interview with arthur goldberg side a q. this is tina isaacs interviewing dean arthur ... ·...

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Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 15, 1976 By Tina Isaacs Interview Tape 1 Side A Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur Goldberg. 1 1 m in Dean Page 1 Goldberg 1 s office and it is December 15th, 1976. Okay, this seems to be working. Testing one, two, three, four. Okay. A. 1 1 11 try to talk into the mike. Q. Okay. A. Alright, go ahead. Q. Mr. Goldberg, could you please tell me where you were born and when, if you 1 i ke . . . if it 1 s not personal . A. I was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1933. Q. Okay. And when your family ... were both your parents American? A. Well, my mother was born in this country and my father was born in Russia; arrived here about age eight or nine, I guess. They both grew up here. Q. Do you know why he left Russia? (Laughter) That 1 s a silly question! A. (Laughter) The Ukraines, the Cossacks were coming; the pogroms were coming. The people decided it would be a good idea to leave. Q. And did they settle into New York? A. Oh, yes. They settled into New York and New Jersey, and New York again, and moved on. If you 1 d 1 ike, I can give you a sort of biographical, auto- biographical, rundown of myself, my family, and Judaism, which makes an exercise in itself. Q. Oh, fine! That 1 s much better than me asking silly questions. A. Alright. Both my sets of grandparents were Orthodox Jews from Russia. Russia ... Poland. Right in along that Russian Polish border. As I said, my mother was born in this country, but she is the youngest child. All of her sisters and brothers were born in Europe. Both sets of grand-

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Page 1: Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG Side A Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur ... · 2015-04-22 · Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 15, 1976 By Tina Isaacs Interview

Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 15, 1976 By Tina Isaacs

Interview Tape 1 Side A

Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur Goldberg. 11 m in Dean

Page 1

Goldberg 1 s office and it is December 15th, 1976. Okay, this seems to be

working. Testing one, two, three, four. Okay.

A. 11 11 try to talk into the mike.

Q. Okay.

A. Alright, go ahead.

Q. Mr. Goldberg, could you please tell me where you were born and when, if

you 1 i ke . . . if it 1 s not personal .

A. I was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1933.

Q. Okay. And when your family ... were both your parents American?

A. Well, my mother was born in this country and my father was born in Russia;

arrived here about age eight or nine, I guess. They both grew up here.

Q. Do you know why he left Russia? (Laughter) That 1 s a silly question!

A. (Laughter) The Ukraines, the Cossacks were coming; the pogroms were

coming. The people decided it would be a good idea to leave.

Q. And did they settle into New York?

A. Oh, yes. They settled into New York and New Jersey, and New York again,

and moved on. If you 1 d 1 ike, I can give you a sort of biographical, auto-

biographical, rundown of myself, my family, and Judaism, which makes an

exercise in itself.

Q. Oh, fine! That 1 s much better than me asking silly questions.

A. Alright. Both my sets of grandparents were Orthodox Jews from Russia.

Russia ... Poland. Right in along that Russian Polish border. As I

said, my mother was born in this country, but she is the youngest child.

All of her sisters and brothers were born in Europe. Both sets of grand-

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A. (Continued) parents were very active in their respective synagogues. My

mother's father was cantor of his synagogue and my father's parents were

very active leaders in their little synagogue, both of them very orthodox.

And my mother's ... my father's mother ran a sort of refugee center dur­

ing the second World War and just before it, and brought a great many ortho­

dox Jews over here, including rabbis, several of whom are today fairly big

wheels in New York City rabbinical.

Q. Excuse me if I interrupt you. Were these refugees mostly from Eastern

Europe or were they from Germany?

A. Mostly from Europe. Almost all of these people were Slavic Jews, Russian -

Polish Jews .. 11 licvacs11 (?) But during the war people weren't all that

fussy, and in fact, as you may know, the flow of Jews through Europe quickly

went from Poland to Germany and out. So there were some German Jews. But

mostly they were Slavic and mostly they were very orthodox. The rabbi whom

I remember and whom Rabbi Karp probably knows, is named Garelick. When I

first met Garelick, thought he was a very old man because he had a beard.

Garelick was probably thirty at the time. I was a very little boy at the

time. There is some interesting stories associated with that, which maybe

make sense in this context and that is the context of assimilation. A very

funny kind of problem that all of these people faced, in that they were

orthodox and strong about it, America .was a land of opportunity and it only

had a few requirements for making it economically in the city. And those

were: one, that you work on Saturday. That was really a very strong require­

ment, particularly in those pre-union days. Second, was sort of that

uh, you not wear a yarmulke. If you wanted to, it depended on how strong

you were and how much pushing around you could take, nobody was going to kill

you.

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A. (Continued) And then the kosher food question: the upshot of all of that is

that ... all of my father's brothers ... they're all pharmacists, except

for my father. Big value on education, everybody supposed to get an education.

My dad didn't go to college because he was the oldest and he had to work to

help the others; nevertheless, he had a great respect for education. My

father's father was a building contractor and he didn't work Saturdays. His

father was a carpenter. He held to it, but his sons were never able to do

that and yet they remained involved with his synagogue for many, many, many

years, into their forties ... well, one of them is still involved. They

kept their businesses open on Saturday, they kept kosher home, they ate out

at non-kosher restaurants, they didn't flaunt it in their parents face .•

a standard practice. A very close-knit family. Everybody got together on

Sunday, High Holidays, everybody stayed, nobody rode, all this kind of stuff.

There was even a fairly rich kind of intellectual overlay in all of that.

There were real arguments about ethics and values as they spun off from

talmudic learning and the trade off on practice. Interesting enough, my

parents generation were quite ambivalent about which way it wanted to go in

this world. A very revealing exercise, which would embarrass my parents

today, I'm sure, is that when I was very young, I wanted to go to yeshiva in

New York. I wanted to go to yeshiva not because I was strictly orthodox, but

because my good handball playing buddy went to the yeshiva, and we had to

break up our handball game when he went to school. Little kids in New York

in those days played handball and not basketball. There were walls all over

the place and you played handball, that's all. My grandfather, my father's

father thought it was a lovely idea. My mother's father died when I was very

young and that's why he didn't enter into this. My father's father thought

that this would be a terrific idea. My father didn't nor did my mother. They

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A. (Continued) were really afraid that I would grow up orthodox, pious, and all

the things that would be frightening to people. And so, somewhat sadly,

continued to go to pub] ic school and 1 ive in a very Jewish neighborhood. For

a large part of my life, I assumed there were only two kinds of people in

this world: Jews and Italians. The Italians were fine. My father thought

the Italians were just like Jews except they ate pasta. You walk into an

Italian house, you walk into the kitchen, the mama is there and the whole

thing. We then moved when was about ten to Connecticut.

Q. Are you an only child?

A. No. have a younger brother. When we moved to Connecticut, my parents

became fearful. We were moving to the land of the Gentiles. And that was

really funny because in Hartford, Connectibut, there 1 s an enormous Jewish

community. But coming out of the Bronx, where in the course of five blocks

you'd pass four 1 ittle synagogues, these were all shtitel, they were orthodox

predicated on the notion that no one could drive on the Sabbath, you had to

walk, so they were all within walking distance. They come up to Hartford,

Connecticut which is the place to which we went, it was really a radical

change. It is a smaller community and it's a much more assimilated com­

munity, with a big, strong German-Jewish base and a big Reform Temple that

predates the second World War and that was a whole new land for us. At that

point, they became very worried about us, I think. With only a 1 ittle

prompting from the leadership of the local yeshiva, enrolled me in the

yeshiva there.

going to pub! ic

was about age, guess was maybe eleven. had been

) you know, three times a week, whatever.

Terrible exercise in New York City, just absolutely terrible. The only

good thing about it ... it was terrible educationally, in terms of what you

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A. (Continued) learned from the book. It was very good in terms of human

). A lot of human access back and forth. Anger, love, but it

was very genuine. Nobody ever heard of (unintelligible) anything and people

put there souls on the 1 ine for whatever they were worth, good or bad, they

laid it right out. And you got used to doing business 1 ike that and that's

probably a good thing in itself; but ih terms of how much Hebrew and Talmud

I learned, very little: which put me at an enormous disadvantage in this

little yeshiva, which was a very 1 ittle yeshiva. It was just beginning. It

was maybe five, six years old when I entered it. It was a beat-up old house

in the downtown, dilapitated part of Hartford, Connecticut. It had maybe a

hundred students, I don't know. I doubt it. I admit, I was way out-of-wack,

because was a second-grade (unintelligible) student in that school. made

many good friends on the faculty who are friends of mine even now. Even

though I was their worst discipline case in years. I'm gonna jump the story

some because that yeshiva today is a multi-million dollar enterprise. My

father was the treasurer of that yeshiva. My mother was the chairman of the

whatever-it-is.

