Jewish Educator Will Steer a Cultural Middle Course : Heritage: New head of University of Judaism fears that Jews are in danger of losing their distinctiveness because of their success at assimilation.

When he was in the fifth grade, Robert Wexler knew what it was like to be a Jew in Los Angeles. He felt a sense of exclusion and alienation.

Thirty years later, as he prepares to assume the presidency Sunday of the University of Judaism in West Los Angeles, Wexler worries that the pendulum may have swung too far: Most Jews have assimilated so successfully into the cultural majority that they are in danger of losing their distinctiveness.

Wexler’s task, he said, is to steer a middle ground by equipping the university’s 200 students, predominantly Jewish, with the tools needed to function successfully in a pluralistic world while instilling a confident appreciation that as Jews they have something unique to contribute.

“That’s where education becomes very important,” Wexler said. “(They are) bringing something unusual to the table. In this case that’s the Jewish heritage.”

The tug-of-war between being an “American” and maintaining one’s cultural and religious heritage is an old story, one shared by immigrants from many lands. But Jews have come much farther down the road of assimilation than, say, newer immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.

As such, the tension is sharp within the Jewish community and among Jewish religious and secular leaders. Jewish concerns over interfaith marriages, for example, are well-known.

That tension will be addressed in a speech to be given at Wexler’s inaugural by Frances Horowitz, head of the graduate schools and university center at the City College of New York.

“The possibility of the disappearance of the modern American Jewish community carries with it a sense of bitter irony,” Horowitz says in her prepared remarks. “What Hitler attempted in Europe may well come to pass in America without the horror, without the slaughter, without the unspeakable cruelty. Judenrein. A disappearance aided and abetted by tolerance and opportunity, by integration and assimilation and intermarriage in the era where everyone had the option of, as (Jewish scholar and author) Leonard Fein has suggested, being a Jew by choice. And none so chose.”

She adds, “Here is the challenge to Robert Wexler, to the University of Judaism and to all who are concerned with the passing on of the ethical, intellectual, emotional and affective content of Jewish life. How much attention to the Jewish aspects of our lives in the daily life? How intense the daily involvement? What role does separation and apartness play and how much is desirable? At what point do we cross the line from integration to assimilation to anonymity to nothingness?”

Wexler’s challenge as he succeeds David Lieber as president is to educate Jewish men and women to participate in and strengthen the fabric of a multicultural American society by offering unique threads from their Jewish heritage.

Charting such a middle course, he said, is preferable to the alternatives. One involves what Wexler calls a survivalist model. The other requires total assimilation.

“The extent to which you can draw fences around people--within a not necessarily physical ghetto but a cultural ghetto--the better chance of retaining them. But to me that’s not what the challenge of Jewish life is all about. There’s always going to be a certain amount of risk the moment you encourage people to go beyond those fences. You’re risking assimilation into the broader culture. . . . It’s always more attractive on some level to be part of a majority rather than a minority.”

Wexler, 41, concedes that his confusion and apprehension as a boy about how to deal with his Jewishness may be a factor in his desire as an educator to uplift and celebrate Judaism in the midst of pluralism.

“I think that in my youth I was very ill-prepared to meet the challenges of participating in the broader society,” Wexler, a Rabbinic scholar and linguist, said in an interview at the Mulholland Drive campus. He recalled his fifth-grade experience in Hancock Park, then a bastion of upper-class Protestantism. He said most of the students in his class as well as his teacher attended the nearby Episcopal Church.

“They were talking over something that had happened. I can also picture myself standing in the classroom and watching them interact as they shared some kind of connection with each other and she was the teacher. She was (the teacher for all of us). But she clearly had a special feeling for them,” Wexler recalled.

“Now, of course, it’s natural because she had an association. She knew their families. But she didn’t know our family. So there was a sense that here they were--this is where the action really was--and here we were. . . . It wasn’t a matter of being discriminated (against) or oppressed. It was just not being part .”

By contrast, these days many Jews worry that they are victims of their own success, which has enabled them to blend into the American mainstream. Many Jews have risen to the top of their fields, from becoming corporate executives to leading politicians and artists.

“My question is, what does it mean to be Jewish in a position like that,” Wexler asked. “Is it just coincidental? Does your Judaism have nothing to do with how you do your job? Or are there certain kinds of moral values that come out of the Jewish tradition?”

Wexler has risen rapidly in his own career. He has spent most of his career at the university, which was founded in 1947 by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the center of Conservative Judaism, located in New York City. (The university is now independent.) Wexler has served as vice president of administration. As a faculty member, he has lectured on the Bible. Earlier, he was a Near Eastern studies lecturer at Princeton University.

He completed his undergraduate, master’s and doctorate degrees at UCLA, specializing in Near Eastern languages. He also earned a master’s of business administration from the City University of New York’s Baruch College, a bachelor’s degree in literature from the University of Judaism, and a master’s of arts degree and Rabbinic ordination from Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is married and has four children.