By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Almost three and a half years ago – January 23, 2023 to be exact – Community published a story looking at how the Jewish Heritage Fund was supporting college-level Jewish Studies programs as they evolved across Kentucky.
A prime example was an interdepartmental minor at the University of Louisville, not surprising in a city boasting the state’s largest number of Jewish residents. Less expected, though, was the activity present at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green and at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
So for mid-2026, we decided to take an updated look at Jewish Studies initiatives at these two schools, augmented by a survey of Centre College in Danville. Alongside UofL — Western, UK and Centre demonstrate the vitality of Jewish Studies programming and the parallel, ongoing commitment by the Jewish Heritage Fund.
“We’ve certainly gone deeper in certain areas over the years,” Jeff Polson, JHF’s president and CEO, acknowledged during a recent interview. From a 2013 grant that established the JHF Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies at UofL (currently held by Ranen Omer-Sherman), JHF has regarded such initiatives as consistent with its collaborative imperative.
That single JHF grant toward establishing the endowed chair was “a continuation of the work the Federation had done back when Bucks-for-Brains started,” Polson said, referring to UofL’s program that partners with donors to bring researchers to the school. Following the program’s inception in 1997, “we came in and were able to add about $1.1 million to that endowment. So working with colleges in this way has been a hallmark for us since the beginning.”
Grantmaking continuity is essential to JHF’s mission. “We’ve wanted to make sure (schools) didn’t have to come back every year, because that doesn’t provide long-term planning capabilities,” Polson said. Indeed, “we’ve been very pleased with the support from administration across all the schools, in terms of wanting to make whatever specific relationships with their professors work.”
Timothy Quevillon, Jewish Heritage Fund Visiting Professor of History/Jewish Studies at Western Kentucky University
Having recently completed his third academic year at WKU, Timothy Quevillon is well-versed in the challenges of integrating Jewish studies into Western’s cultural life. Arriving in the fall of 2023, he built on programming established by his immediate predecessor, Alexander Marcus — who left after one year to eventually take a similar post at the University of Alberta in Canada
“He’d done a great job organizing Jewish student life on campus,” Quevillon said, “resurrecting our Jewish student organization. I was able to take that, and now we have our Jewish Hilltoppers,” which is functioning as a kind of precursor to an official branch of Hillel. Indeed, comprising not only undergraduates but “faculty, staff and community members — an overarching Jewish organization within Bowling Green.”
As a young scholar (he earned his doctorate in history from the University of Houston in 2020), Quevillon is adopting a flexible approach to his academic responsibilities. His portfolio is noticeably broad, reflecting an abiding interest in how Judaism evolved in swaths of the American south.
“When I was brought here with a grant from the Jewish Heritage Fund, the (WKU History) department chair (said), ‘we want to make this a permanent position…so find a way to make yourself appealing. What are some long-term goals that will be great for the region, great for the university, and great for the region.’”
One such foray took Quevillon to Paducah, where he spoke at the city’s single synagogue, Temple Israel. The congregation’s library was housed in the building’s basement — not an especially secure location amid an area prone to flooding. So in the summer of 2024, efforts to preserve the synagogue’s vulnerable holdings got under way.
More recently, initiatives have begun to establish “an actual physical archive, for the region, here on campus.” It’s part of Quevillon’s work on behalf of the Riverlands Jewish Archive, established in 2024 as a partnership among WKU, the Indiana Historical Society and several area Jewish communities.
“Take where the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers connect, and draw a big circle around that,” he said. “We cover, basically, everywhere from Fort Wayne to Texarkana; Quincy, Illinois; and down to Chattanooga (Tennessee).”
As a Texas guy making his initial foray into Kentucky, Quevillon acknowledges a foundational debt to earlier surveyors of the region – particularly the late UofL scholar Lee Shai Weissbach — whose 2005 study, Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History remains the definitive text on the subject.