Q. Your parents still 1 ive in Hartford then?

A. They still live in Hartford; they live in West Hartford. They're very active

leaders in what is the orthodox ways, but it's a peculiar kind of orthodox.

Almost all of the money for that yeshiva comes from people who are not

) It's a funny, classical syndrome. The

school probably enrolls now five hundred or so students. It's a big operation.

There's a lot of transition and assimilation involved in the (unintell igiblev

being eleven and being forty-three, and here I am now.

Q. So, you were raised orthodox then, are you still?

A. Well, I was raised a "funny, compromise orthodox". I was raised orthodox in the

home and assimilated outside, and not ashamed of being Jewish and without a

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A. (Continued) chip on my shoulder. A very funny kind of mix, but I think

very common for New York Jews. don't think I've ever seriously had an

anti-Seminic experience of any great consequence. I did have a couple of

experiences which were relative to my being Jewish which were enlightening.

One was when I was a college student and working in a (unintelligible) and

doing a Jot of physically back-breaking work. It was a wall-to-wall Gentile

(unintelligible), mostly Irish, I think. It wasn't a bit of a problem, except

that I was a bit of an outsider. But it was hard to separate out whether I

was an outsider because I was Jewish or Lf I was an outsider because I was an

). These people didn't know what the hell to make of me. Why would

a guy with a college education be mucking around (unintelligible). Still, I

was somewhat on the outside of that group, that wasn't really hostile, they

were clearly friends of both (unintelligible). But there was a little boy

who lived nearby who used to come around and watch me work, and always had

to watch out for him unless he'd get caught up in the machinery. He was

really a little boy, maybe seven years old. We got sort of friendly. guess

I was about eighteen then, twenty, something I ike that. He said to me one day,

sitting there, you know little kids speak out straight forward, he said, 11 Gee,

ya know, I don't know what I'd do if I was a Jew. 11 I said you'd probably

wouldn't be doing much, you'd probably be sitting there, playing or running

or something. It wouldn't make that much difference. And, we sort of Jet it

go. It became obvious to me that I was the cause of some comment from people

in the area. It was somewhat of a shock to me that this wo~ld puzzle a young

boy like that, that Jews were alien to his world and it clearly, for him, being

a Jew meant to carry some kind of a burden, and I understood all that and it

never came to anything very much. The next experience I had of that sort was

rather different, actually, it was when I went down South. And, you know

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A. (Continued) I had two different experiences. This is 1957, maybe. Around

there, 1 56, '57. I got tired of Southeners telling me after awhile how proud

they were of their Jewish community. I never encountered a hostile comment

well, I was an officer in the army so you can account for some hostile com­

ments. But, as soon as people knew you were Jewish, they would ta~e pains to

tell you how proud they were of their Jewish community, and what a nice

Jewish community they had. Now, it took me awhile to Hgure all that out.

And, as near as I can tell, in the South, that's the peculiar thing, the

South never (unintelligible). In some ways it was much more honest (unin­

telligible). So, they were aware of their differences and they sort people

out and they 1 ike people to stay in their 1 ittle boxes. And, they do have an

up and down but it's not always necessarily (unintelligible). B.ut, I

never did. On the other side of that I had a most interesting experience in

the South, in Colombus, Georgia. Walked into an army navy store with a Jew

to possibly buy my uniforms there instead of the PX, I was wearing civies.

I hadn't noticed the name of the store, if I had it wouldn't have made any

difference, because I'm still thinking like a New Yorker. walked in and

talked to the fellow about the price of his uniforms and the quality, and they

were considerably better than the ones at the PX, and the price was only a

little higher. thought I wanted to buy it there, which actually I did, but

said, look, I have a problem, I have no money and I won't have any until payday.

Can you extend me credit? And he looked at me with a smile from ear to ear

and he said, "Sonny, for you there is credit in this store anytime you want. 11

(Uses a Yiddish accent) Now, I brought the accent in at that point because he'd

been speaking with that accent all along, I never thought one thing of it. I'm

obviously very Jewish looking. I never think anything about that. Where

grew up, you walk into the store and the guy gives you nothing for being

Jewish because everybody's Jewish. (Laughter) It doesn't mean anything!

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A. (Continued) And it never occurred to me that it would. Clearly, the community

party situation is always such that for him the old notion of (unintelligible)

is real. And, I found that thr,oughout the South. The Jews are really much

more of a community of Jews and that as a Jew you can exercise claims that

I hadn 1 t seen done since the immigrants. The immigrants used to come and if

a) you were Jewish and, b) you were from ) then anyone within twenty

miles of ( who was Jewish in this country, owed you for at least a

night 1 s lodging. And, you could claim it. And, people would. I hadn 1 t seen

that in year 1 s, but it 1 s still true. At least it was twenty years ago.

don 1 t know how much of a picture that gives you of where l 1 m at, but (unintel-

1 igible) but I think not all that uncommon for New York Jews who weren 1 t knocked

.and beaten around, who feel pretty secure in being Jewish, not tense about it.

Q. Do you think this has something to do with being a second generation?

A. Yes, no question about it. My father fought his way through the streets of

New York. I never fought anybody, on the basis that I was Jewish. I fought

some people mostly they were Jews.

Q. Now your brother. What does your brother do?

A. My brother 1 s in Hartford because he works in my dad 1 s business, he 1 s a plant

controller. And, I can 1 t speak for his rel igous views; I really don• t know.

My own are funny.

straight emotion.

have a strong emotional bonding to orthodox Jews. lt 1 s

never heard a Reformed sermon that could bring tears to

my eyes. They 1 re all sociology lessons.; l 1 m not against sociology, there 1 s

a nice department here. But, ritual is something l 1 ve moved away from for

years and years and years.

Q. Are you affiliated with the temple here?

A. Yes, I am. l 1 m with the (unintelligible) Beth El. l 1m mainly affiliated with

(unintelligible) very complicated setting. I can 1 t really say l 1 m more (unin-

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A. (Continued) -telligible) part of the concern about just supporting the tradi­

tion, which I think it has. Very profound human values. I can't sort out

what part of those human values owe their existence to European shtitel and

all the persecution that surrounded that shtitel. In many ways the shtitel

had some of the values of the (unintelligible) Society. For one thing,

(unintelligible). Another thing, people pulled the wrong way. Those indi-

viduals were called ( ) and treated with some contempt but not thrown out.

It was just too dangerous to throw anybody out. The people understood about

working together, but there's a concept that comes out of all orthodox Jews,

and that appeals to me the most, it's a concept called ) . It

has to do with human dignity and it has to do with stiff-neck pride, it has to

do with the notion of humanity being in God's image and you don't desecrate

people or humiliate people, deface people ... you might (unintelligible)

... you wouldn't mutilate a corpse. A whole series of things I think tend

to make people treat other people with a certain amount of respect. It's one

(unintelligible) profound value. The other is ) ... the notion

of charity is really an actually antithesis of the (unintelligible) notion.

And the third is a respect for money. There are other values, but those

really central values and I can't really quite figure out to what extent they

owe there continuance to the conditions of the shtetil, to what extent they

come out of talmudic learning, to what extent the ritual has sustained them

over the years. In most cultures, my own guess is that in most cultures, the

intellectual rationality of behavion :of the culture is maybe rooted in some­

thing like talmud or some oth~r theological base are not which sustain people

from day to day. They may be important to have there as a reference in the

dynamics of the society, but my guess is that what sustains people from day

to day is ritual.

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Q. Now, do you think that American assimilation has ... well, put a damper

on these sorts of values today, or are they still there?

A. Oh, no. Well, American assimi Jation has put an enormous damper on the

ritual. That's clear. My grandfather used to say America ( ) . And yet he had great success in this country, he loved t~is country, but

he saw what was happening. He saw that the assimilation was pulling away

the children from the traditional modes of behavior. :lit didn't effect the

first generation very much in its committment to the ethical principle~

They understood about ) and all those things and believed

it, and felt it. I'm not sure if the assimilation brought the (unintell igi­

ble), if the assimilation in the long term, if you really do it, the thing

is I don't you would do it. If the thing actually ran with no feedback and

with no (unintelligible), the thing ran in this extensive melting pot thing,

you'd get one homogeneous mess; it might even be a nice mess, but it would

certainly be homogeneous. And I think in the conflicts between, for example

the Jewish values ( and the Calvanists views for charity, the Cal-

vanists would win. Just given the nature of the country; we tossed every­

body out if they were disallusioned. The Jewish culture doesn't do that.

