The University & The Jews No. 4: The Interwar Years: Exclusion & Self-Determination

Advertisement for the 1928 opening gala at Yeshiva College.

Given that the 1920s marked the height of Jewish exclusion from university life, it is perhaps not coincidental that the 1920s witnessed both a major attempt to found a national Jewish university (a forerunner to Brandeis University, which would only be created in 1948) and the opening of Yeshiva College (in 1928). Zev Eleff’s 2011 article on a proposed national Jewish university highlights the possibilities and tensions inherent in the former idea: Proponents, most notably Louis Newman, argued that Jews needed an outstanding institution of higher education that would welcome them, just like their non-Jewish counterparts had. Eleff points out that Newman was inspired by the contemporaneous founding of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But the idea found many detractors, most of whom argued that Newman’s proposed ‘Menorah University’ would be essentially throwing in the towel on the effort at joining the American mainstream—it was, in their words, un-American. Instead, they encouraged Jews to continue going to state universities.

Where Newman’s vision had its roots in the assimilationist narrative of late-19^th and early-20^th century Reform Judaism, Bernard Revel’s vision of Yeshiva College, which he first outlined in 1923, had its roots in the yeshiva world. Revel himself was an iluy, a child Talmudic prodigy, and upon his arrival in the United States he earned the first doctorate at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, writing about Philo.

(As an aside, it is fascinating that Philo was the subject of research not only for Revel, but also for Samuel Belkin, his successor at Yeshiva, and for Harry Wolfson, the first chair of Judaic Studies at Harvard. After World War II, Philo would not be as prominent a topic of research—Maimonides came to replace him as the model of integration between Western and traditional Jewish thought. My own theory of this is that one couldn’t easily write on Maimonides in the context of a basically Christian university, since knowledge of Maimonides requires Talmudic knowledge, which had been avoided in university life. Philo can be read as a Bible commentary through a Greek philosophic lens, and therefore was an acceptable topic in early-20^th century American academe. For several reasons, not least of which was the development of university Talmud scholarship, Maimonides could become the exemplar of synthesis, displacing Philo, after World War II. More on this later.)

Revel’s vision received similar critiques to those leveled against Newman’s idea—essentially that it was un-American to develop parochial education; but Revel was also attacked by traditionalists who saw the idea of Yeshiva College as leading on a dangerous path away from tradition. Yet the idea for Yeshiva College was initially a concession to reality: students at the Yeshivat Rabbi Yitzhak Elchanan (RIETS) needed to get college degrees in order to get decent jobs. Their choices were thus to attend night school or drop out of yeshiva. Revel himself had some loftier visions for what the institution could be, and invoked language of integration and synthesis, but largely he was alone in this effort, one of only a handful of men with deep Talmudic backgrounds and PhDs. With the founding of Yeshiva, he began to collect others who shared similar training and commitments, but it would be left to Samuel Belkin and the generation after World War II to make Yeshiva into a University and truly flesh out a vision of synthesis.

 

The University & the Jews I: Introduction

Rabbi Bernard Dov Revel, PhD, first president of Yeshiva University.

I’m preparing for my last round of qualifying exams for my PhD program. One of the wonderful challenges in this process is preparing a reading list and writing the questions. As a recent column by a graduate student in the Chronicle of Higher Education observed, the point of qualifying exams is to have a collegial conversation with your future colleagues, the faculty. And that means doing original thinking, bringing together previous knowledge and ideas into new formulations and new theories. That’s both thrilling and daunting.

My general area of interest is the intersection of American Jewish life and American higher education, and particularly in the story of Modern Orthodoxy. My academic work has taken me well into the literatures of both these areas, and there aren’t too many other folks who have done the same thing. A number of Jewish historians have done work that touches on the academy, but few seem to have done so from the perspective of the literature on the history and philosophy of American colleges and universities. And some of those who work in the latter area have touched on Jewish life, but generally their treatments focus on the exclusion of Jews from elite academic life and their eventual inclusion as part of the expansion of American higher education after the Second World War. And virtually no one I’ve come across, with the exception of Zev Eleff, has taken up these two areas with an additional eye on Modern Orthodoxy (if you’re out there, we want to know!).