Yet even a 400-page tome couldn’t cover every relevant facet. “There’s still a lot to discover and pull from these materials,” Quevillon emphasized, a task that grows ever more challenging as once thriving Jewish enclaves dwindle to mere handfuls of constituents. “You see the sad reality that happens when communities have to face the music of, ‘We have four people left here, and the youngest one is 83.’”
Engaging with a substantially younger cohort on WKU’s campus, “one of the first things I did was say, ‘Do you have a mailing list of who was regularly attending events? Who are the students I need to talk to – the professors and staff, faculty and community members I need to reach out to?’”
While it’s difficult to know the precise number of Jewish students at Western, Quevillon estimates the total at around 25, with perhaps a dozen or so “who regularly do things.”
“One of the biggest challenges is just letting students know that, ‘Hey, we’re here,’ and working with students at preview days, orientations, and homecomings – things like that.”
As a historian, Quevillon’s research interests “focus on Jewish identity in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly as it relates to politics, culture, and diaspora.” He teaches U.S. history survey courses, and intends to “offer upper-division courses in American Jewish history, the Jewish diaspora, and Jewish politics & colonialism that will be cross-listed between history and religious studies.”
Meanwhile, he’s encouraged Jewish students to embrace initiatives that have little to do with academics: a Rosh Hashanah-themed event, staffing a booth at Jewish Food Festivals in places like Lexington and Indianapolis — all rolled into a center for Jewish life and culture.
“Branding is the key,” Quevillon said, “making people realize there is a Jewish community here — that if you come to Western Kentucky University you can have a Jewish experience here, a Jewish college life in a way people don’t necessarily think they could at Western.”
Martin Luther Chan, Director of Jewish Studies and Jeremy Steinberg, formerly Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew & Jewish Studies at the University of Kentucky
Alongside its vaunted UK-JHF Holocaust Education Initiative, the University of Kentucky’s Jewish Studies resources serve a student body that – like colleges across the state – is predominantly non-Jewish. It’s a reality that Martin Luther Chan, the faculty member who oversees UK’s Jewish Studies program, must always acknowledge.
“I think my defining character as Director of Jewish Studies is pragmatism,” said Chan, adding that he seeks to “reconcile/navigate different ideas of what a Jewish studies program should look like.”
An Assistant Professor of Hebrew & Jewish Studies and Part-time Instructor in Arabic, the Hong Kong native straddles multiple planes of scholarship, faith and location.
“In the state of Kentucky we have to be aware of our demographics,” said Chan, who grew up in California as a Lutheran as but who now identifies as secular. as a young adult. “If we’re trying to craft a program for the traditional Jewish Studies demographic, it isn’t going to survive for very long. So the way I approach the directorship is that we have to expand beyond Jewish students, or students who are interested in modern Judaism.”
To that end, Chan and his inter-departmental colleagues have sought out “commonality with people who might be attracted to Judaism for different reasons.”
One cohort jumps out at once: students intrigued by “historic overlaps between Christianity and Judaism,” or “perhaps the relationship between Islam and Judaism.”
The ongoing imperative, Chan emphasized, is to “make Judaism relevant to people for reasons beyond simply Jewish heritage, or adjacency to Jewish populations.”
Among UK’s predominantly Christian undergraduate body, “a lot – given their evangelical background – tend to be supportive of Israel,” he said. “That’s something we can start with.”
To that end Chan adopts a deliberate, measured approach.
“I try to come at it from an angle that says, ‘Okay, you can be supportive of Israel, but let’s learn more about the topic so we can develop an educated opinion about why we support Israel, or why you support Israel,” he said. “I don’t want it to be just unconditional, (because) part of what education is is to sharpen your opinions and ground them in logic and rationality.”
The Jewish Heritage Fund also supported the hiring of Jeremy Steinberg for a two-year stint as a visiting assistant professor of Jewish Studies. Though Steinberg departed after a single, 2025-26 academic year to take a post at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, he shared Chan’s desire to expand UK’s existing program.