It sorts people out very differently and it starts in the old shtetil from

a very interesting position. (Unintelligible) has written on this, and I

don't want to plagiarize his stuff, a lot of my insights come from (unintel-

1 igible) and then (unintelligible) also wrote (unintelligible). There's

another (unintelligible) aspect of Judaism. There's Yorn Kippur and there's

fasting but that's a little differenFthing, it's a symbolic self-denial

to remind one. In general, there's no big thing being placed on the (unin­

telligible) pain and on debasing oneself. One is gluttony, drunkeness is one,

but good food, pleasant drink; these are not considered bad sins. That's one

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A. (Continued) (unintelligible) It's not easy, it's not a bad thing if you

have (unintelligible) sex, okay. Check for one thing. In the old culture,

the perfect person, the (unintell i~ible), is one who obeys all 637 injunc-

tions. It's impossible to obey all 637 injunctions and get rich. There's

no time. mean, the amount of time you dedicate to studies makes it im-

possible to become rich that way. So you find a funny sort (unintelligible)

in the old shtetil. You found a talmud scholar (unintelligible) They were

almost all the poorest churchmen. They made their money tutoring children

and things I ike that, •bhe~ just barely existed, but people fed them (unin-

telligible). Very few communites had (unintelligible) you had to pay them.

(unintelligible) The problem with scholars was really a highly (unintelli-

gible) There's no macho treatment between the Jews. The really high

status people were the talmud (unintelligible). They had no money. There

were people in the community who had money. They were the merchants. The

butcher, the baker, the clothing merchant. They really had money. They had (

some status, not as much status as a talmudic scholar. Now the manifest

uh ... truth of this could be observed on the High Holidays when it came to

). Now, I never saw this in Europe, I'm not sure it was their

practice though I gather it was, as I said before here, the (unknown)

would be auctioned off for money. Now of course the money did not pay them

on High Holidays but (unintelligible) were made. These were I ittle congre-

gations, they were so nice and 1 ittle nobody had to write it down, and there

were no little slips. Of course, everybody knew everybody, and if Mr. Swartz

said "ten dollars", then that's ten dollars. Incidentally, youowed the money

whether you got the ... you know ... the bidding was funny. Whatever you

bid, you pay even if you didn't come out at the top. It was a way of con-

tributing money. Now, these auctions were always won by the richest people.

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A. (Continued) Of course, the money was used to pay up the mortgage, to pay

the coal bill, to pay everything. It was considered the height of gross

behavior to the people who won those Alleahs to take them for themselves.

I have never seen any one of those people except the Alleahs, and go up and

read from the Talmud. They actually do get called up to read from the

Talmud during the year .. free. But never would they take one of those

Alleahs for themselves. They 1 d give them away (unintelligible). That was

a very widespread factor~in orthodox congregations. And I think really

explains this trade-off, It's okay to get rich, but you must have done

something a little not right because you couldn 1 t posstbly be emphatic and

be all that rich. So, maybe you should do a little something to the Talmud

for that, and help those who really did lead a truly wonderful, pure 1 ife

and give them the (unintelligible). That ambivalence is clear, it 1 s a trade­

off to see how much can I give him. The point is: there was no assumption

that because you were rich, God loved you, which is a Calvinist 1 s assumption.

Q. Although, I think a Calvinist might argue with you on that.

A. No. In pure Calvinist theology that 1 s nonsense. There 1 s a very interesting

study that I read a paper on. True Calvinists believe in preordination. It

doesn 1 t matter what your material situation is. It's absolutely irrelevant.

What 1 s done is done, right? Very interesting dynamics about what happens in

the human population having to live with and cope with the ideas of preordina­

tion. How do you deal with a thing like that? And, really it's all done

before you start. I think in the preaches and the mores that developed under

Calvinism, you got the notion of the elect and the manifest evidence of

being among the elect, which I am sure is a corruption, you know, without any

question, but think the broad soct~l practice was the social practice of the

corruption.

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Q. Oh, I see. Well, I certainly agree with that. (Laughter)

A. (Laughter) I really ought to be careful between the theological Calvinism

and what happens in practice. Uh . what else?

Q. vell, anyway, one of the values that you stressed was the respect for learn­

ing, and I'd like to go on that, just for awhile. Now, you obviously went

to co~Jege, where did you go?

Q. That's a whole interesting thing by itself, about learning. think a funny

happened to the Jews in regard to learning. And I' II tell you where went

in the course of this, in the next example. Uh ... people valued learning.

I'm not sure they completely understood why they valued learning, but they

most certainly did value learning. And, you could see it, I mean, again, if

you talk about the ritual the question (unintelligible) to the Talmudic

scholars were the status of people and a lot of the people couldn't have

their children become talmudic scholars because they needed them to work and

bring money in. In Europe there was always desire to get the children educa­

ted which was very hard to do in Europe there was massive discrimination

against Jews. In this country it was possible, most particularly in New

York City. In New York City by the time I was a little child, and my parents

really missed that, you know, and my older cousins did not, when CCNY (unin­

telligible). The only thing you had to be to go to CCNY was smart. And

smart, there was plenty of smart. Not only was there natural smart, but all

the smart was nurtured. That is that people saw it and they valued it. They

trained it in the same way that some coaches notice a youngster with terrific

reflexes and they nurture that, you know, and they become great ath1etes.

If they saw a kid that was smart, then they dedicated all kinds of stuff.

But what happened was with Jewish version of the Protestant ethic in a funny

way. Uh ... it's a matter of capital acquisition. They had momma-poppa

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Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 14

A. (Continued) stores, orthodox Jews. They would open up early in the morning

and close late at night .and on Sabbaths, they didn't work. And they didn't

spend money either. What, you'd get a lot of money 1 ike that after awhile.

What do you do with the money? Send the kid to college, that's what. So,

you have in one generation: we go from the momma-poppa candy :store to my

son the doctor, my son the neuro-surgeon, my daughter the concert violinist.

In one generation. And I could take you through the Bronx today and show

you they're no longer owned by Jews, but I could show you the candy stores

and the butcher shops, and the fruit markets from which there came in one

generation doctors, lawyers, not college professors, not then, later.

College professors didn't make any sense. They didn't know about them.

Nobody knew how to get there. All professions, almost none of these people

wanted their children to go into thelr business. They were back-breaking

(unintelligible), but they sacrificed, they saved all their money and they

sent their kids. And mostly their kids could carry them. Most of those

people, if they're still living, have nice condominiums in Miami. When it

gets cold in the winter, they go. They didn't all make it. Some of them

are still 1 iving in the Bronx, and they get mugged. The third generation

is the problem generation. The father whose the lawyer, lives in Long

Island, whose kids were born in Long Island, who never saw the store. If they

go to visit grandma in the condominium in Miami, doesn't understand what the

hell this is all about. They have no idea in the world. And maybe (unintel­

ligible) They don't understand their father. They don't understand what's

eatin' him, and they never lived on top of the candy store and had to worry

whether there was mice. So, it's fast (unknown). But that generation out on

Long Island now, has a real problem. And it is that the father's temple, which

is conservatively reformed, doesn't seem to say anything to them, and they're

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A. (Continued) looking for something. And some of those kids are studying

(unknown) and some of those kids are becoming orthodox Jews. And I don't

really understand that whole (unintelligible), but someplace along the line

we forgot what we were looking for with that education. Bill Green is the

guy who told me what we were looking for. Bill Green, right over here,

(unintelligible) He told me what all that scholarship was aboutLthat the

Talmud scholars were studying. And, we forgot what it was about. The

reason you study Talmud was to discover how to live a life such that God

would live in your house. It's 1 iterally true, and you gotta speak to Bill

about this, if you go back to early stages in the beginning, when the

temples stood, there's no evidence that Jews are .aoy:.:m0Ee:1people in book

than anyone else. The priests were the people who spoke with God. For

anybody else, you want to talk to God, you go up to the priest, the priest

talks to God, that was it. There wasn't even books. With the destruction

of temple, the rabbis came into the foreplay. They had the sort of the spin­

off from the prophets. The prophets had argued the High Priests for some

time because priests had real power, and the prophets were sort of the critics,

the social critics. And the rabbis spun out of that, and the temples were

destroyed the second time. The rabbis really came to the fourth time. Said:

look, we believe that you can make the temple in your own home if, if you

perform the rituals properly. And there were no records of the rituals.

So, one has to think through what would God want you to do, if God is as we

be! ieve God to be. And that would establ~sh the ritual. Speak the value of

clean! iness, purity of mind, the various values that have generated.

