RELIGION / JOHN DART : The Jewish Spectator a Vital Voice

Magazines: The quarterly, which is edited in Calabasas, is small in circulation but prominent figures are among its contributors and readers.

Jewish Spectator, an intellectual magazine with a religious focus, has a small circulation of about 6,000 and is edited in Calabasas, hardly the center of Jewish life.

Yet, the quarterly’s regular contributors include prominent U.S. rabbis and educators, among them prolific author Jacob Neusner, a former Brown University professor now at the University of South Florida.

The influence of the 66-page periodical goes well beyond its limited circulation because as many as two-thirds of its recipients are libraries and rabbis.

From its 1936 founding in New York City until its sale in 1989, Jewish Spectator reflected the independent and thoughtful, sometimes feisty, stances of founder-editor Trudie Weiss-Rosmarin. The man who bought it, Robert Bleiweiss of Calabasas, has kept up the tradition, observers have said.

“It’s a highly credible publication,” said Gene Lichtenstein, editor of the Jewish Journal newspaper in Los Angeles. “There aren’t many magazines that have a religious focus and attempt an intellectual dialogue.”

Commentary and Tikkun, for instance, are larger Jewish-oriented magazines with strong political interests to the right and left respectively. A third Jewish periodical, Moment, has a more popular format, according to Bleiweiss.

Jewish Spectator’s successful transition to a West Coast suburban setting and a new editor is a testament to the determination of Weiss-Rosmarin, who earned a doctorate in her native Germany shortly before arriving in America in 1931.

Through the magazine, she asserted that secular Jewish culture, politics and community work in America still needed an intelligent, vibrant Judaism in order for Jews to survive as a people.

“Weiss-Rosmarin had enormous confidence in Judaism, its attractiveness and ability to compete with contemporary cultures in the modern world,” wrote Deborah Dash Moore of Vassar College in a recent biographical essay.

By the 1980s, the septuagenarian editor had moved to Santa Monica and was looking for someone to help with the journal.

Given an honorary doctorate by Los Angeles’ Hebrew Union College in 1984 and frequently requested as a speaker in the Los Angeles Jewish community, Weiss-Rosmarin also lectured at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley. It was through that Jewish educational institute that she found her successor.

Writer-editor Bleiweiss, a former director of the institute, was being consulted by Weiss-Rosmarin for publishing advice, but she also began suggesting that he become a partner with her in the magazine.

“We consistently said no because my wife Vida and I were busy building our commercial business, primarily publishing labor union newspapers,” Bleiweiss said in an interview.

“Then when she was reaching the end of her life in 1989, she called us one day and said that we absolutely had to take it or it would be on our heads that the magazine would fail,” Bleiweiss said. She had declined offers from three institutions to buy the magazine, asserting that the publication would lose its personality and independent thrust, Bleiweiss said.

“I went over to see her and to turn her down, but I spent 2 1/2 hours with her and walked away buying the magazine,” he said.

That was May, 1989. Weiss-Rosmarin died on June 26, shortly after her 81st birthday.

In her final, combined spring-summer issue, Weiss-Rosmarin wrote of Bleiweiss: “He is a remarkably knowledgeable trans-sectarian Jew totally committed to the sustenance of Jewish values for this and subsequent generations.”

Bleiweiss, now 59, said he and Weiss-Rosmarin were on the same ideological wavelength. The difference between Weiss-Rosmarin and himself was that she was a Talmudic scholar. “I’m a darn good editor and a devoted, scholarly Jew but not a scholar,” he said.

Her description of her successor as “trans-sectarian” referred to Bleiweiss’ contacts with all three of Judaism’s major branches.

His son, Mark, an adviser and frequent contributor to the magazine, is in New York studying to be an Orthodox rabbi. But Robert and Vida Bleiweiss said they feel very close to Reform Judaism. He has taught a Bible class for nine years at Rabbi Steven Jacobs’ congregation, which merged last year to form Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills.

Nevertheless, his three senior contributing editors are prominent in Conservative Judaism: Rabbi Daniel Gordis, dean of administration at the University of Judaism; Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson of Mission Viejo and Deborah E. Lipstadt, associate professor of modern Jewish studies at Emory University in Atlanta.

Lipstadt, a former director at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute who also taught at Occidental College, is the author of the critically acclaimed “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory” published in 1993.

Told late last year that she didn’t have to write her usual column for Jewish Spectator in light of her busy book-publicizing schedule, Bleiweiss said that Lipstadt responded, “Don’t you dare. Save those pages.” Lipstadt’s essays and commentaries have appeared in every issue that Bleiweiss has edited.

When Bleiweiss took over the magazine, its overall circulation was down to about 1,500 and its paid circulation stood about 800. Today, he said, the paid circulation is at 1,307. But were it not for their income from publishing a dozen labor newspapers, the Bleiweisses said, they would be unable to keep it going.

He said Jewish Spectator lost some subscribers when he wrote an editorial three or four years ago praising the social work of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement.

“Lubavitch is not mainstream Judaism and has a lot of things wrong with it ideologically and functionally, but I certainly can’t argue with people who put millions and millions of dollars each year into reclaiming drug-lost youth and feeding hungry people,” Bleiweiss said in an interview.

Bleiweiss also received heat for criticizing the many Jewish federation organizations across the country, which he characterized as “still mainly run by assimilated, ignorant, self-serving people.” But in the winter issue, published this week, he wrote that he was encouraged by what he saw as hopeful signs at the November convention of the Council of Jewish Federations in Montreal.

An editorial he wrote in the fall issue scored supporters of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University for selecting singer Michael Jackson for the 1994 Scopus Award to be presented in Beverly Hills in January.

“This will mark the umpteenth time a major Jewish charity will have reached out cynically and opportunistically to tie the name of a distinguished Jewish institution to a member of the American glitterati, motivated entirely by the fame and box-office appeal of the person to be honored,” Bleiweiss wrote.

Previous winners of the Scopus Award, cited for excellence in their chosen field and philanthropic generosity, have included Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, as Bleiweiss noted. But the awardees have also included author Eli Wiesel, pianist Arthur Rubenstein, the late Rabbi Max Nussbaum, conductor Zubin Mehta and film director Steven Spielberg.

After Jackson’s selection was announced in July, he became the subject of a lawsuit and investigations involving possible child molestation. Bleiweiss made no comment on those stories, but did conclude his editorial by betting that the singer would still get the award and “the joint will be sold out.”

Representatives of American Friends of Hebrew University, however, announced recently that Jackson had asked to have his name withdrawn at the time he canceled his world tour, saying he needed help to overcome an addiction to pain relievers. The organization said Cable News Network talk show host Larry King would receive the award instead.

“I’m happy to say I lost the bet,” Bleiweiss said this week. “It should not be given to a superficial figure in pop culture.”