Gratz College announces that Brendan Goldman will serve as the inaugural holder of the Dr. Saul Philip Wachs Chair of Jewish Life and Learning. A specialist in medieval Jewish history and textual traditions, Goldman comes to Gratz from the University of Washington where he held the position of associate director of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the School of International Studies.
Goldman will assume leadership of Gratz’s Jewish studies programs, including the launch of the school’s new “Executive Ph.D. in Jewish Studies,” scheduled to welcome its first cohort in spring 2025. In addition, Goldman will oversee public programming and community education.
The Wachs chair was endowed to honor professor Saul Wachs and his remarkable legacy in enriching Jewish education and training generations of Jewish educators. Wachs served on Gratz’s faculty from 1975 until 2017. For more than six decades, he has touched the lives of many Jews and non-Jews, both directly and indirectly.
Gratz College president Zev Eleff is eager to uphold and expand Wachs’ lifelong work: “It’s impossible to overstate Dr. Wachs’ influence on Gratz, from our degree programs to the wider Jewish community in Philadelphia. As a researcher in Jewish education, thought leader in the area of liturgy and a myriad of other fields, Dr. Wachs set a high standard for Jewish meaning-making,” said Eleff. “In Dr. Brendan Goldman, we have a scholar prepared to leverage his wide knowledge, strong educational know-how and desire to innovate new ways for the Gratz community to make meaning in their lives.”
About assuming this new role, Goldman says, “I am delighted and humbled to be appointed the first Wachs chair at Gratz College. During my brief time in Philadelphia, Dr. Wachs’ students and peers testified to his profound impact on them as an educator, researcher and colleague. I hope to emulate his path as an educational innovator, expanding and deepening Gratz’s leading programs in Jewish studies.”
At the University of Washington, Goldman maintained the leading Israel and Sephardic studies programs; fostered relations with donors and the wider Jewish community of Seattle; and built partnerships with Hillel, Seattle’s Jewish Community Relations Council and the local federation. Prior to this position, Goldman held the Hazel D. Cole Postdoctoral Fellowship in Jewish studies at the University of Washington.
Goldman earned his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. His first book, Camps of the Uncircumcised: The Cairo Geniza and Jewish Life in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
His second book project, tentatively titled A Disciplinary Society: Medieval Prisons through Jewish Eyes, examines how documents found in the Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storehouse preserving more than 40,000 medieval writings, can illuminate the ways in which state violence shaped the lives of everyday Jews living under Muslim rule during the Middle Ages.