(Unintelligible) wasn't really expected to be written down, studied, anal­

ized, and that's what people would study: how to live a life, as an ethical

human being in relation to God and one's fellow, such that it would be a

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A. (Continued) domicile for God to 1 ive in. It became in America this whole

knowledge was quite by accident, if the scholarship studies became a rode to

upward social mobility and income. I think in the first generation, there was

no big cleavage. My father took his social values from his childhood (unin­

telligible) ... learning ..• uh ... useful point. These things came,

he didn't take them completely out of Talmud, they were just part of the

chicken soup (unintelligible). Which may well have had this at the base -

Talmud. But it wasn't so much his preoccupation with the stock out of which

the chicken soup was made (unintelligible). But I'm not sure by the time

I went off to college that those things were really so clear and anybody

could really say what it was he was studying to become, in fact what came to

be the case, was that if you weren't going to become a doctor or a lawyer or

some kind of professional, why were you going? There wasn't much money.

My parents were not poor, but they were not rich either. They're still not.

So, when I went off to college, I went off to have a profession. I didn't

want to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a dentist. So, what was I gonna do?

Well, Three of my uncles are pharmacists so I went to pharmacist school, where

I was bored out of my sku 11. I went to pharmacist schoo 1 at Fordam Uni ver-

s i ty.

END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A, INTERVIEW 1

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Page 17

By Tina Isaacs

Interview Tape 1 Side B

A. (Continued) The history of Fordam's Pharmacy School ... for must

have been forty years, maybe more .. very nice. Introduced me to Jesuits.

Had a lot of fun with Jesuits .. good arguments. Learned a 1 ot about

1 ife and relationships. In fact, learned about the neophytes. The neo-

phytes would grant you your premises, and they would finish right away. You

could see which ones would make it as Jesuits. (Laughter) A very interesting

group. At any rate, was bored out of my head, so I proceeded to leave

that program trying to leave with flying colors, which I did, I got all A's

and got out of there. So, my parents says, well they couldn't really hol-

Jar because got all A's, but people did raise their eyebrows, what's a mat-

ter with him? What's the matter with being a pharmacist? Your uncles are

making a nice living, etc. All of that. Well, I went to be an engineer.

People didn't think it was such a bad idea, they didn't really know what it

was, except for my father who had wanted to be a civil engineer, but he never

went to do it, because he couldn't, he just had to work. Well, I was no good

at engineering, but I went to the University of Connecticut and that's a whole

long story which would take a lot of tapes. But eventually I •d left engine-

ering at the University of Connecticut, stayed at that school, though, and

went back to become apolitical science major. By then, my family sort of

given me up for a lost sheep, although my dad, somewhat puzzled and bemused

said, well, look, I'll pay this much, I'll pay the rest ... finish. He got

a sense while I was doing the political science major that I was having a

really good time. Ny dad and I weren't all that close until later. And, in

fact it started about then. I was in an honor's program and I guess when I'd

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A. {Continued) come home, which wasn 1 t all that often, I would talk with some

pleasure about ohe of my faculties, it was my honor 1 s supervisor. We were

coming up to commencement and my dad asked, well, before we went to commence­

ment, my dad asked if he could meet this fellow named Max Fascher. And, I

said, yea, I guess so and I asked Max if he had some time to see my dad after

the ceremonies and he said sure. So, we met and we strolled around the cam­

pus. Max was walking with my dad, and I was with my mother, my brother and

I don 1 t know who else was around, somethings. On the way back my dad asked

if I wanted to go to graduate school. I was then going to work in his store

for six months, and then I was going in the army. So, I said, well, 11 11

look, I don 1 t know, why don 1 t we, I don 1 t know. Let me ... I want to give

the store a good shot, you need the help, let 1 s put it aside. And we did,

and I did put it aside. worked in the store; I don 1 t think was very

good at it. went into the army. And when

I wanted to go back to graduate school. And

was in the army, I decided

did, I went back to Connect i-

cut, took a master 1 s there because that 1 s what you (unintelligible) under­

graduates record. Did a pretty clean job with that master 1 s and went to

Yale graduate school. took a Ph.d and then I came up here. think my dad

is the only person in my family who really understands what I did. And when

I say what I did, I ... is what did as a scholar. He also understands

what I do as a dean. That 1 s Jess interesting to him. think his greatest

disappointment is that I never wrote a book. I got into the dean business for

my own interests and in some w~ys too soon. And, I have a few articles out,

and he likes articles, but he would have liked a book. From the old guy.

Q. Now, why did you come up to Rochester?

A. Now, that 1 s idiosyncratic. Well, no, it 1 s important. lt 1 s important I think

Jess in the perspective of Jews than the history of the university. was at

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A. (Continued) Yale. The job market was moving. No baloney, I was one of

their better graduate students, and I knew that perfectly well. Still, I

had a wife, two children and $5,000 worth of debts and I was very concerned

a5out a job. didn't want to go out to the coast, because both sets of

grandparents live in Hartford, we had the two children, was very close with

tne children, my wife's an only child. The back and forth transportation to

the coast would have been brutal. Neither set of grandparents has a lot of

money, indeed, not much money at all on my wife's side. It would have been

actuaUy prohibitive for them to spend the money to fly to the coast even

once, let alone ... So, that, I had a··couple of opportunities at the coast

that were very attractive, Berkley being one of them, but, it really was not

a thing I wanted to do. In the East I was getting offers from places that

wanted to have a behaviorist course. I didn't want to be their pet behav­

iorist, in those days that was the big thing in political science. (Unintel-

ligible comment) And, uh .. faculties like that weren't very attractive

to me. was in a bit of a quandary when I got a call from this guy Bill

Wrightman in Rochester, and I went to see my mentor at Yale, Bob Lane, and

said, where the hell is Rochester and what is that all about? He said, well,

I don't know what's with Rochester but I know Bill Wrightman, he's a bril-

1 iant guy, he's a (unintelligible), if you're going up to Rochester, try and

do some really terrific thing, I don't know if you'll suceed or not, but I

think you should look look at it. So, came up to look at it. Bill Wright-

man had only been here, at that point, a year. The department was planning.

Two people were close to retirement, clearly not of the new school, but

clearly very gracious gentlemen who were not (unintelligible) Glen Wilksy and

Bill Leets who were really interested in where political science was going.

And, uh ... there was not a great aura of resentment, then, you know .. ·

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A. (Continued) here's the new people coming to throw out the old. I expected

to find that kind of thing. I did not find it. found a very (unintelli-

gible) Dick Fenno, Ted Blue and Peter Rettestry of the present faculty were

then also here, each of whom was an interesting person. And Bill seemed to

have some terrifically interesting ideas .. And, uh. I was really

learning, even sitting around shooting the breeze In his office. And the

fact is, (unintelligible) I understood all of their (unintelligible) and

not that I would think of everything that everyone of them thought of, but

had no (unknown) coming out of there. But they had a whole new (unknown)

(unintelligible) which made a lot of sense out of funny corners :in the kind

of modeling (unintelligible) sociological mode. It really seemed like an

attractive offer. But, again, who the hell knew if this thing was gonna fly

or not. And the school had no particular rep from where I came from. So,

again I spoke to Lane, and he said, look, think you oughta give it a try.

He said, given the restraints you've put on yourself on the west coast, he

says where the real problems are, go out there, keep your nose clean, and do

your work. And, if you don't 1 ike, I' 11 get you another job. And the market

in those days was such that you could really say that. I mean, it was not

foolish, and it was true, had five job offers in five years. I had job

offers before I published anything; it was an absolutely incredible market Ln

those days. (Unintelligible) I mean people did. (Unintelligible) the baby

boom, the Second World War was coming to school. Everybody get ready. So,

that's what that was. Well, I came up here and here and it was a ball. It was

a ball. Bill was coming to the department, in on the ground floor, all young

people. No big age gaps from youngest to oldest, with the exception of the

two people who were retiring and they were very nice and lively and I really

regretted when each of them retired, I mean they were really fun to be with

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A. (Continued) they weren't hostile, they asked intelligent, sharp questions.

