Supporters of Rabbi A. Bruce Goldman, dismissed Jewish chaplain at Columbia University, accused a trustee of the university yesterday of trying to block Rabbi Goldman’s appointment to a similar post at Wesleyan University. The accusation was leveled against Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, president and publisher of the New York Times, who is a member of Columbia’s Jewish Alumni Advisory Board, the body that originally appointed Rabbi Goldman to his campus post and subsequently advised him that his contract was not being renewed. The accusation was contained in a 350-word statement issued by the Committee for Freedom for University Clergy.
Mr. Sulzberger said yesterday that he was consulted by Edwin Etherington, president of Wesleyan, regarding Rabbi Goldman’s qualifications and “I told Mr. Etherington that from my experience I did not think Rabbi Goldman was the man best suited for the job.” A spokesman for Wesleyan confirmed yesterday that Rabbi Goldman had been considered for the job but that it was never offered to him and would not be. Other university sources said that Mr. Sulzberger was one of a number of references consulted in connection with Rabbi Goldman’s possible employment.
Rabbi Goldman, who has the support of several student and faculty groups at Columbia, has accused the Jewish Alumni Advisory Board of complicity with the university administration in firing him because of his support of student rebels in last spring’s disorders on the Columbia campus. Mr. Sulzberger said yesterday that as far as he could recollect, Rabbi Goldman was informed of his dismissal before the campus troubles.
Rabbi Goldman took issue with Columbia University on another matter. He walked out of the annual baccalaureate service on Monday after addressing the gathering and demanding an apology from the university for an allegedly anti-Semitic article published last winter in Columbia College Today, an alumni publication. Rabbi Goldman told Columbia and Barnard College seniors and their parents that the university’s refusal to apologize despite a 15-0 vote by the City Human Rights Commission requesting it to do so confirmed its unawareness of the “shabby bigotry” contained in the article. The article dealt with the 1968 campus disorders and was branded anti-Semitic by some because of its references to the Jewish background of some of the student leaders.
On other occasions, Rabbi Goldman has charged that the Jewish Alumni Advisory Board dismissed him because they felt he reflected badly on the “Jewish image” they wanted to cultivate at Columbia. “They told me to shave off my beard–they said it made me look too Jewish,” said Rabbi Goldman, a 33-year-old graduate of the Reform Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
About two dozen Jewish students and alumni of Columbia University demonstrated a week ago in front of the Newsweek building in Manhattan, owned by Gerald Oestreicher, the chairman of the Jewish Alumni Advisory Board. Mr. Oestreicher told a reporter in April that Rabbi Goldman had been dismissed because the board felt “that he had overstepped the bounds of a religious man and was a co-belligerent with the students” in the Columbia campus disorders.
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.
