Using His Religion

by Steven Menashi

“It’s fascinating,” observed President James O. Freedman in the February 11 Los Angeles Times, “that there was not a Jewish president of a major university — with one or two exceptions — until about 15 years ago. And then all of a sudden — without notice — there are Jewish presidents now at dozens of major institutions.”

Among all those presidents, however, Freedman remains among the most outspoken on Jewish issues in higher education. Through a series of public comments, notably his 1990 attack on the Dartmouth Review, Freedman has repeatedly used his ethnicity to make a name for himself in academic circles.

The Los Angeles Times interview concerned his comments at the opening of the Roth Center for Jewish Life, in which he exposed Dartmouth’s history of anti-Semitism. Since the Roth Center dedication, Freedman has returned to the Roth Center only once — for his annual visit to Hillel at Friday night services.

At last year’s visit, Freedman mentioned that Dartmouth tries to recruit both Jewish faculty and students because, the Dartmouth reported “It is important to have diverse faculty because it is important to give minority students more role models.”

It is curious that President Freedman, supposedly a Jewish role model himself, would have such a weak connection to Judaism that he would attend religious services only once per year.

In 1989, the College scheduled Freshman Parents’ Weekend for the beginning of Passover. Freedman expressed “regret,” but took no action to change the date. Evidently, he wasn’t planning on being busy.

Freedman explained his Judaism in a column in the December 4, 1994 New York Times. “Being Jewish means many things to me,” Freedman wrote, “but none more important to my identity than being part of a tradition of scholarship and learning.”

His “house abounded with books and conversation about ideas” and “I gradually came to understand that serious learning was a core Jewish value connecting us with the wisdom of the past.”

He even goes so far as to say that “By pursuing scholarship and learning, American Jews have preserved their identity . . . and fortified the covenant between themselves and God.” In Freedman’s formulation, his own identity as a Jew and, indeed, the character of American Jewry itself, is a bookish and academic nature.

Studying may, in fact, be a noble pursuit, but the simple fact remains that one need not be Jewish to pursue it. Stereotypes aside, the truth is that gentiles are equally capable of “scholarship and learning.” Some may even rival Freedman in scholarship, though that would be hard to imagine.

In any case, Freedman’s conception of Judaism is one that can be expressed in a purely secular way. In fact, his own list of “Books that influenced my development” (http://bookstore.harvard.net/recommended/freedman.html) contains no texts on Jewish subjects. A Judaism centered on scholasticism can hardly preserve Jewish identity, much less fulfill a holy covenant.

Jewish faith and practice have sustained the Jewish community throughout history by conveying a set of shared values and beliefs and distinguishing it from non-Jews. To replace that spirit with nondenominational pursuits is to erode the core of Jewish identity.

It is to supplant Judaism with a faint “Jewishness” that can hardly attract the passion of succeeding generations. The failure of the Jewish civil religion can be seen in the fact that one-third of Americans of Jewish ancestry no longer report Judaism as their religion; twelve percent are now practicing Christians. Being a Jewish role model ought entail some commitment to Jewish faith.

Were ethnicity the sole determinant of Jewish identity, Freedman would not even be Dartmouth’s first Jewish president. That would be John Kemeny, who was also of Jewish origin. However, whereas Kemeny did not identify himself as Jewish, Freedman harbors a penchant for using his religion to gain political mileage — even to the point of perpetuating myths about Dartmouth. In 1990, he fought nonexistant anti-Semites and race-baiters in the student body.

In his Roth Center speech, Freedman used information from Alexandra Sheppard ‘92’s senior thesis about the role of Jewish students at the College in the 1920s-40s. Freedman left out her conclusion, however, that despite quotas and masked anti-Semitism, Dartmouth was at the time a “good place to be Jewish.”

Sheppard also noted that during the 1930s, the percentage of Jewish enrollment at the College was higher than it is presently. The class of 1935, for example, was about 15-20 percent Jewish, while Jewish enrollment today remains around 10 percent.

This is not to trivialize the anti-Semitism that did exist at the time, but merely to note that President Freedman failed to paint an accurate portrait of Dartmouth past.

Freedman likes to see himself as having opened Dartmouth up to Jewish students. He called the Roth Center an important step in “the legitimization of the authentication of Judaism” at Dartmouth. Whatever that means, the truth is that Dartmouth opened its doors to Jewish students and Judaism by the late 1950s and put the study of Judaism in the curriculum in 1964.

Today’s Dartmouth is also a “good place to be Jewish.” Freedman’s political grandstanding, however, does not contribute to that environment and has, in fact, harmed it.