The distance from the chairman to me was very small. Bill's about 15 years

older than am, and is sort of like an older cousin, and there's no sort of

father and son business, no intimidation. We were gonna make the discipline

different. And we did. Political science is really different because of

what Bill Wrightman did here in ten years. And if you pick up the American

Political Science (unknown) and go through the journals, I could . Oh,

took them down and put them away to make room for something else

can look through his series ~h there, and for a five-year period, pull

them out randomly and every one of them will have something by a UR faculty

member or a UR graduate. Now, consider the program was. scarcely ten years

old in terms of the outflow, and it's a tiny program, so it was fun. I was

delighted to come here. I was delighted to stay here. Stayed here against

offers from other schools that were very attractive places (inLntel 1 igible)

Uh . because it was a tremendous learning experience, tremendous vitality

at the graduate student level, at the undergraduate level, at the faculty

level, brown-bag lunches in the department, everybody mixed together. Very

little formality. Very little gossip, all of it was really sort of business,

good business. Now, what I found was that that characterized this place in

general. Joe Wilson going back just before, well, one of the reasons that

they brought Bill Wrightman, that they brought Kenneth Clark and actual Jy

they brought people like myself, was because Joe Wi Ison persuaded the Board

of Trustees that this place should stop sitting on all its money and ios.tead

should become a national institution which wanranted have that kind of money.

That it should make a contribution to the nation and put together a faculty

and be open to students very broadly and produce graduate students and do

what you're supposed to do if you have those kind of resources. He persuaded

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A. (Continued) the board to do that; he persuaded them in a way that very few

places suceeded in doing. He persuaded them without losing anyone. What you

say moves to the same thing, took the same route, significant friends of

the Board of Trustees said, well, that 1 s where you 1 re going? Good luck.

You go without me, that 1 s not my school. take my wallet, and my friends

and I go someplace else. My wife graduated from here, my cousin graduated

from there, because it 1 s not the kind of school I want. Joe Wilson, one of

the great miracles he did was to persuade a very conservative local Board

of Trustees, of very rich people, to continue to support financially and

emotionally to the extent that they even went and fought with their friends

and argued with their friends in the communities in the 1 60s that this was

a good place. And the fact is, it was a very different place from the place

that they grew up in when they were in school. And that had to do with Jews,

and everything else. As soon as you stop the 60% in Monroe County, and you

to downstate, that means that your gonna have an enormous influx in Jews.

And, whether anybody is worried about that or not, I don 1 t know, but the fact

is they didn 1 t let it stop them and there have been allegations made to me

at one time or another that this place is anti-semitic; lord knows at one time

or another everything was. But when I opened up my class roster the first day

I was here, I really gasped. Really. I thought could ... I couldn 1 t believe

i.t! Garfinkle, Goldstein, Finklestein, Anderson, any ... you know, there

was no end to it. I had not had the slightest sense of anti-semitism in any

corner of this university. And I 1 ve been in a lot of corners of this univer­

sity. You know, departmental students, deans offices, before I was in the

dean 1 s office, central administratio~ Board of Trustees ... absolutely none.

I do believe that there are people in the university who 1 s early life exper­

ience has ~ery little to do with Jews, and Jewish culture is something of a

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A. (Continued) novelty to them and they're curious about it, and I think you

got to be paranoid if you think someone who asks you a question about how the

Jewish people feel about this and regard that as an anti-semitic posture.

They really don't know! Uh. and t~ey 1 d really like to know, and in many

cases they'd like to know so that they don't step heavily on people's sense

of (unintelligible). I've had some inquiries like that. I've had inquiries

like that from Bill Wrightman, who's a good friend of mine. And ... uh

who just didn 1 t know. I !m trying to recal I ... I guess the first Bar

Mitzvah he attended was one of Peter Rettestry's children, and he said to

me, well, what's the proper behavior . I don't know, I 1 ve never been to

one. don't regard that as anti-semitic. Ther~ are people who would. Uh,

So, why I came is sort of (unintelligible). Why I stayed here speaks for the

quality of the place. have never gotten used to the flat land, and I have

never gotten used to the gray weather. It snows and it's cold in New England

but the sun shines. It's chilly and it's beautiful. It's beautiful 30 miles

south of here, but right here, I don't regard it as one of the great beauty

spots. But, the intellectual climate of this place has held me here, there's

absolutely no question about it.

Q. Sure. Okay, well, I'd like to ask you some questions ..• um ... more

about Rochester itself and then when I come back, we' 11 spend all of our time

talking about the U ,of R. I think that would probably be the best path to take.

A. One thing let me slip into this thought. If you see in your example, there's

no Miriam Rock .

Q. She is being interviewed, yeah.

A. Okay, Miriam probably knows more about this than me, than anybody who's not

professionally involved.

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Q. Yeah. No, she's on thhs new 1 ist. She' 11 be interviewed in the middle of

January, I think.

A. Okay, that's fine.

Q. Um ... okay. Now, when you got ... when you first came here, where did

you move in? What neighborhood?

We moved into the 19th ward. And had no religous temple, synagogue, affilia­

tion ... my heart is st i 11 very much with Hartford, and we drove home for

everything. Even when we couldn't afford it. We lived on Arnett Boulevard

and Rugby Avenue.

Q. Was that a Jewish neighborhood?

A. No. (Laughter) It was not a Jewish neighborhood; there was a neighborhood

at the end of the ghetto. It wasn't clear what all was gonna happen. The first

of the riots broke out while we were 1 iving in that neighborhood. It was one

mile from where we were to Bull's Head. We were worried.

Q. Could you just go into how you felt, you know, when the riots were happening?

A.

What you felt caused them, that sort of thing. What was your impression of

the riots?

Oh, my. Let me tell you one thing about that neighborhood. Uh the

neighborhood was a mix of Italian and Greek. There's not a big Greek in that

neighborhood some. And, I don 1 t know what all else. No black families

in that neighborhood when we moved there. The neighborhood ... we had a

(unintelligible) ... the neighborhood's own reaction was ambivalent. To

some extent was like my own. You couldn't blame the black people for being

(unintelligible). There was an arguement among neighbors between those who

really were bigoted and hostile towards blacks and some rationalized (unintel­

ligible), and others who really felt guilty, who felt it was wrong, who didn't

want to take on all that neighborhood and didn't want to try to fight the

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A. (Continued) whole world in order to make justice for black people, but

who felt, in fact, that black people got a bad deal. And there was a .

sort of low-level arguments among people in the neighborhood about that. On

the other hand there was great (unintelligible) in that neighborhood ..

that if black people came all in through that neighborhood, they would

have been shot. And that's not an uncommon pattern for tight ethnic neigh­

borhoods ... Italians, Polish, Greek ... it almost doesn't matter. If

it's a tight ethnic neighborhood, where the people all know one another.

saw the same thing in Hartford; there's one neighborhood like that, when

went into Hartford. When the riots in Hartford happened, the men in that

neighborhood waited on the street corner. They just waited with baseball

bats. Nobody ever showed up, and yet the same arguments went on in that

neighborhood. (unintelligible) made up of Klu Klux Klan. They were divided

between those who really were bigoted against blacks and those who felt that

the blacks really had gotten a bad deal. But none of them were gonna stand

still if you get mad (unintelligible). And that was the general attitude

if not understood at that point. That the blacks were some kinda spastic

self-destructive (unintelligible). The thought really was blacks were gonna

come bursting out of the ghetto and try to burn down white society. Well,

that clearly didn't happen, and people sort of stood around in some puzzlement

trying to see what the hell really was going on. And why would you burn down

your own neighborhood. And I think to this day, not too many people understand

that, including a lot of blacks. Well, one reason you'd burn down your own

neighborhood, clearly it's not your neighborhood. You' reliving there, but

somebody else owns it. And, uh ... I was not at that time a party to what

must have been important discussions going on in Jewish communities. Alright,

because I was not living really in one. That was the beginning, however, of

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A. (Continued) when it was I observed that they were Jewish stores that were

being burned and looted, and it was observed that there was intense feeling

against the Jewish merchants and landlords in the ghetto. The Jews began to

turn in on themselves and ask themselves what was going on. Jews saw them­

selves until then as straight champions of black people. They would weep

sincerely when Martin Luther King came to speak at their temples, and they

thought themselves enlightened. They had been trodded upon and they didn't

wish to tread upon anyone else. And they referred to their ) . And they never, never understood that part. I don't think that generation

is ever gonna understand that part. Some of them more in some ways. All

these things are comp] icated. My mother and father wer,e very different in

their attitudes towards black welfare. It's surprising, my mother was the

hardest. My father, through all his 1 ife, he used to fight in the streets

with black people. When he was a boy, they were both on the short end of the

stick. Somehow he fought tough enough and long enough that he got to really

taking people one at a time. To him, somebody's a bum, he's not a bum. But,

it's got nothing to do with what they look like when they come in. Depends

who they are. And, uh . he's been able to sort pretty well. My mother's

pretty good at it too, but she gets so damned turned off because she's the one

who goes to make the bank deposit, well, they've moved now way out In the

suburbs. But when they were in the city, she would go down to the bank to

make the deposit and she would come up in line with the welfare check cashing

ladies, and it 1 s literally true that you'd ~ee people rolling up in taxicabs

or parking cadillacs out;in front. And it does offend people who are working

hard and, she knows perfectly well because, in fact, they have a fairly sub­

stantial number of middleclass black people who are their customers in their

furniture store over the years. lbs a small n~mber, but its grown over the

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A. (Continued) years and all of these people are people who have worked their

way up in one generation, and have the whole . . work hard, save the money,

educate the children syndrome. So, she can sort alright, but she gets irri­

tated anyway. Well, look, the riots were the beginning of the reassessment.

