Eli Katz, 77; Lost a UC Post Over Politics

Eli Katz, a noted Yiddish scholar, translator and professor whose refusal to answer questions about his political affiliations and beliefs led to his dismissal from the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1964 and ignited a fight over academic freedom, has died. He was 77.

Katz died July 22 at a Berkeley hospital from complications after his third stroke, his family said.

The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrant union activists, Katz was an acting assistant professor of German at UC Berkeley in 1963-64 when his departmental colleagues recommended him for a permanent appointment.

Chancellor Edward W. Strong, however, declined to renew Katz’s contract because of his alleged membership in the Communist Party and his refusal to answer questions about it.

In 1959, Katz reportedly had been identified by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as having been a member of the Communist Party two years earlier. Appearing before the committee, Katz invoked the 5th Amendment when asked if he had attended two party meetings in 1957.

While employed as a teaching assistant at UCLA in 1958, Katz had signed the loyalty oath required of all state employees stating that he had not belonged to any subversive organization within the previous five years.

Katz, whose 1963 doctoral dissertation for UCLA was on medieval Yiddish, signed another loyalty oath before joining the UC Berkeley faculty later that year.

Katz’s dismissal from Berkeley, according to a UPI news account at the time, “set off a fight that brought faculty condemnation of Strong.”

“It became an important case for faculty independence at the university,” Katz’s son, Dan, told The Times on Monday. “On the one hand, certainly it was one of the last examples of McCarthyite persecution -- it was happening well after the heyday of McCarthyism.

“It had to do with a whole other era, the free speech movement, and the right of the faculty to be independent in terms of their assessments of someone’s qualifications and ability to teach or not to teach in their department and be free from administrative interference.

“I think his case was important to many people in the faculty who might not be particularly interested in the specifics of his own political position.”

Katz said his father’s dismissal from Berkeley “was very disappointing and difficult for him. He felt he was not being allowed to pursue his career based on his merits as a scholar and a teacher.”

Katz, who taught at Western Reserve University in Cleveland after leaving Berkeley, returned to UC Berkeley in 1966 after the Berkeley Academic Senate voted to reverse Strong’s decision and the new chancellor, Roger W. Heyns, reviewed the case.

Katz served as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley until 1970. He then joined the faculty at Sonoma State University and retired as a full professor in 1992.

His principal works are a scholarly edition of “The Book of Fables: The Yiddish Fable Collection of Reb Moshe Wallich” and a translation of stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz.

Until suffering a debilitating stroke in 2005, his family said, Katz taught popular and highly regarded Yiddish classes at UC Berkeley, the Lehrhaus Judaica in Berkeley and other institutions devoted to Yiddish language and literature.

“He single-handedly kept Yiddish going at UC Berkeley for a number of years,” Yael Chaver, a lecturer in the UC Berkeley Yiddish program, told The Times on Monday.

At Berkeley, she said, “There was really no one of his stature as far as Yiddish scholarship, no one with his prodigious memory and wit and the cultural richness that he brought. And he was one of the great storytellers. So the combination is really rare, and there is no one now at Berkeley with this particular combination.”

And Katz did it, Chaver said, “out of love for the language and a feeling of responsibility to keep Yiddish alive.”

In addition to his son Dan, Katz is survived by his wife, Dr. Helena Leiner; his other children, Jeremy, Mia, and Paola; his stepson, Lawrence Brickman; his sister, Rosalind Scheiner; and five granddaughters.