Credit-bearing travel seminars (the biennial Fishman Family Travel Seminar, JWST 110), field trips from campus during the academic year, and alumni-and-parent trips that revisit our seminar territory. Underwritten in part by the Grinspan Travel Fund.
The Program treats travel as intellectual method. Texts read in their own places reveal new meaning. Streets, synagogues, archives, kitchens, and cemeteries are put in conversation with the secondary literature and with each other; students learn the shape of a Jewish past — and a Jewish present — that doesn’t fit on a single map.
Three rough categories: credit-bearing travel seminars built into the curriculum; field trips from campus during the academic year, often to New York City for theater, music, and museum-going; and alumni and parent trips that revisit the territory of our seminars for graduates of the Program and their families.
A biennial credit-bearing travel seminar — taught on campus through the spring, then on the ground during Spring Break.
2025 — Andalucía · Iberia · Sepharad. Twenty students traveled with the Director, the medieval Iberian art historian Julie Harris, Rabbanit Dr. Ágnes Vetö, Victoria Atlas, and Alex Spector Kobzev through Burgos, León, Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba, Sevilla, Granada, Barcelona, Girona, and Besalú — reading the long history of Sefarad in synagogues, museums, archives, mikvaot, and street.
2027 — Italy. Rome, Venice, Florence, Padua. The intertwined histories of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited Jewish community, the first ghetto, the humanist city, and Padua’s university and rabbinic networks.
Earlier seminars have visited Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Budapest, Florence, and Venice (including a semester-long course tied to the 2016 Quincentennial of the Venice Ghetto).
Need-based financial support is available through the Grinspan Travel Fund (Judith and Edward Grinspan, both Class of 1974). No admitted student is prevented from joining the seminar for financial reasons.
Dispatches from past Italian itineraries — gathering material for the 2027 seminar.
Jewish Studies students, with discussion before and after — a select list.
Click any box to see the playbill or poster from the outing.
Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes — the Program was there when it was new and on Broadway, and now our students are writing theses about it as if it were ancient history. Stick around long enough…
See playbillTom Stoppard’s late-career play tracing a Viennese Jewish family from the high bourgeois turn of the twentieth century through the Anschluss and beyond. The play that finally let Stoppard speak about his own family. Students attended in two cohorts during the 2022–23 Broadway run.
See playbillThe National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene production directed by Joel Grey, performed entirely in Yiddish with English and Russian supertitles. Students attended at Stage 42 during the New York run. A rare chance to hear Fidler afn dakh in the language the Sholem Aleichem stories were written in.
See playbillMozart’s Magic Flute read as an Enlightenment-era artifact of the Viennese masonic milieu in which Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals quietly mingled. We discuss the opera’s tangled relationship to its sources and to the moment when European Jews first imagined entering a shared cultural sphere.
See posterItzik Manger’s Yiddish poetic re-telling of the Esther story — a Purim ritual in its own right. Attended this past Purim with students from JWST 101 and the Yiddish tutorial.
See playbillA visit to Congregation Shearith Israel — the historic Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York, founded 1654 — for a Western Sephardi liturgical music concert and a meeting with members of Yale’s Jewish a cappella group, Magevet. Tied to the Program’s Western Sephardi Liturgy student-research project.
See posterOpen to alumni of the Program, their families, and parents of current students.
Periodically the Program offers alumni-and-parent versions of our travel seminars — same intellectual core, different pace, more room for conversation. Recent and upcoming destinations include Venice, the Sephardi cities of the Andalucían itinerary, and the four cities of the Western Sephardi liturgical world.
To be added to the list for upcoming alumni trips, write to maepstein@vassar.edu.
Itineraries developed in consultation with the model and counsel of the Director’s long-running international study tours — for which see marcmepstein.com/tours.
Your gift sustains financial aid for our travel seminars, public lectures, language teaching, and the Sefer Torah restoration. Use designation DA059 – Jewish Studies.