Q. Do you think the riots themselves were anti-semitic, that is, do you think

that the black people were lashing out against Jews, or against whites, or

just against themselves?

A. Oh, my God. Look, I think the black people in the ghetto would have J~~b~d

dut'against anybody who owned their property. Pure and simple. I think

there 1 s no big, profound rationalization, I mean, there 1 s no big, pro~ound

rationale. True. However, the fact is that a Jot of that property was owned

by Jews, that 1 s almost an action into the historical mobility (unintelligible)

and .. uh . the fact that the Jews owned that property and the fact that

the Jews . the middle east are in a confrontation with another culture,

made it easy to work the black Moslem exercise. lt 1 s not clear to Europeans

that bought arms (unintelligible) I ight skin or dark skin, that 1 s really not

clear at all. And, it 1 s not hard to make that spinoff .. Uh . . I can

conceive of a whole nother scenario where you 1 d wind up with blacks hating

Arabs because of historical things having to do with the slave trade, and I

would guess if a bunch of Mos]ems had owned the ghetto properties, the ball­

game would be the other way. But history didn 1 t work like that and the way

it works now, I think there 1 s a substantial cleavage that began there and has

~valved and will continue to be a point of some difficulty between militant

and revolutionary blacks and Jews. The militant and revolutionar}es are gonna

identify with Third Wor]~. And the Third World is going to include, somewhat

paradoxically, the Arab World, am I right? And, the black African countries

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A. (Continued) are gonna be in a confrontation with the developed western world

thatrs Third World country. don't know where the oils gonna come out of,

as a matter of fact, but it's gonna be a very vital kind of thing. The other

thing that's a tremendous pain in the neck as an analogy, is that the south

Africans are in very much the same situation that the lsraelies are, in that,

they live surrounded by what they regard as a hostile environment with their

backs to the sea. They have absolutely no place to go. And, that's a very

uncomfortable thing for most Jews because it's an easy sympathy between the

lsraelies and the south Africans. Didn't used to be. Didn't used to be at

all. But as the Israel ies found themselves increasingly confronted with

Third World (unintelligible), they found themselves sitting really in the

same boat as south Africans. And, so they have mutual trade arrangements,

mutual weapons, munitions, all kinds of things come up like that. It would

be very embarrassing for American Jews who don't know what to do about it.

The fact is of the military (unintelligible) types around the world today

which probably would be the case, is that the two toughest armies ini-the

world today are the lsraelies and the Africans. And for the same reason,

can·1·t afford not to be ... you'd die (unintelligible). It's never been

clear that either one of them could win their wars in the last (unintelligible)

war. Their premise is in each case, that if you make that war look expensive

enough, the other guy won't fight it. And each one is absolutely committed

to making that war prohibitively expensive, incredibly expensive. That's

gonna put us in a very funny boat in this country. The other dimension

that's gonna put American Jews in a very funny boat is where this country

stands visavis the Arabs because of the oil. There's more to it than the oil,

though, and that's the thing I think most American Jews don't really under­

stand and should. And it's that it's a tremendous dilema. The Israel is

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A. (Continued) understand it perfectly well. And that is the U.S.S.R. and the

Arab block. The U.S.S.R. doesn't need the oil from the Arab block, it just

needs tb,command the territory. If the U.S.S.R. commands the eastern end of

the Mediterranean, well the southern and eastern end of the Mediterranean, the

Israel is are in a lot of trouble. (Laughter) If the U.S. doesn't keep the

Arab block from falling to the Soviets, then what will? And how would the

U.S. do that? That's a real dilema, because if the U.S. takes an absolutely

unmitigatedly hostile stand toward the Arabs, it's relatively easy then for

the Russians to subvert the area lying in the middle. And if they subvert

the area, the Israel is are in a Jot of trouble. On the other hand, if the

U.S. is a great buddy of the Arabs, then the Israelis are in a Jot of trou­

ble. (Laughter)

Q. Have you yourself ever been to Israel?

A. No.

Q. Would you like to go?

A. No.

Q. Do you consider yourself a Zionist?

A. No. don't .consider myself a Zionist in the same way

an orthodox Jew. But ask me a different question: if

war, which war would I 1 ike to die in?

Q. Okay.

don't consider myself

were gonna die in a

A. That's the one. And I don't think the Jews have any more to that land than

anybody else. They just got no place to go, and it's a decent culture.

hope it stays that way. The dilema internally that the Israelis face is how

they gonna keep themselves from becoming south Africans. How they gonna keep

the culture that they brought to that land from being totally corroded by

the (unintelligible) of a fortress state. Whether they could still continue

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A. (Continued) to regard Arabs as human beings, I mean the fact that Jews, that

young Jews in Israel conducted the equivalent of pogrom, is a horrible idea.

And it horrifies the Israelis. And I don't know if you know what happens

but, you know, when ther:e's an incident, the first thing the Israelis do is

send the pol ice in to keep the Jewish kids out of the Arab court. Because

they're gonna rip it up. I would, you know, if I'm gonna die in a war,

that's alright so I'd be willing to die in a war. There are no good wars;

that war has the single virtue that those people have no place to go; that

they have a really decent culture that doesn't get ruined and is probably

worth dying for. Not too many wars are worth dying for. Not dying. But

anyhow, but, they're not so clearly worth dying for. That's a gut response.

It's a thing that ... I had no interest in going to Israel, except to do

that. I think in the last ditch stand, it may be pure Walter Mitty fantasy,

but in the last ditch stand if ... particulary if my kids are grown and are

off .. I think that is the thing that I'd like to be involved in. But if

I had my druthers of where I'd go, 11 d go to Japan. (Laughter)

Q. You just mentioned your kids, are you giving them .•. how old are they,

first of all?

A. Well, my daughter's seventeen and my son is fourteen.

Q. Were they given a Hebr:ew education?

A. Well, yes, to varying degrees. My daughter went to ... well, they were both

educated in Talmud Torah after school hours, kind of an exercise before Sunday

school. Initially in Henrietta in a little synagogue out there which was just

then started. My daughter, for reasons I don't understand, turned off it

very early and dropped out. She was getting super tensed up so we let her

drop out. Never had a Bas Mitvah, didn't want that. Dropped out when she was

about eleven. She has a very mixed group of friends. She's very self-con-

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A. (Continued) scious about the question of Jewish. I don 1 t think she feels

anything about Jewish, but she senses that that 1 s odd. I can 1 t quite figure

it out. My son fought Hebrew school all the way. He 1 s tremendously compe­

tively oriented, doesn 1 t like the educational system. He 1 s an extraordinarily

able student. He 1 s an 11 A11 student in the pub! ic school system. He 1 s

turned off by the whole educational game in Hebrew educational process.

He 1 s ambivalent about these Jew, non-Jew things ... doesn 1 t I ike to see the

world sorted that way. Continued on after his Bar Mitzvah. When I said to

him, look, if you continue that 1 s your business. You 1 re welcome to it, but

I don 1 t want any more of this grouching around the house that anybody 1 s

bothering you, forcing you, making you ... it 1 s your business ... you go

... you get up, and 11 m not gonna live with you as a miserable human being

on the premise that you• re sacrificing .•. you• re sacrificing nothing.

Well, you do it because ~e gets credits for the regents of something else.

That's your business. He keeps going. don 1 t exactly know why he keeps

going. Some of it is friends there, some of it is learning, and some of it

is sort of he 1 s intrigued. gather he has a sense of:~bhere 1 s something in

there. He doesn 1 t know what it is. And, there are times, indeed, I think if

I weren 1 t in this position, I would almost certainly do it, but I would love

to have him sit in on some of Bill Green 1 s seminars and learn what the devil

is really about. But, I think, and l 1 ve heard several ser,ilous students of

this thing say it, that probably the great tribute that you can, one of the

great tributes that you can pay to the sanctity of the Jewish culture is that

it survived the Jewish educational system. And if these kids come back

anyhow, and I see it here, I see kids who come into this program after they• ve

become completely turned off by the experiences they 1 ve had, and now come back

because they want to learn something. And I don 1 t ... there 1 s apolitical

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A. (Continued) dynamics there that explains part of it, I ebaldn 1 t understand

what the tremendous preoccupation with learning Hebrew was, strictly Bib-

i ical Hebrew, it seemed to me, one: that they ought to have taught the lan­

guage, which is a fine idea, in as much of contemporary terms as they could.

