They called for a renaissance of the Jewish spirit, for student empowerment and for pride in Judaism through knowledge as the new unifying force of a new generation of Jews.
For two intensive days, the self-styled “Edgar and Richard show” preached the revival of Jewish campus life at meetings with students, professors, community leaders and reporters.
The message brought by Edgar M. Bronfman and Richard M. Joel was that Hillel, the 70-year-old network of Jewish college and university centers, was being transformed from a 97-pound weakling into a muscular, exciting, relevant presence on campus and in the Jewish community.
They made for a persuasive combination: Bronfman, the urbane chairman of the Seagram distillers and juice empire, president of the World Jewish Congress and among the wealthiest people in the United States; and Joel, a staccato-talking, yarmulka-wearing former Bronx assistant district attorney and law professor at Yeshiva University.
Both were in town to meet and exhort Jewish student activists on Los Angeles area campuses and to introduce the community to the new Hillel, reincarnated and rejuvenated as the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, under the lay and professional leadership of Bronfman and Joel, respectively.
In recent years, the Hillel presence on 105 American campuses and in half a dozen other countries has undergone a transformation that Moment magazine headlined in a lengthy article as “The De-Nerdification of Hillel.”
Underlying the change has been the gradual realization by the Jewish establishment that if “Jewish continuity” was to become more than a catchword, Jewish college students would have to be the key link in the generational chain.
One basic need was money, especially because B’nai B’rith International, Hillel’s traditional funding source, had to reduce its support level drastically.
Into the breach stepped the Council of Jewish Federations, which at its last assembly assumed major fund-raising responsibility for Hillel, and a group of wealthy private donors, exemplified and rallied by Bronfman.
Of Hillel’s current budget of $22.5 million, 41 percent comes from Jewish Federations, 24 percent from donations and grants, 9 percent from B’nai B’rith and the rest from program and registration fees.
And under Joel’s direction, Hillel’s international headquarters instituted a tough, five-year review and accreditation process, judging each campus center on staff competence, diversity in programming, lay support, outreach to unaffiliated students and student empowerment.
The accreditation is no mere formality. Since Joel came on board six years ago, half of all Hillel directors in the country have been replaced.
The Hillel Center at the California State University, Northridge, is the first in the Los Angeles area to pass the test. Its director, Rabbi Jerrold Goldstein, describes the experience as a six-month process of self-analysis and planning for the future. In the midst of all this, the Northridge earthquake struck the campus with particular fury.
Yet with the new impetus and hope, there is still a long way to go. Of the more than 400,000 Jewish students on American campuses, only about 50,000, or 12.5 percent, are involved in any Hillel activities.
According to a 1990 Brandeis University study, another 25 percent are so alienated from Jewish life that they can be counted out. The remaining 62 percent may be reachable, under the right conditions and with imaginative approaches.
The situation is no better, and probably somewhat worse, in Los Angeles, where Jewish affiliation rates for all ages are lower than on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
The case at the Northridge campus is instructive. There are about 3,500 Jewish students on campus, less than half the number of five years ago. Some 900 are on the Hillel mailing list, said Goldstein, but only a small fraction of these participate in Hillel activities.
Why no greater involvement? Part of the answer lies in a letter sent by a female student to Elissa Schwartz, Hillel outreach coordinator. “I no longer believe that only needs go to Hillel, and I want to participate,” she wrote. “But I drive 20 miles each way from my home to campus, and I spend two hours a day in my car. I take a full study load and work 22 hours a week in a coffee shop. I don’t have time to go out with my boyfriend or to eat or sleep.”
Yet, CSUN Hillel was praised by Bronfman and Joel for establishing effective ties with other ethnic and special groups on campus, which came into play last year when Hillel counterprogrammed a campus talk by black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan.
At a news conference at CSUN, Bronfman gave his own recipe for the survival of Jewish identity and cohesiveness.
After noting that the Holocaust, Israel and Soviet Jewry were “no longer the great galvanizing issues” of Jewish life, Bronfman observed that both U.S. Jewry and Israel have “pretty well made it.”
However, in achieving this success, “what we lost was Judaism,” he said. “What we need is rejuvenation, a renaissance of the Jewish spirit, based on religion and Jewish study.”
Bronfman voluteered that he does not particularly like going to a synagogue, and rarely does so. But in recent years he had pursued a self-study course in Torah and Talmud, he said.
“The essence of my Judaism is my pride in Judaism,” he said. “The only way you can have pride is to have knowledge. The only way you can have knowledge is to study. I exhort everyone to learn as much about Judaism as they possibly can.”
Joel put it more pithily: “You can’t be a light unto the nations if you don’t have the fuel to light your own fire.”
In early April, Seagram purchased a controlling interest in the entertainment conglomerate MCA, Inc. Asked whether he might promote his “Jewish” agenda through MCA films and products, Bronfman replied with a definite no.
“Business is business,” he said, “and Moses is Moses.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
