Q & A : He Heads Small School but Has Affected Many

David Lieber, 66, president of the University of Judaism

Claim to fame: One of the longest-serving college presidents in the nation, Lieber plans to retire next year after 29 years as the chief executive at the university. When he started in 1956 as dean of students, the school offered evening classes from a house in what is now Koreatown. It now occupies a modern campus atop Sepulveda Pass in Bel-Air and offers undergraduate, graduate and extension courses on Jewish and secular topics.

Background: Born in Poland, Lieber came to New York with his parents at age 2. He obtained rabbinical ordination and a doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He served as a chaplain in the Air Force, at the University of Washington and at Harvard University and as a pulpit rabbi at Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple before coming to the University of Judaism. He became president in 1963. Upon retirement, he plans to work on a commentary on the Bible and continue teaching at the university.

Q What makes someone decide to be a rabbi? What are they looking for?

A They are looking for meaning in their own lives, and that includes helping others, helping people find their path in life, and the path, they believe, has to in some way relate to God. For the last 30, 40 years, the concern of the synagogues has been largely with crises--the Holocaust, Israel, refugees--and not as much attention has been paid to personal religion. Now there’s a greater-felt need of personal religion.

Q A recent report suggested that rabbinical studies are attracting greater numbers as law and medicine lose some of their luster. Is a revival occurring?

A We’re not talking about huge numbers. When I was a rabbinical student at the seminary, my entering class was 20 students. So let’s assume that the entry class now would be 40, and considering that maybe up to a third of them are women, the numbers aren’t as extraordinary as they sound.

What is interesting is that we’re getting people who’ve been doing other things. We’ve had a few lawyers. We have a man who’s now coming to one of our important pulpits in San Francisco--I don’t know if it would be fair to call him a master, but he was active in Zen and he decided to become a rabbi. We even have people who are converts. It’s not so much that law and medicine don’t seem so appealing anymore. I think more people are asking themselves, “What does life have to offer me besides a good income?”

Q Would that reflect a spiritual search in America in general?

A I think this is true of the churches, too. That’s one of the reasons why fundamentalists have such an upsurge. I think that the mainline churches are beginning to learn from that.

Q Rabbinical students spend two years here, then go on to study in Israel and at the Jewish Theological Seminary. What is the rabbinical training like?

A The model for what we need today would be medical school. For example, in the first two years they do the hard sciences, then there are internships, so that a person acts and thinks like a physician. In my day, when the emphasis was on scholarship, a person who graduated might be an observant Jew but wouldn’t act and think like a rabbi, and the result was that a number of people went into congregations and they just didn’t survive. Much of the last two years now is devoted to internships. The seminary is also attempting to deal with another issue that we had not dealt with, namely spirituality.

Q How did that become an issue?

A Spirituality just somehow is not a Jewish term, and some people even criticized it for being an import from Christianity. The truth is that we do have this central notion within Judaism. But we’ve always emphasized mitzvot (commandments or good deeds). So for a lot of Jews the emphasis is mostly on the acts, and they don’t pay too much attention to the larger meanings behind the acts.

The first two years of the program here are critical years, because it’s in these years that we take people, a number of whom literally don’t know the Hebrew alphabet, from scratch to the point where they can handle a biblical text. (But we also) have to socialize them into the spiritual life of Judaism. We do that in a unique way: In addition to the regular classes, we have three “mini-mesters” of three weeks each. For those three weeks, they spend full days, full weeks together, and they study one subject only, generally one that would lend itself to spirituality.

Q How has the role of a college president changed during your tenure?

A In the old days, a college president basically was a distinguished academic, and his administration was largely an academic kind of administration. Today college presidents have to deal with the community, with the trustees, with public relations, with fund raising, and there are all kinds of pressures. So it’s not the kind of position that most people would stay at for a lifetime. Either people change their presidencies (moving to another institution) or they leave the presidency to go into some other things. Some of them go back to teaching and research. Others will go out into other fields.

Q So why did you stick with it for so long?

