Forward: A Blast from the Jewish Studies Past - Dropsie College Remembered by Jenna Weissman Joselit

Jenna Weissman Joselit writes in the Forward, "Succeeding Yourself Out of Business" about The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning which functioned from 1907 until 1986.

When we were deciding on a career, we read a lot about Dropsie. And we read a lot of books and articles by scholars who had studied or taught there. Indeed, Bernard Revel the first President of Yeshiva College wrote his doctoral thesis on Karaite Judaism at Dropsie in 1911.

In its time the school served an important purpose in the cultivation of Jewish scholarship in America and helped pave the way for Jewish Studies to enter the mainstream of academic life. Joselit writes,

...A chance encounter with a book from that library, now a part of the holdings of Penn’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, fed my curiosity about Dropsie’s once glorious past. Coming of age in a different era, I had remained completely in the dark about the school’s existence until I happened upon a volume that still bore the shadowy markings of its former steward. I don’t recall the title, but the sobering realization that a proud institution named Dropsie College had once existed but was no more stayed with me through the years....more