RELIGION / JOHN DART : Journal Defends Ties to University : Judaism: Jewish Spectator affiliates with institution to ensure its future. But a prominent author says it risks becoming a ‘house organ.’

The 70-page Jewish quarterly that arrived in mailboxes this week was typically thoughtful.

Articles declared, among other things, that spousal abuse is a larger-than-acknowledged Jewish problem, that too many rabbis suffer burnout over conflicting expectations and that two decades of women rabbis has not led to a “feminization” of the synagogue as predicted.

But there was also a surprise in the fall issue of Jewish Spectator, edited and published in Calabasas. After 58 years as an independent religious voice within North American Jewry, the journal has become affiliated with the University of Judaism.

Editor-Publisher Robert Bleiweiss, 60, announced that the magazine will continue to be independent editorially and financially but has entered into a closer association with the university to ensure its future.

“The magazine’s open, trans-Judaic policies will also continue, unchanged in any way,” said Bleiweiss, referring to the journal’s past lack of organizational ties.

However, the journal’s best-known contributor, Jacob Neusner, who has written, edited or contributed to hundreds of books, said he was not convinced.

“I resigned as contributing editor because I regard myself as a nonpartisan among the Judaic religious movements in the country,” Neusner said in a telephone interview. The author is distinguished research professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa.

“I didn’t want to serve in the administration of a journal that could turn into a house organ,” said Neusner, who, like other contributors, has donated his work for the journal.

The 47-year-old University of Judaism, a liberal arts and graduate school on Mulholland Drive in the Sepulveda Pass, offers beginning courses for rabbinical students who may complete their training at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York to become ordained in the centrist Conservative branch of Judaism.

Responding to Neusner’s statements, Rabbi Daniel H. Gordis, a University of Judaism administrator who went from contributing editor to managing editor with the fall issue, said the university is open to self-criticism and would not jeopardize the journal’s integrity.

“We are firmly part of the Conservative movement,” Gordis said. “At the same time, our institution is very much committed to nurturing the intellectual life of the Jewish community in its broadest dimensions. Our faculty, for instance, has included Reform, Orthodox and secular Jews and non-Jews.”

Gordis is the university’s vice president for public affairs and community outreach as well as acting dean of the rabbinical school and assistant professor of philosophy.

The Jewish Spectator affiliation awaits confirmation by the university’s board, “but I’m absolutely convinced this is a deal that will happen,” Gordis said.

As for the magazine’s direction, Gordis pledged that the university will honor “the intellectual honesty and legacy of its founder, Trudie Weiss-Rosmarin.”

Weiss-Rosmarin began the magazine in New York five years after emigrating from her native Germany in 1931. She maintained that Jewish life, however strong it might be in secular and community expressions, needs a vibrant Judaism to compete with other cultures, one biographer wrote.

She moved to Santa Monica in the 1980s and eventually persuaded Bleiweiss, who was already editing and publishing several labor publications, to take over the magazine a month before she died in 1989 at age 81.

The journal, influential despite its limited circulation, was down to about 800 paid subscribers and 1,500 copies of each issue mailed when Bleiweiss assumed control. He said the journal has doubled its paid subscriptions and publishes at least 5,000 copies each issue. Donors, including Bleiweiss himself, cover the costs of the extra distribution.

In linking up with the University of Judaism, Gordis became vice chairman of the nonprofit corporation that owns the journal, American Friends of the Center for Jewish Living and Values. Rabbi Robert Wexler, president of the university, also joined the center’s board.

Bleiweiss said he hopes the magazine will receive further exposure through the university’s constituency of 10,000 alumni, students and supporters.

“One of the things I have in mind is to increase the frequency to six or eight issues a year,” he said. “Part of my problem is that I don’t have time or staff to do that.”

Bleiweiss and his wife, Vida, who helps run the magazine out of their home, attend a Reform synagogue in Woodland Hills. They have a son who is an Orthodox rabbi.

Rabbi Eli Schochet of West Hills’ Shomrei Torah Synagogue, who knows both Bleiweiss and the university’s leaders, said the marriage is promising.

“Sometimes the severest critics of Conservative Judaism and the school have been people associated with the university itself,” said Schochet, an adjunct professor at the hilltop campus.

Almost as if to demonstrate that, Gordis wrote an article in the summer issue that belabored unnamed leaders of the Reform, Conservative and small Reconstructionist branches of Judaism for lacking courage to provide intense Jewish schooling for their memberships, such as Orthodoxy does with its yeshivas.

The fall issue of the magazine published a letter from Rabbi Ed Feinstein, of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, saying that the idea of a liberal yeshiva is brilliant but Gordis’ accusations were “wrong-headed, arrogant and offensive.” Gordis wrote a sharply worded reply in the same issue.

Looking beyond the dispute in print between colleagues, which Gordis said he now wishes had not become so personal, Gordis said he was struck again by the wide impact of the small-circulation quarterly.

“I got calls from Canada and letters from Israel and heard that it was raised in staff meetings of various Jewish organizations in New York,” Gordis said. “It’s being read avidly by Jewish leadership and gets passionate responses.”