Surely the Israelis school children had primaries that speak to the common

wealth, they don't speak to little boys who are tending sheep under trees.

I mean, it's got nothing to do with, you know, if you look at the primaries

they use in the Talmud Torahs, they're all Bible stories. Well, these kids

don't know from Bible to begin with, it's not like they come from a home like

mine. So, my argument was, look, why don't you teach them the Hebrew in

context they understand. You know, current Israelis newspapers. We know how

to do that, I mean, we do that over here. Teach them Bible stories in English.

And, when you teach them Bible stories, always we've needed some principle.

Some ethics. Some moral value. What is a story? This story, that story,

they remember the little boys name in the story. why? What they're really

interested in is what's there, what's right, what was wrong here, what was

judged. mean, that's what the Bible stories are about ... completely lost.

Nothing. Okay? Well, that's why the kids was really getting turned off. They

go through this whole thing and have no idea there's some moral understanding

to this exercise or anything else. And, I think, it's a disaster. But I

think you can sense now ... now he's in the highschool and they're getting

into things which sort of interest him. don't know how far he 1 11 run with

that, I'm just letting him go easy, I have this a~bivalence myself, I cherish

the ethical values, I can't believe there's any practical reason for.

there's a partial good ... I can't get myself to believe in, my God, that

there's any empty universal kid where (unintelligible). can't imagine any

of these holy words have ever had anything to do with any (unintelligible)

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A. (Continued) I'm convinced more people have died in holy wars (unintelligible)

Yet, I ... I'm not convinced, at all, that the ritual is superfluous.

Q. Okay, I have one last question before we stop for today, and that is about

your daughter. Do you think she' 11 go to college?

A. She certainly will.

Q. Do you think it's ... do you have different feelings towards ... um ...

educating daughters than to educating sons?

A. None whatever. That's . . well I ... I tease the women's l i bbers about

the things I've said. Something I ran into yesterday was called (unintell i­

gible) I said what the hell are you talking about! On the other hand, I

think that 1his culture that you' re fighting most of the time has surprised

themselves (unintelligible). As an educator, I see women in these roles

in Cunintelligible) in their applications and they're not (unintelligible)

theytre very bright. At least there's a lot of very bright women. And, it's

a dumb thing, particularly in our society, in that they really were earlier

societies. It's not so clear if you go to a frontier society which is

mostly manual of one sort or another. But there was all this much division

of labor and stuff. To be a homemaking frontier society was one hell of a

complicated demand. mean, it required intelligence, well, you could do it

all kind of ways, plus being sharp. But, sharp meant a lot of intelligence,

a lot of ingenuity, an enormous amount of strength, moral and physical and

moral, I mean, tough to withstand the pnemonia deaths of little children,

freezing cold, chopping wood, cooking that started at 5:00 o'clock in the

morning and the people worked like the devil and ate a lot and ... a

making a home was a profound exercise. It's a trivial exercise in its physi­

cal components today. If you're gonna be a homemaker today, in fact, making

a home is a wholly emotional orchestration. That's some trick. I don't who

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A. (Continued) exactly makes the home, it makes a lot of people much more comfy.

And it happened as an outfall from the old days when the common endeavor to

stay alive ... I mean the husbands didn 1 t go off with their little black

bags and come back to . nor the wife 1 s either, for that matter. You

worked the fields, everybody worked the fields at certain times during the

year. You had a little store, it was next door, everybody worked in the

store. People would leave when another one went upstairs to eat. So, family

wasn't a unit in a way that it is today.

Q. Well, do you think the Jewish family will suffer from the professionalization

of i. ts women?

A. No. Not at all. I have a thing, and I ca 11 it the metamorpt-os is of the Jewish

Princess to Empress. God help us all. I say that because I remember both of

my grandmothers. My father's mother was a spitting image of Golda Meir. When

I met Golda Meir, I couldn't believe it, and I really had to keep doing double­

takes and she was exactly 1 ike her. She was brilliant, tough, driving woman,

who fought off muggers and chtldren, and landlords, rip-off artists, what­

ever. Ran that family, raised those kids, watched the child ... broke

through. Then there was the generation of the Jewish American Princess.

Don't exactly understand what that was all about, really. And, I ... my

wife is Jewish and she's no Jewish American Princess. She skipped that thing.

But the idea that you musn't learn, and you musn 1 t do this or that ... I

don't know where they came. I saw, sort of, one half of the matriarchcal

thing, but lacking the rationale that made a matriarch a matriarch who could

really do something, well, the opening up of women 1 s rights and(_;opportunities

is just shy of that. And I watched the metamorphosis, I watched kids come in­

to this school out of that background, and when they just shake it off, you

know, and I see their grandmother and you really gotta watch out, because the

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A. (Continued) fact they are smart, and something, you know, some of what

enabled their grandmothers to carry three bags of groceries up hills and

three stories to the apartment, and to connive when they had to connive,

and to really argue when they had to argue and win arguments; all that's

buried there someplace in the genes and is coming up. So, as far as I'm

concerned, I can see nothing but good. Except, that Orthodox and Reformed

Judaism are gonna have to take another look at what their talking about

Biblically. That's all. Whether you're gonna have women in the rabbinate,

it's inevitable. The only question is, what do you want, five years, ten

years, fifteen years? I don't know and can't predict, but it's absolutely

inevitable and it is highly desirable,\

Q. Well, the Reformed Jews are doing it now.

A. What, they always lead the way and then the other people say, well, what do

tney know? They're really Episcopalians. (Laughter)

Q. (Laughter) Well, okay. Well, thank you.

END OF TAPE l, SIDE B, INTERVIEW 1

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Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 16, 1976 By Tina Isaacs

Interview 11 Tape 11 Side A

A. Okay.

Page 36

Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur Goldberg. l 1 m in Dean Goldberg 1 s

office, and it is the 16th of December.

A. Okay, you 1 re doing fine.

Q. Okay

A. lt 1 s a little early for this.

Q. Well, yesterday we left off speaking a little bit about your family. But

think we pretty much ended that out. We were talking about your daughter going

to college, if you recall, and women in the professions. So, l 1 d like to ask

you a few questions, first about the community in general, and then, um .

get to some questions about the University of Rochester and your role here.

A.. Okay.

Q. Do you belong to any community groups?

A. Yes .. uh ... I 1 ve been in and out of a small number of things and in and

out of politics a little bit, but the only current activity that l 1 ve been

involved with is Cboperative Extension Service. happen to be on the Board

of Directors of the Cooperative Extension Service, and that 1 s a little unusual.

§rowing up in the Bronx, you don 1 t normally .. I never knew what it was.

I got sort of lassooed into that by a friend of a friend. They were looking

for somebody who knew something about management problems that might give them

a different perspective, and I agreed, and met a very interesting group of

people, and l 1 ve been involved with them, and, it 1 s been very educational for

me. I haven 1 t been terribly active in any regular way in any other community

organizations. l 1 ve been involved mccassionally with one political group

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A. (Continued) or another on a consulting ba~is. Some years ago I was very

active in a political campaign when Ed Muske was thinking about being presi-

dent. was active through this university at one point at the Kent State,

Cambodia time, and that got me into contact with the community. And because

I'm with the university, I do find myself on occasion doing things like

talking to the Chamber of Commerce or talking to the Legal Aid, voters,

and things like that. I haven't been involved with the Temple in any

regularized way. Occasionally I have arguments with one person or another.

And, I'm vaguely aware of what's going on or not going on. But, I'm not

deeply involved in the community beyond the university.

Q. So, do you belong to any Jewish community organizations? Or, are you

A. think, probably not. I suspect given the contribution I sent in to the

( ), I'm a member of something, but again, I wouldn't ... I'm just

not one of the active people.

to enough of these things that

know who some of them are, and I get invited

say hello to Neil Noyer at least twice a

year. And, you study the Jewish community ... currently in our system,

you haven't run into Neil Noyer, there's something wrong with your studying.

But, I'm not at all active in the sense, you say, Neil is or Bob Gantz is

(unintelligible) so, I'm not a good source of what's really going on in those

organizations.

Q. What is your, this is a somewhat vague question and if ... a ... it might

not be easy to answer: what is your perception of, say the Jewish community

and their organizations here in Rochester, even though you're not, I mean,

from the perspective of a non .

