The University of Southern California has announced the establishment of an Institute for the Study of Jews in American Life that will study the growing number of Jews living in the Western United States.
As leaders in the arts and media, the general economy, and in professional and academic life, “Jews are significantly influencing the shape of things to come” in the West, says Morton Owen Schapiro, dean of the College of Letters, Arts and Science at USC.
“There are now more than 922,000 Jews in California alone, and their number in the Western United States has tripled since 1970,” Schapiro said.
“We felt the time was right for a scholarly institute, the first of its kind, focusing on issues of contemporary Jewish life and identity in the West, their relationship to other ethnic and religious groups, and their role in the general community,” says sociologist Barry Glassner, the director of the institute.
“There are many excellent Jewish study centers at American and other universities, but their focus is mainly on historical and religious research,” says Glassner. “Our priorities are current issues, with emphasis on the West.”
But is there a distinctive identity among Jews in the American West? The question will be the subject of a future conference at the institute, but a study conducted three years ago by the Council of Jewish Federations found some preliminary evidence that there is such an identity.
With results similar to the Hollywood cliche that residents of the Western United States are individualistic, independent-minded loners, the CJF study showed that Western Jews, compared to their counterparts in other regions, shunned religious and community affiliation, suspected central authority, gave least to charity and were less concerned about intermarriage and the fate of Israel.
At its inaugural event on Oct. 24-26, the institute will play to the university’s strength in the visual arts with a conference titled, “Eye & Thou: Jewish Autobiography in Film and Video.”
Other likely subjects on the institute’s future agenda are Jewish feminism, Jewish values and attitudes in public education and medical ethics, Hollywood’s portrayal of Jews, and Jewish relations with Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and Arab Americans.
At least for the first 60 years of its existence, until World War II, the private university near downtown Los Angeles was considered a WASP bastion inhospitable to minorities.
During the last couple of decades, USC has made a concerted effort to recruit Jewish students and faculty — now close to 10 percent of its 25,000 students are Jewish, as are one-third of all deans and professors.
USC President Steven Sample, who is given high marks for toughening USC’s standards over the past decade, recently noted, “The Jewish contribution has been immense. Our ties to the Jewish community are as strong as those of any other American university.”
These ties are greatly enhanced by USC’s close partnership with the neighboring Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s seminary. HUC’s faculty is teaching Jewish-themed courses for some 1,000 undergraduates, half of them non-Jews.
One major side benefit of the institute is that it gives the Jewish presence on campus a central address, which, not so incidentally, encourages generous donors to mail in their checks.
“The response from our Jewish alumni has been tremendous,” says Glassner. So far, without concerted publicity or a fund-raising campaign, about $1 million has come in for the institute.
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