Judaic Studies Sell on S.D. Campuses

In a region where interest in in Middle Eastern history and Israeli topics has been traditionally weak, San Diego’s two major universities surprisingly have nurtured flourishing and well-respected Judaic studies programs during the past decade.

UC San Diego, with several well-known biblical scholars on the faculty, enjoys a national reputation for research in both the origins and meaning of the Hebrew Bible, more commonly known as the Old Testament. In the near future, the university is expected to approve a doctorate in history with a Judaic studies emphasis.

San Diego State University, with its 5-year-old Lipinksy Institute for Judaic Studies, focuses more on general undergraduate courses in modern Jewish issues and sponsors seminars and presentations for the outside community, which have ranged from U.S.-Israeli relations to the effect on Jews of the Iranian revolution.

Both programs enjoy strong backing from Jews in San Diego, whose financial support reflects their pride that academicians view Judaic studies as within mainstream university offerings. Without the community backing, the San Diego State effort would probably not exist and the UCSD program would be far more circumscribed and without most of its prestigious professors.

The growth of such programs at UCSD and San Diego State parallels a movement nationwide in which the number of Judaic studies specialists has ballooned from 60 in 1966 to more than 600 today. A majority of American urban universities today have some type of program, although few have become as comprehensive as those in San Diego in such a short time.

“Surprising? Yes, at first,” said Jacob Goldberg, an Israeli specialist on modern Middle Eastern politics from Tel Aviv University. Goldberg has served as visiting professor at both San Diego campuses.

“When I first came (in 1984), people had told me that the West Coast in general and San Diego in particular were deserts, the wilderness, very remote from the East Coast in terms of interest and knowledge, and much more oriented toward the Pacific Rim,” Goldberg said in a telephone interview from Israel last week.

Goldberg guided San Diego State faculty members in designing a Judaic studies program to avoid duplication with UCSD and to attract community support.

“And, in fact, so many students do take these courses and the community was not hard at all to sell,” he said. San Diego’s increasing urbane character also has helped develop greater awareness of Judaic issues, he added.

Enrollment in Judaic studies courses at SDSU has grown from 364 during the program’s first year to 820 this fall. More than 1,300 students--graduate and undergraduate--took at least one offering at UCSD last year. In both programs, professors say that a majority of the students are non-Jews, emphasizing the interaction between Judaism and other strands of Western civilization throughout history.

The two programs do have significant differences, reflecting the times each was begun, the separate roles of the UC and Cal State systems, and interests of the community.

“But absolutely both are needed because you’ve got different student bodies, both large enough to need these programs,” Murray Galinson, a San Diego political activist and banker, said. Galinson co-sponsors an annual symposium on Israel at SDSU and serves on the advisory committee to the UCSD program.

At UCSD, the origins go back to the mid-1970s, when various ethnic and area studies were gaining recognition. Several hundred students petitioned top administrators for courses in Judaic studies and, consequently, a campuswide committee was appointed to deal with the issue.

The committee brought a recognized Middle Eastern history scholar from Yale to UCSD as a consultant. He recommended that any program emphasize Hebrew language and Bible research as its key components, said Walter Kohn, now a physics professor at UC Santa Barbara who then taught at UCSD.

“He made a thoroughly convincing case and subsequently the administration allocated” the first two positions, Kohn said.

“That basis gave it a good reputation from the start as having a serious scholarly component, so it would not be seen as a second-rate program in response to a temporary ethnic interest.”

The first appointment was literature professor Richard Friedman, whose multidisciplinary interest in the Bible aided UCSD’s growing reputation. Friedman’s 1987 book, “Who Wrote the Bible?”, has been critically acclaimed for its sleuth-like approach in trying to identify the ancient writers of the Five Books of Moses.

In the early 1980s, UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson decided to tap San Diego’s Jewish community to help expand Judaic studies for an undergraduate major and additional graduate courses.

“The community raised an initial $700,000, and now that figure is more than $1 million,” La Jolla resident Jerome Katzin said. Katzin was instrumental in the effort and has served many years on the Friends of Judaic Studies, a community group that meets several times a year with UCSD administrators and professors to discuss academic issues.

The money raised by the community has endowed two faculty positions in Judaic studies and has supported a specialized campus library collection. The university, through the endowment, is also close to announcing the appointment of a senior scholar in biblical archeology to join Judaic studies.

The extensive support stemmed primarily “from the mere presence of the university, the fact that it is a sophisticated presence (and reflects) all the changes during the past 20 years, with all the doctors, the scientists, well-educated people who have come to San Diego, a community in transition,” Katzin said.

The fund-raising endowment enabled UCSD to recruit Professor David Noel Freedman from the University of Michigan in 1987. The appointment of Freedman, who has edited the Anchor Bible commentaries for almost two decades, gave the UCSD program additional visibility in academic circles.

Freedman said that the Judaic studies specialists at UCSD, by emphasizing the Bible, have helped show that Bible research should be important to Jewish tradition. Traditionally, Freedman said, Judaic studies began with post-Bible history, since the Bible itself was researched as part of Christian religious studies or Near Eastern history departments.

“You have to be as broad as possible,” Freedman said, “since the common foundation that Christians and Jews share is the Hebrew Bible, and we have to find common ground and exclude the narrowness and prejudice of certain beliefs by those that wish to use the Bible to bolster one position and prove another wrong.”

In contrast to UCSD, professors at San Diego State set out to emphasize modern Jewish history and Israeli-related topics--to avoid competition with UCSD and as recognition of UCSD having the area’s preeminent research mission under the state educational system.

Individual professors at SDSU, such as Maurice Friedman--an authority on 20th-Century German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber--long had taught isolated courses in some aspect of Judaic studies but wanted a more organized effort. Goldberg of Tel Aviv University suggested that San Diego State invite a different professor from Israel each year as a way to emphasize the study of modern politics and Jewish history.

“I think we in the community also saw this approach as a way to have the professors be a community resource in speaking to groups and holding seminars,” said San Diego businesswoman Lucy Goldman, an SDSU alumnus who spearheaded fund-raising.

UCSD supporters, recognizing the benefits that another program would bring, suspended active fund raising for almost three years to allow SDSU’s program to develop a sufficient endowment. San Diego State now has a full-time endowed professor in Judaic studies who coordinates courses from individual departments and the visiting scholar position.

“We’re not really set up to train people who will specialize in Judaic studies,” said Lawrence Baron, who came to San Diego State about two years ago to take the endowed position.

“Rather, one of our major goals is to give students some general education in Judaism . . . a second is to be a resource for the community, and to do outreach, such as holding symposiums.

“I like to perceive ourselves as a service program.”