Hebrew

The Hebrew Studies Program at the University of Texas offers the most comprehensive program available in the Southwest.

The program supports students in fulfilling the university’s foreign language requirements. It provides a supportive and creative learning environment. Small classes enable students to progress in their own pace and explore individual interests. No prior knowledge of the Hebrew language is assumed. This intensive program emphasizes language proficiency focusing on the student’s abilities and learning styles. Diverse and innovative instruction technics are employed to expose students to an educational and authentic experience. In our classes students are immersed in the language and are exposed to the Israeli culture and community.

Hebrew has been taught at UT Austin for decades—Hebrew characters are fixed to the Tower building, symbolizing the status of Hebrew as a language of civilization and representing, together with four other alphabets, the intellectual aspiration of the University. The Hebrew program finds a home in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies . The program regularly offers HEB 601C and 611C, intensive courses in Modern Hebrew, at the conclusion of which students are expected to reach an intermediate-high level of proficiency; HEB 602C and 612C, intensive courses in Biblical Hebrew; and upper-division and graduate-level courses that focus on Hebrew culture throughout the ages, on Israeli society as a locus of technological innovation, and on social and political issues related to the dynamics of Israeli, Jewish-diasporic, and Middle-Eastern societies. The Hebrew instructional website, in place as of the 1990s, includes a large volume of open-source materials, and has been used extensively in the US and throughout the world.