“Part of the mandate was simply to grow Jewish Studies,” Steinberg said, “to be able to show the administration that it’s worth it to have more faculty and Jewish Studies long term. The courses I taught were mostly Bible-oriented — things that are meeting the kind of non-Jewish student interest that we have at UK.”
Steinberg, who earned his Ph.D at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025, recalled a course he taught at UK titled “Jews in America” that he estimates had about a 50-50 ratio of Jewish and non-Jewish undergraduates among the 17 students in the class.
Most of the Jewish students were minoring in Jewish Studies (UK doesn’t offer a major in the subject). “I did have one student in the class who was a Jewish exchange student from England, who was very familiar with Judaism and wanted to understand how America factored that. I also had two students from the local Jewish community who were auditing the course under the Donovan Scholarship Program, so both were 65 or older.”
Steinberg told of asking one of his younger students, who was from a sparsely populated area of Kentucky, why she were taking his course. The student answered – and here he was paraphrasing – “‘I’d never met a Jew before I came to UK, but I’m going into nursing and want to be able to treat all my patients with the respect and dignity they deserve.’
“I loved working with that student.” Steinberg said, in part “because she showed me where my blind spots were, in terms of what I’m assuming everyone knows.”
“I think this is the moment express our sincere appreciation to the Jewish Heritage Fund,” Chan said. “Without JHF’s being willing to take a leap of faith, literally, in our vision for the program, we would not be able to achieve this.”
Vitally, “they weren’t ideological about imposing a certain kind of vision for us,” Chan emphasized. JHF, he said, “was able to accept that this vision I have is a little bit unconventional – but they said, ‘Okay, we’ll take a punt and we’ll do it.’ And it’s been very successful.”
Shana Sippy — Associate Professor of Religion and Chair of Asian Studies and Religion Programs at Centre College
Centre has one of the nation’s most successful study-abroad programs, and not long ago Shana Sippy took a class to Europe where one of the stops was Berlin. The trip was made possible by support from the Jewish Heritage Fund, which has provided a succession of two-year grants to bolster the school’s nascent Jewish Studies activity.
Visiting Berlin was “the most exciting thing we’ve been able to do with the JHF grant,” Sippy said. “We’re on our third two-year grant and have done a lot of cool things — but as you know, our location in Kentucky challenges our ability to expose students to the full range of Jewish culture and history.”
JHF underwriting supports Centre faculty as well as its undergraduates (84 percent of whom have at least one study-abroad experience). “A couple of times, the JHF grant helped a colleague do curriculum development for a course on Jews, Christians and Muslims in Spain and Morocco,” Sippy said.
She recalled how for her recent student trip — originally limited to a stay in London — JHF agreed to redirect a portion of its grant to accommodate the stop in Berlin. “We were able to take 22 students and two faculty members.” Coincidentally were in London during the upsurge in antisemitic attacks. The students knew there was a bombing of four ambulances in Golders Green,” a neighborhood in North London.
For London, “the students had spent time learning about 19th century immigration of Jews to England — they took a two-hour walk to the Jewish East End and learned about the Blitz and how Jewish textile businesses and labor organizing” helped in “the transformation of neighborhoods.”
Not long afterward Sippy’s students visited the city’s Daniel Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened 25 years ago as Europe’s largest such complex. The building, Sippy said, serves as a “memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe, so we’d been talking about memory and loss – and how do we teach about the vast tragedy and horror of the Holocaust?”
Sippy’s 22 students – none of whom were Jewish — spent close to five hours immersing themselves in the museum’s collection, she said. “I’d never been a space like that, one that architecturally works on you to create emotion” – in her, and in those accompanying students.
“It was incredibly powerful for them,” Sippy said, adding that insights gained in Berlin served them well once they returned to the Centre campus. Call it a bridge to appreciating, even in modest ways, the rich diversity of their fellow undergraduates.
At the same time — largely via JHF’s grants — “what we’re doing is serving our Jewish student body and creating an environment that nurtures their Jewish identities and allows them to express their Jewishness at Centre,” Sippy observed, “which is not an easy thing to do in Danville, Kentucky.”