In the department of the general relationship between American Jews and American higher ed, Harold Wechsler and David Ritterband’s book on Jews in the Academy is the place to start. David Hollinger’s intellectual biography of Morris Raphael Cohen remains a formidable piece of scholarship, and his book Jews, Science, and Secular Culture is also a wonderful collection of thoughtful essays on the ways in which Jews and academe have worked together in mutually reinforcing ways. Lila Corwin Berman’s book Speaking of Jews is also very helpful, though its focus is not on universities per se.

But trying to find folks who are as conversant in Lawrence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (the classic starting point for most scholars of modern American higher education) and Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University (a more recent classic), on the one hand, and Jeffrey Gurock’s The Men and Women of Yeshiva or Samuel Belkin’s In His Image on the other, is a real challenge. Alan Brill, whose contributions to understanding Modern Orthodoxy in the context of wider trends in thought and intellectual history are enormous (and whose expertise and intellectual generosity have greatly assisted me), is essential. Among the handful of people who think about Jewish life from the standpoint of historical scholarship on higher education, most have focused on non-Orthodox figures like Cohen, Jewish social scientists (Horace Kallen, Oscar Handlin, Nathan Glazer, Marshall Sklare, etc.), Jewish historians or Semiticists (Salo Baron, Harry Wolfson, Felix Adler, Morris Jastrow), or Jewish literary figures (e.g. Lionel Trilling). While many of these men grew up in Orthodox families, none remained so. Thus virtually all of the studies I have read that have a foot in the world of scholarship on American higher education don’t deal with the Orthodox world, at least not as anything more than the background to a nostalgic or hated childhood in the lives of formerly Orthodox academics.

On the other hand, the literature within Modern Orthodoxy that deals with what the university is or should be tends to be rather limited. The writings of Belkin or Revel generally come at the question from a Jewish lens, seeing the issues as dealing with marrying Western and Jewish knowledges–not from the perspective of American higher education. Aharon Lichtenstein is certainly conversant in the works of Cardinal Newman (and there are some very interesting comparisons to be made between Catholic higher education and the issues for a Jewish institution like YU—see, for instance, Phillip Gleason’s Contending with Modernity; but the fact that Catholic higher ed is so much larger than Yeshiva makes the comparison of limited use), and he invokes Matthew Arnold and a late-19^th century vision of college as one that Orthodoxy might aspire to. And a few thinkers, like Emmanuel Rackman, Walter Wurzburger, and Eliezer Berkovitz, see the possibilities for Modern Orthodoxy within Western philosophy and American life, which would have implications for a university. (And Rackman, who became president of Bar-Ilan University, clearly had more developed thoughts–but not necessarily in the American context. Had he been elected president of YU in 1976, things would likely have been different.) None of these thinkers is having a dialogue with Clark Kerr or Robert Maynard Hutchins; which is to say that they’re not having a self-conscious conversation about the aims and purposes of liberal education within the literature on liberal education, even though they clearly value such an education. (Just what is meant by a liberal education is something vigorously debated; see Bruce Kimball’s Orators and Philosophers for the standard work unpacking the term.)

So this is where I am aiming to come in. There are a few histories of Yeshiva University (Klaperman’s hagiographic piece from the 60s, Gurock’s work, Rakeffet’s biography of Revel), but none of them deal with Yeshiva from the broader perspective of American higher education. There are some sociological notes about the fact that higher education is a sine qua non of Modern Orthodoxy in comparison to Haredi Orthodoxy. But there isn’t a full-fledged examination of how the idea of the university influenced he development of Modern Orthodoxy, much less how that same idea functioned for the larger American Jewish community.

