Israel in a week to do the second round, we invite 36 scholars, the best scholars in Israel are from different fields, for three days, in the Negev, in the and get the, and in the desert, we have a lot of fun, there's carbs involved, and bird, seeing and touring and, and there's a lot of the marshmallows and a fun stuff, but also speed dating academically between scholars. And the idea is basically at the end of the three days, is to try to create combination between scholars wouldn't otherwise have thought to work together. And at the end of that, three days, they can apply for a grant of 400,000 shekels, and my judges are heads of university, Nobel Prize winners, and the head of the Israeili Budgeting Committee. And so I have very high profile scholars who judge the different project and then decide who to allocate the money to. So not only we promote studies that are of interdisciplinary nature, we also try to say the mere meeting of minds of different scholars from different will lead in the future for the creation of scholarship, it's, that's interdisciplinary. And by the end of the three years, that is basically to go to people who policymakers in Israel and say, Okay, now let's change the system, see, this works. And it's easily done, give money to this. So just to conclude, I think that will be extremely helpful for humanities to try to broaden that I think there's ways to advance humanities also by doing interdis...interdisciplinary work. But in order to do that, I need to change how the system is being funded. So we need to work with policymakers, and we need to work from with outside budgeting grants. And we need to start thinking strategy and how to do that in order to help save the field and basically promote it much better than we've been doing so far.

Chip Gruen: 47:12

So if I am seeing no a through line, in a lot of the things you're talking about, it's it's good partnerships, right, good partnerships across disciplines, good partnerships, you know, in, in government, or in the academies as you've been talking about good partners at other universities, right, good partners, you know, even internationally and it, and I can't help but think about the way I mean, sort of the the stereotypical scholar in the humanities operates, right, which is alone, you know, that this is really, to some extent, swimming against the grain of a lot of habits that are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. I mean, do you run into when you talk to people and you say, Okay, what we need to do is we need to develop all these partnerships. And look, I spent all this time doing this, but there's great rewards. I mean, do you run into resistance around this message of developing partnership?

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 48:09

I'm happy you stopped at alone and you didn't mention the smoke filled room with, with the smell of old books and very dark corners? Yes, definitely. First of all, I love working on my own, and I love the quiet of my room. And I don't think it has to be one or the other, that's for sure. I think there's something a little bit lonely in that but there's good in this loneliness, you know, the sticking in the stacks in the library. And, and there's something you know, magical about this, I find you alone with the text. And so I don't think that you know, kind of has to be either that or the other. But I am a huge, huge supporter of collaboration and meeting with the minds and I have to say that my own from my own experience, I would not have been the scholar that I am today without meeting scholars from different disciplines from my discipline, talking about my research, exchanging idea. This is what we do in conferences, right. This is what we do in workshops, we have to step out of our comfort zone and it's hard for some people who are shy, but this is if you're an academic, you have to otherwise you can't be a good scholar and I'm definitely I just think we should raise it to the next level. And the next level is two things. First of all, it's friendship. My own life has changed dramatically from the fan friends they made on the quest when you have you know, some agenda that you want to promote together you become good friends, sometimes. It's funny, and it's, you know, my WhatsApp group with, you know, some physicists and, and biologists I have a group with the physicist, biologist, a computer science and a psychologist and we this is a group that sustained me in the hardest time of my life with the jokes and humor and sadness and so friendship is an important cause of that. So we should do that just for the friends you make on the way. That's number one. But also, I really, really think that my scholarship has become so much better just by talking about academic issues and academic topic and academic agendas and promoting them and thinking together how to do that my scholarship becomes better just period. And I do think we have to do that much more often in different ways. I do think we have to be creative in the way we do it. Right? Not just you know, go to conferences, 20 minutes, talk, 10 minutes question and answers. And then again, we can do other things. And I wasn't joking, I was a little bit joking talking about marshmallows and a bonfire and even singing together. But I do think that stepping out of our comfort zone and doing things a little bit differently, talking and all kinds of different ways. And I think that's been doing I've been starting to be more prevalent in our circles, trying to create connection in different ways than just regular conferences. And I think that's important. And carbs are important in that. When you're happy and well fed, you are more likely to be nice to each other and think of ideas together. So I am a great great believer in carbs, friendship, and promoting and collaborating with others.

Chip Gruen: 51:21

Michal Bar-Asher Siegel I'm sorry that I had no marshmallows or carbs to share with you.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 51:26

You should be sorry!

Chip Gruen: 51:28

Right on this remote session, if we can figure out if anybody knows a way that I can transport sweets across online, let me know. But nevertheless, thank you very much for appearing today on ReligionWise. It's been great and I am going to go out and work to make friends and find good partners.

Michal Bar-Asher Siegal: 51:47

There we go. Thank you so much for having me.

Chip Gruen: 51:53

This has been ReligionWise a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement. Please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.