A First of all, I’ve had a terrific board of directors. In particular, a handful of people have taken over some of these financial responsibilities. I’ve also been blessed with some outstanding and devoted colleagues. Then there is the joy of seeing an institution grow and be productive.

It’s a small institution, obviously, but we have surprisingly touched a lot of people. We get to know our students. That’s very rewarding. And the appreciation of the Jewish community is also a reward. There are people out there who appreciate what we’re doing--many of them don’t know what we’re doing, but they know we’re doing something good, and they appreciate it.

Q The University of Judaism launched the Lee College, its undergraduate school, eight years ago. How has that been going?

A When we established Lee College we introduced five majors and my immediate goal was to see to it that every major had at least one full professor, and we just completed that. In English literature we have two full-time people. In Jewish studies, obviously, we have more than that, but we have full-time people in psychology, in political science, in business. We also now have a track record in terms of where our graduates have been admitted: University of Michigan, Georgetown University, University of Pennsylvania, Loyola, UCLA.

It’s still a hard sell, but this past year we had 65 students full time. This coming year we’ll have at least 70, maybe 75 students full time. We graduated this past year 13 students. What I’m very pleased at is our retention rate--out of a class of 25 we may lose two. So that the students who come, come and stay, and they like the place. We have a very generous policy in terms of scholarships, obviously.

Q Did you have all this in mind in 1956?

A That’s ironic, since I left Sinai Temple because I wanted to have more time for my studies. During the first six years I would say that I was able to devote a minimum of six hours a day to my studies. But my predecessor used to commute from New York and then they needed a full-time president. After they tried everybody who was good, and they turned them down, they asked me--as I told them at the time. But by that time already I felt that Los Angeles was my home and Los Angeles needed an institution of this kind.

Q How do you think the American Jewish community might look in the next century?

A A study coming out soon says there are 4 million people in America who say that they are “religious Jews,” meaning that they see Judaism as their religion. There are an additional 1 1/2 million who say that they are not religious people, but they see Judaism as their primary ethnicity. So you’ve got 5 1/2 million “core” Jews in this country. But the other interesting thing is that there are another 2 1/2 million Jews who are in a sort of in-between status. Maybe they’re married to non-Jews.

Now, given the fact that Reform Judaism has recognized patrilineal descent (as opposed to the traditional definition of a Jew as someone whose mother was Jewish), that’s a whole new ballgame. How this is going to come together, nobody knows, but it does tell us that there is going to be a Jewish community in this country a hundred years from now. What’s also interesting is that 90% of the 5 1/2 million who clearly identify themselves as Jews are American-born. About half of those are third- and fourth-generation Jews--which means that the community has been able to survive the integration into the American scene.

I don’t see a division between right and left; I see a kind of shading. In other words, some people will devote more to Jewish observance, to Jewish study. There’ll be those who do less, so the challenge of the Jewish leadership is to get those who do less to do more.

Q Some ethnic groups, including some of the most strictly traditional Jews, seem to be insisting on making a place for themselves in America on their own terms. Is this a good thing?

A It’s very dangerous when each group considers only its own interest and doesn’t have a sense of the commonality of all Americans. I think it’s very important that we emphasize the commonality, but America being what America is, it is made up of a whole bunch of groups, and each of these groups should be encouraged to cultivate its own traditions. And being an educator, I think the key is education.

Q Are Jews a minority group in America?

A They are and they aren’t. Obviously, they are not underprivileged. They were when I was growing up, because when I was growing up you couldn’t get into medical school to save your life if you were a Jew, you couldn’t get a professorship. Up to World War II, we were an underprivileged, and discriminated-against, minority in this country.

Conditions have improved since then. I think the Jews have done well in America and America has done well by them--I have no complaints about that. We are a minority in this sense, that the culture is still one which is both not understood and in many American circles not valued. Those of us who go back to the ‘30s still carry with us those memories. And just as blacks who made it can’t ever forget where they came from, so it seems to me that Jews can’t ever forget where they came from.