As I gear up for my exams, I’m hoping to write several blog posts by way of unpacking some of my ideas and trying out possible arguments. (I’m aware that my examiners may be reading too; I’d welcome your responses.) Though some of this may sound technical because of the reading involved, my aim will be to keep it simple and understandable. The issues here are not simply fascinating to me; I think they bear on some of the fundamental questions for higher education, which Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith articulated over 50 years ago in their anthology on the history of American colleges and universities:

How was one to adjust the competing claims of quantity and quality, of democracy and excellence, of the professional or vocational and the liberal? How would one reconcile the practical and the theoretical, the development of means and the formulation of ends, the criteria of the graduate school and the ideals of the liberal arts college? How many subjects can be effectively taught in an age of specialized knowledge? Is there any longer a common body of knowledge to which it is desirable to expose all college men and women? What kind of a liberal arts curriculum is meaningful in an age of specialization? How much common organization and how much individual choice should such a curriculum provide?

These questions have as much to do with American Jewish life and Modern Orthodoxy as they do with colleges and universities. What is it to be a good, educated human being, and a good and educated Jew? What should an educational institution look like based on that vision? How are Torah and ‘secular’ studies to be defined, learned, and understood? How does an institution’s approach shape the values of both the individuals under its roof and the larger communities of which they are a part?

Those are the questions I aim to explore.

 

The New York Times and Madoff’s Jewishness

The New York Times has been relentless in its front-page coverage of the Madoff scandal. $50 billion is a lot of money, and it’s a New York story, so I can’t blame them. But they’ve also been unstinting in pointing out, repeatedly, the fact of Madoff’s Jewishness. A couple of reactions:

1. This morning’s article about Yeshiva University’s response is actually a wonderful piece, and reflects well on the Jewish community in general and YU in particular. Madoff was on the board of YU, chaired the Sy Syms School of Business, and was in bed with another board member, Ezra Merkin. So the scandal has hit YU particularly hard, and it is heartening to see the university reacting in the classroom.

(At the same time, I have to believe that the Times’s portrayal is inaccurate: Of course we all react most strongly when events hit us in the face; but why does it have to take an event like this for people to realize that Jewish life is not just defined by ritual, but, just as importantly, but ethics and behavior? While I would have liked to see YU and the Rabbinical Council of America taking a stronger lead on, say, the Rubashkin’s scandal, there is no question that YU has publicly promoted discussion and reflection on ethics and morals beyond ritual in recent years. I particularly remember the busloads of YU students at the Darfur rally several years ago on the national mall. But I digress.)

2. This letter from David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, published Saturday, tugs at my American (and Illinoisan) heartstrings and makes an important point to the Times:

To the Editor:

In “Standing Accused: A Pillar of Finance and Charity,” your Dec. 13 Business Day article about Bernard L. Madoff, arrested in a major fraud scheme, there was a striking emphasis on his being Jewish. It was not just once, or twice, but at least three times before the article continued inside. Why?

Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?

I have read several accounts in The Times of the shenanigans of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois, yet have no clue what his religion is, nor, frankly, do I care. Why should I? Unless he was acting in the name of his faith, which I assume he was not, what difference does it make? And if a profile is warranted and the governor’s faith matters to him, mention it and move on.

But to refer to the “Jewish T-bill,” “the clubby Jewish world” and the “world of Jewish New York” within four paragraphs near the top of the article on Mr. Madoff was over the top.

David A. Harris
Executive Director
American Jewish Committee
New York, Dec. 13, 2008

3. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik is reported to have said that Jews in the New York area should not read the Times on Shabbat, since, in essence, the paper is a Jewish paper, printed for Jews. If someone has work done expressly for them on Shabbat, it is forbidden to benefit from that work on Shabbat. (I have other halakhic reasons for thinking that reading the paper on Shabbat is a bad idea, based on the principle of dober davar, that we are to talk and think about things on Shabbat that are different in style and substance from the things we dwell on during the week. For news junkies like me, the paper is a quintessentially weekday thing.)

Of course, the Times isn’t a Jewish paper. But one has to wonder, given the way it has approached this story, as well as the regular curiosity pieces it runs on Jewish life, what its Jewish nature really is. I’ve always thought that New York Jews’ obsession with the Times was a bit overblown, as when some rabbis during the second intifada called on Jews to cancel their subscriptions in protest at the Times’s coverage. But watching how it has responded to Madoff–which brings in not just the New York section, but the business and front page sections as well–I’m starting to think differently.