CAL STATE NORTHRIDGE : TV Producer Aids Jewish Program

When Cal State Northridge’s Jewish Studies Program was in danger of losing more than half of its fall classes to state budget cutbacks, Hollywood came to the rescue.

Michael (Mickey) Ross, a writer-producer who helped develop television’s “The Jeffersons” and “Three’s Company,” and his wife, Irene, donated $35,000 to the ailing program.

“I was born of immigrant parents,” said Ross, who read about the program’s plight in a Jewish newspaper. “I loved their attitude, their ways, their morals. I don’t want to see that lost. I wanted people to know their history and their culture.”

Ross said he sees programs such as CSUN’s as a means to preserve that way of life.

The Rosses’ donation, combined with $1,000 from an anonymous donor and $4,000 from the 1939 Club, an organization of Holocaust survivors, spared five of the program’s eight fall classes from the financial ax. They included classes in religion, sociology, history, Hebrew and a special course on the Holocaust.

“It was crucial,” program coordinator Jody Myers said of the Rosses’ donation. “It just saved us. It showed the university there is a lot of community support for Jewish studies.”

Myers said that course offerings in the program, which was founded in the late 1980s, can vary by semester because Jewish studies does not have its own department. It relies on other departments to provide faculty sponsors willing to support the classes, she said.

Because of severe part-time faculty layoffs resulting from the state budget crisis, Myers said, garnering support was especially hard this year.

“A program like Jewish studies is on a vulnerable basis because it is dependent on other departments. I have to go begging,” she said.

Despite the donations, Myers said she hopes the university does not take the program for granted. “People say, ‘Why should we raise the money for you when you’ve got all those rich Jews out there?’ This is not the case. It’s really a double-edged sword.”

Instead, Myers said she hopes the university recognizes the need to serve the area’s large Jewish population and Jewish students on campus. But she stopped short of suggesting that CSUN form a department of Jewish studies. “With this budgetary situation? They’d have to be crazy.”