Baskin says it will be a challenge to run an interdisciplinary program after heading a department with its own faculty. But she has overcome challenges before. Working with my colleagues, we succeeded in raising the number of majors and minors, redesigning the curriculum to make it attractive to a diverse array of students, and raising significant funds from the Albany Jewish community for speakers and events. Baskin says Judaic studies programs are needed at universities for many of the same reasons that women's studies and ethnic studies programs are needed. Her research specialties are the study of women in rabbinic literature and Jewish women in the Middle Ages.
Most textbooks assume that the male Jewish experience is the Jewish experience.
Only in the last twenty years have women begun to say that women's lives were very different from men's. In medieval Europe, Jewish women often worked to support the family while their husbands pursued scholarly interests, Baskin says. I find it really interesting to see how female members of an already marginalized and often persecuted community developed strategies for communal survival. Baskin obtained her doctorate in medieval studies from Yale University in 1976. Her dissertation and early scholarship focused on Jewish and Christian Biblical interpretations.