Why Choose Graduate School at JTS?

Finding a graduate school that’s right for you is not always easy. While the quality and nature of the departmental offerings and the faculty members you’d like to study with are your central concerns, you may also have other important but non-academic questions: Where are you going to be living? What resources will be available to you locally, and how will you be able to take advantage of them? Who will be your new friends and colleagues, fellow students, and neighbors? All these factors play into your decision.

The combined resources of JTS and New York City together offer a truly stunning array of benefits.

Your Faculty

The unparalleled opportunities at JTS to live in the most exciting city in the world, to use one of the greatest scholarly libraries in existence, and to teach a splendid mixture of enthusiastic graduate students has attracted top faculty in their fields.

Our professors pursue independent research as well as collaborative work with each other and with our students. In fact, our low professor-to-student ratio means that you’ll get to know nearly all our faculty, whether in the classroom, sharing knowledge in The Library, lunching in the cafeteria, or just chatting in the hallways.

Your Fellow Students

There are fifteen departments and programs at JTS, ranging from Jewish Art and Visual Culture to Ancient Judaism to Modern Jewish Studies. The total number of graduate students varies but tends to hover around two hundred.

In your classes at JTS, you will sometimes find yourself settling in with your own group of friends, fellow students following similar paths through The Graduate School. But you will also occasionally find yourself in a class with rabbinical students. Or you might be in a course with advanced doctoral students who bring their own research to bear on the material presented by the professor. Sometimes you will find that the most highly motivated, advanced undergraduates of List College will choose to take your graduate-level classes. Finally, our consortium agreement with many graduate institutions around the New York area means that sometimes you will have students from outside JTS in your courses, further enriching the learning environment here.

New York City is rich in international cultures and JTS, too, welcomes students and faculty from around the world. We have had students from China, Israel, Germany, Sicily, Japan, Russia, and many other countries.

We welcome everyone—Jewish and non-Jewish—to come and study.

One thing we have in common is a passionate love of the historical and textual subjects and the desire to immerse ourselves in their study.

Your Campus

JTS is a vibrant, living jewel on the Upper West Side of New York. Our verdant courtyard, surrounded and enclosed by arched walkways and warm brick and studded with green trees, offers a delightful haven from the noise of the city.

Here you can study with friends in the glowing fall sunlight, enjoy our fabulous sukkah during the holiday season, and play Frisbee while the leaves swirl around your feet. And when the warm weather comes in the spring, eat lunch on the terrace amid the profusion of flowers.

From this refuge, you can explore the riches of the city of New York in all their thrilling variety. New York is the best walking city you can find, but it does have an excellent system of public transportation, including buses and subways. And, of course, you can always splurge on a taxi for your night on the town!

Your Library

The Library of JTS is open to the public and draws researchers from all over the world. We have actual letters written and signed by the great twelfth-century Hebrew poet Judah Halevi in his own hand. We have a copy of a work by Maimonides with corrections written in by himself. Pretty amazing!

Naturally, as a student, you can take out books from our extensive library, but you can also obtain borrowing privileges from the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University libraries. If there’s anything you can’t find there, you’ll find it in the New York Public Library, or through Inter-Library Loan.

As for the Rare Book Room, in some of your classes you might have the opportunity to spend a couple of sessions there examining ancient texts, illuminated manuscripts, and rare documents. And as a doctoral student, you may find yourself spending a lot of time there if your dissertation focuses on medieval manuscripts or any of the other rich research material kept in the RBR.

New York and JTS

Housing is available both on and off campus. While living in New York City is not cheap, JTS housing costs are very reasonable and our kosher cafeteria provides excellent food at moderate prices. Along with The Library, it is one of the biggest draws for non-JTS folk.

Finally, JTS is truly a warm and welcoming place. It can be an adopted family and a home away from home. At JTS you can experience all that a living, breathing city like New York has to offer. And, to be honest, New Yorkers are vastly more courteous and genuinely friendly than their reputation has it. We are helpful, gregarious, and often cheerful! In fact, New York has the lowest crime rate of any large city in America, and you can feel it.

All in all, JTS is an ideal place to pursue a graduate degree in Jewish studies. If you'd like to come for a visit, you are more than welcome. Just contact us to arrange it. To get more information about academic departments and application procedures, just complete our online inquiry form.

The Arts
The Jewish Museum	Museum of Jewish Heritage
Metropolitan Museum of Art	Museum of Biblical Art
The Frick Collection	Carnegie Hall
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts	Brooklyn Academy of Music