JoelNothman.com

It’s getting to a few weeks into my studies and I haven’t written anything about some of the exciting things I’m learning. Okay, so exchange students are typically not meant to actually go to their classes, but I’ve seemed to go to most so far…

The general load at McGill is four to five subjects. Most locals do 5, but exchange students are better off getting away with less, as they can each have a high workload and exchange students would rather none. Apart from that, I had a few constraints in choosing things to study: when on exchange, you have to be enrolled both in your host and in your home institution with equivalent subjects. While the school term here started on September 4, it had been going for over a month in Sydney and the last date to change my subjects there was the end of August. The departments in Sydney also had to give me approval for these equivalents and I wasn’t allowed to enlist in any non-Arts subjects. I also wanted to keep my Fridays free on my timetable so that I could take trips out of Montreal or otherwise enjoy myself on Thursday nights… So after looking at the timetables for subjects that wouldn’t put me in class on Fridays, I enrolled in Sydney for a linguistics unit, one Classical Hebrew and two other Jewish Studies. It seemed to be the easiest way to do it.

And once that was done, it was fixed. What exactly I would take at McGill wasn’t though. In particular, one of the reasons I came to McGill was on recommendation by my Hebrew teacher back home of a Professor B. Barry Levy, but it wasn’t clear that he was teaching any subjects. When I contacted him, he told me he would like to have been on sabbatical after finishing his term as Dean of Religious Studies. But the faculty failed to assign anyone else, so he was back in his chair (article-strewn office nearly unpacked again), and so maybe he’d find time for a class.

What Dean Levy usually teaches is a History of Jewish Bible Interpretation which he admits to being able to teach in his sleep. But he wanted to try something different this semester: a look at the influence of Near Eastern hermeneutics on bible interpretation. He intended to explore liver omens, Hammurabi codes, and all sorts of other obscure findings of the area to see what biblical authors should have expected to be done with their texts. Fascinating stuff. And yet when the three prospective students got together with the professor, it came to a vote that swung slightly in favour of just teaching the normal class. Even with that, one of the three (the one who had the most influence in not choosing the new topic) dropped off the face of the planet after the first class.

I had been warned by friends while in negotiations with Prof. Levy that he would be a very demanding teacher. And he is. He delivered each student a floppy disk (!) containing a 230-page document listing texts to read for each class of the course. Now thankfully most of these were optional, additional bibliographies, but still the course goes through different stages of bible interpretation on a class by class basis, and we only discuss what we prepare by reading. (This course covers from bible-internal commentary to mishnaic times or thereabouts and is followed by another completing history to date that I won’t be attending next semester.) Despite the hard work, it is a very worthwhile class and is astoundingly interesting as each bit of work is paid off when summed up and discussed in class. But because there are only two students, I do actually have to do the work.

Still, because it hadn’t been clear at first that this class was going to run, I had been enrolled in another four classes: Neuroscience of Language, A Book of the Bible, American Jewish History: Colonial Period through WWI, and Judaism and Poverty.

The American Jewish History class was my first and the first to be dropped. When I entered class on my first day, I was a little late (I had been Skyping Gary a happy birthday), walked into the classroom and was asked by a white-haired man in a thick New York accent “what’s your name?” I gave him the name everyone calls me: Joel. As he handed me the course outline: “Mr Nothman, take a seat.” In Sydney I am used to referring to my lecturers by their first names, and here it was I that would be referred to by my last. Weird. While the professor is known to be fairly old fashioned, he was quite interesting and I enjoyed his teaching. Still, history wasn’t for me and I dropped out.

“A Book of the Bible” I had presumed to be equivalent to a Classical Hebrew course back home. I was only a little wrong. Whereas the class at USyd focusses on language and some of the issues in scholarship around a text, this course purports to be more about seeing a text within its Near Eastern context. We were doing the Book of Genesis, always a controversial one in academia. At the end of the day, though, most of the lecture is comprised of the professor telling us what he thinks, and giving evidence, without too much room for dissent. And he’s got some very unusual opinions: in many ways he is a maximalist, leaving aside what was done by the last two centuries of academics in splitting the text into various authors, and instead trying to find maximal coherence within the text’s account and Near-Eastern findings. But his analysis is often very far from what we usually understand literally from the text. If something noteworthy comes up, I may write a blog entry on it some day.

Judaism and Poverty was a course I at first picked up by default, in case Barry Levy wouldn’t take a class. It seemed interesting, to look at the Jewish perspective on poverty and look at its influence elsewhere. The course purported to lie between sociology and Jewish studies. And yet, when it came to buying books, I saw the pile of texts that would be required for the course: six novels. A literature class! I hadn’t really intended to do a lit course, but when it came down to it, the lecturer was nice, and it would be more fun to do the readings for this class than most others. In the end, we’ve discussed Jewish perspectives on poverty very little. I’m not completely sure how Judaism fits in even, except in the course code JWST552; basically we’re looking at literature on poverty, as taught by a Jewish studies literature teacher. We did start by looking a little at Jewish perspectives on charity as espoused by the Encyclopedia Judaica and by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. And we looked in one class at some Sholom Aleichem, IL Peretz, Brenner and Mendele Mocher Sforim which I really enjoyed. But the rest of the time it’s Wordsworth, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Zola, Steinbeck, Coetzee, Mahfuz, etc. Lots of important classics I should probably have read anyway, but now I have to learn how to read them each in a week essentially. Fun and interesting reading, though.

Finally, the Neuroscience of Language takes a fairly different perspective on language from what I have studied before, looking at demonstrable neurological processes related to understanding and producing language. It’s fascinating stuff, and its lecturer is passionately involved in research (always good), but the class is very different to my others, having around 50 students as opposed to 6, 5, 2. And unlike at home, there is no such thing as a tutorial. There are just lectures and assignments. No opportunity (in class at least) to discuss the material with classmates and consolidate it well. It seems to imply more dependence on the lecturer and on one’s own work. I had imagined that maybe understanding the neuroscience of language would give me ideas in the direction of computational linguistics, but I think I would need many hours to consider the impacts of neuroscience on “artificial intelligence” methods and research.