Teaching is one of Bernard Cooperman’s passions, which is why he’s been a professor for more than half a century. He has spent 35 of those years teaching Jewish history at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Growing up in the 1950s, the longtime professor didn’t know what he wanted to do professionally.
“I didn’t even know that Jewish studies existed,” Cooperman said, adding that he knew he didn’t want to become a rabbi. “What I wanted to do was intellectual and academic work and I love to teach. It’s always been my favorite thing in the world.”
His love for academia came about when Cooperman was young. Raised by immigrant parents in Toronto, he attended a Jewish day school that “would not have fit into any model of Orthodox Jewish school today.”
“It was essentially a Zionist school,” Cooperman said. “We were taught about the Holocaust, we were taught about Israel, we were taught about Judaism and [underwent] a very intensive Hebrew language program.”
He spent six days a week there between the five weekdays and Sunday school, then went to a Toronto yeshiva for high school: “I got the kind of rabbinic training that I really made use of in my career.”
Cooperman attended the University of Toronto to study Biblical Hebrew; the school lacked a Jewish studies program.
“In the last year that I was there, they hired for the first time someone in Jewish studies,” Cooperman said. “It was the ’60s and it was that time when Jewish studies was beginning. [The University of Toronto] hired someone and this guy blew my mind.”
That professor was renowned author, scholar and editor Frank Talmage.
“Frank Talmage opened up a world for me because he showed me that you could take all that rabbinic stuff that I had learned as a personal kind of experience and apply the categories of academe to it; you could actually see how it worked and you could make sense out of it,” Cooperman said.
The mind-blown young student applied to graduate school, first attending Brandeis University, then transferring to Harvard University.
“I thought I would become a lawyer or something like that; I had no particular plans,” Cooperman said.
After earning his Ph.D., he taught at Harvard for 20 years until he learned of an open position at UMD: the Louis L. Kaplan chair of Jewish history. “I came down to Maryland and I’ve been here ever since.” He lives in Rockville with his wife and belongs to Beth Sholom Congregation.
Cooperman arrived at a small Judaic studies program in 1989. Multiple professors in the language department shared an office with only one secretary and enrollment for Judaic studies courses was low.
“When I came in, the first thing that I felt I had to do was raise money,” he recalled, noting the importance of finance for universities. “To get federal money or state money for Jewish studies, that’s difficult; Jews don’t represent a major part of the population.”
Cooperman raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for UMD’s library, which now owns one of the largest collections of books on Jewish studies at any state university: “We have one of the largest collections on the East Coast.”
He worked to raise enrollment for Jewish studies courses by revamping the curricula, widely expanding the program. Cooperman taught one course on Jewish history that began with 30 students, and by the end, the class had grown to fill two semesters.
He also helped implement an Arabic studies program, a lecture series and a film festival at UMD before the age of DVDs. Once, the lecture series drew so many students that the university had to open the largest ballroom on campus to accommodate everyone.
Cooperman served as the director of UMD’s Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies from 1991 to 1997. He is the author of a publication series titled “Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture,” two books and many articles. He has organized professional conferences and often consults with museums and libraries for exhibits in his field.
Having spoken to congregations and Jewish gatherings over many years, Cooperman said these speaking engagements are now fewer and farther between.
“I used to do a lot of public speaking, … [but] that kind of thing has pretty well dried up,” he said. “It’s part of that whole phenomenon of the expansion of knowledge.”
He partially credits modern technology for the reason he feels the humanities are currently in “real steep decline.”
“The whole idea of what knowledge is has changed radically,” Cooperman said. “It’s not just AI and it’s not just Google and Wikipedia, but … so much information is available so easily.
“I’ve got more information in this than my teachers could possibly have imagined 50 years ago,” he said, holding up his smartphone. “So the question is, what is it they’re teaching you? This is a real problem. You might say, ‘teach them the facts,’ but facts are irrelevant now because they’re so accessible, so you can’t teach facts, and students know that.”
This dilemma is something Cooperman takes into account as a professor.
“I love to teach, but the biggest challenge to me [now] is figuring out how to make the classroom into a place where students are being taught how to pose questions, how to question their own ideas and how to debate those ideas,” he said. “Students find that excruciatingly difficult and it’s very hard to teach.”
And while Cooperman may not have all the answers, he does have five decades of teaching and a lifetime of scholarship from which to draw.
Hi I am Christine Mowat