A. Weil,

Q. active participant.

A. The thing is, the social scientist is sent to look at things, and you know,

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A. (Continued) can conjecture a lot, even though, maybe, you shouldn 1 t ...

This strikes me as a rather fluid community, an older and more assimilated

Jewish community than one to which l 1 m accustomed, at least a good part of it,

and I think that 1 s because the people who came out here before the Second

World War, and most of the leadership of the Jewish community have roots

here that go back two, sometimes three generations. They 1 re people who

essentially left the security of the Jewish ghettoes in New York, Baltimore,

whereever, to move out into a different environment, and they made their own

way. Saw the frontier types in their day. I gather tend to be a German­

Jewish extraction because, in terms of the (unintelligible) that would have

made sense. That was the earlier flow of immigration. And, uh ... you

see some of that still. In fact, you have some remarkable communities here

dating back to very early immigration. lt 1 s a (unknown) community here,

which is very old, l 1 m told. If l 1 m not mistaken, it 1 s a (unknown) community

through and it 1 s a (unknown) synagogue, 1 ike the oldest synagogue in this

town. I 1 m not sure the buildings are that old, but the congregation, I

think, l 1 m not sure. Uh ... so, in terms of the sorts of things l 1 m used

to out of New York City and its environment, this is a somewhat more assimi­

lated community, and it also senses itself more distinctively apart. I don't

think its really apart, but to one coming from New York out of a background

where you just assumed everybody you looked at was Jewish, if they weren't

that was their problem, here it 1 s just a tiny bit more like the south. You

know, the Jewish community tends all to know one another, at least if two

Jews in this town get together and talk long enough, they 1 ll find somebody

that they know in common. That 1 s not true in New York. And, because ...

that 1 s just too big an area. So, that's one characteristic. lt 1 s remarkably

affluent. In the Six Day War, I watched the fund raising exercises here,

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A. (Continued) and its ties to Israel are remarkabl~ here. Uh . It does

not seem to me to be (unintelligible) as some that I've known. As between

the various sectors Reformed, Orthodox, Conservative, they've seemed to have

made a very viable set of accommodations whether . that may have hap-

pened all over the country, I really don't know, you know. Certainly there

was much deeper feeling when I was a kid than I find here, and as I said,

I can't (unintelligible) the temple or this locale. I also get the sense

that the Jewish community in this area feels more secure and more a part of

the community than has been felt in a long, long, long time. I'm not quite

sure why, but some of the things are obvious. There was a time when, we] 1,

when this town was really based on (unintelligible). When the Valley Club

really was closed, the country club of Rochester really was closed. I'm not

sure they were closed particularly to Jews against everybody else, thetwere

just closed (unintelligible). And that's backed off to some extent, and at the

same time the clubs haven't made all that much difference. The Jews did what

Jews did everywhere ... they bought their own clubs. The palace structure

in the community is just not as neatly tied to those clubs, it seems. The

economic power, political power . there's a lot to all of that, it's just

not as closely held as it once was. So, I think it's part of this in general

assimilation process is to a great extent a security, but there is also, at

this time, a resurgence of those self-conscious identity, particularly on the

part of the young people. And, I just don't know quite where all of that is

gonna go.

Q. You mentioned that the community you thought, percei~ed of itself as being

more distinctively apart, do you think that's positive?

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A. Well, it depends on how you feel apart. Whether you think yourself up, down,

or sideways. Clearly, there was a time when Jews in this community felt that

no matter what they did, they really couldn 1 t get inside. I don 1 t think that's

true anymore. And, I think, probably right now the apartness is healthy.

think the apartness is by choice and not by somebody pushing it. The distinc-

tion is a funny one. put it this way: someone who was arguing with me one

day about this question said, you don 1 t understand. The discrimination is

discrimination in a pogrom. lt 1 s a very subtle form of discrimination and

it sorta goes like this, or went I ike this: if you took two wealthy families

in this community, oh fifty years ago, and you gotta go back more than

fifty years, well, no fifty years ought to be about right ... fifty, sixty

years ago; and if one of them was Jewish and one of them was gentile, and in

each family there was this stupid son, alright? The stupid son in the Jewish

family had no chance in the world of becoming a vice-president of one of the

local major corporations. The gentile son did. (Laughter) Alright? That

was an example. Now, what 1 s really a shame is that things have moved in such

a state that the stupid sons of nobody can become vice-president. (Laughter)

.. of major corporations.

Q. What do you think of intermarriages?

A. Uh . . oh boy, that 1 s a ..• I don 1 t have any particular problems with it.

I have Jess problems with intermarriage than I have with marriage itself. So,

that . uh, it 1 s a really very complicated question. Take two people who

are highly secular, don 1 t think there's much problem, except that their

families give them problems. If you take two people who regard themselves

as secular but with massive amounts of guilt in their guts, then they got

a problem. And of course, if you take two people each of whom is seriously

religious, and they finally choose to marry, I think there 1 s probably no

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A. (Continued) problem. I think two people like that are very likely to address

this thing head on and come to some resolution that they've really thought

through carefully, that they can probably live with. I think it's that second

group that's in trouble. The people who will suggest that there really is no

problem, and that they ... in fact, they don't want to look at the problem

and they don't know where they each are at, feel kind of guilty, and I think

that that's the trouble.

Q. Isn't this the rough equivalent of three generations layout that you gave

yesterday, that is the second generation being the ambivalent one?

A. Yeah, it is. Yeah, except that they all happen to .11i;)Ok alike. Yes. Yes.

It's the same sort of problem. The substance is the same. Uh

intermarriage in a demographic sense poses a real problem. Uh

think

have

a very hard attitude toward the survival of almost any marriage. But most

particularly toward a religion whibh is rooted in it's appeal to intellect.

And, uh and the mind. And, intermarriage threatens Judaism (unintelli-

gible). That assumes that each intermarriage (unintelligible) don't see

why that should automatically be. If Judaism has something to say to peo­

ple's needs then it keeps itself alive as against an ossified sort of ritual.

It speaks really to people's emotional and moral needs. It speaks in a lan­

guage that people can understand, I don't see why it doesn't gain from inter-

marriage. If it fails, then it desearves to fail. See, I take .. then

that's where I really get hostile about people who go to spread religion by

the sword, or any other kind of coersion. My views ... if you got a set of

1 iving ideas, then fine, they' 11 grow, and if you let them die, then you ought

to bury them together. So, I don't really see intermarriage necessarily as a

single cause (unintelligible). It depends on whether Judaism itself is 1 iving

or morable. If it's morable, then it's probably gonna disappear and it's

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A. (Continued) probably okay. So ... you know I would be sad, but in terms

of the larger societies' interests it 1 s probably a more (unintelligible)

Q. Okay, well, why don't we talk for awhile about the university and then if we

have time, we can get back to, you know ...

A. The university in general or the university and Jews?

Q. Well, both.

A. Well, I told you a good deal about the university yesterday in terms of why

I stayed here.

Q. Yes. I would 1 ike to know why you went into the dean business as opposed

to the political science business.

A. My good God. That was just an odd thing. I can you it's a ... I never put

this on tape before and it's sort of personal, but I guess it's not terrible.

The day that Kenneth Clark offered me this position was in thirty minutes of

the time when he offered it to me, someone approached me and asked if I wanted

to be considered for the ~osltion of dean at (unintelligible) and I said, gee,

thanks but, no. Why would I want to be the dean of something? No, I don't

th ink so. Thank you anyhow and I wa 1 ked over ... just forgot a 11 about that.

And thirty minutes later Kenneth offered me this job, which I also didn 1 t re­

spond to very positively. And after I thought about it for about three days,

and he and I had talked twice, I finally did accept it. And, I guess the

reasons that I accepted it were peculiar to that historical time. Having

accepted it now that I'm in it, I think, I do, in fact, have some ability at

this sort of thing. I rather wish the ballgame had been such that I could 1 ve

moved into it.two or three years later.

Q. When did you become a dean?

A. I became a dean now the 22nd, I guess, of July, 1970. The offer was probably

made back in March or April, I don't remember. So, the reasons I accepted it

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A. (Continued) were ... were odd. I had been quietly minding my business for

several years in a good political scientist. Having a very good time with

that, I enjoyed that enormously. As I've come to perceive what I suspect is

some truths that political science has to offer, I came to the conclusion that

is. that is political science and not economics is truly a dismal science.

A lot of what political science has to say is bad news for people l'n Greece

and Tokyo. Political science is (unintelligible). of course, that's fun, but

from what I can tell, I think people are pursuing a lot of illusory goals,

things which just aren't there. Well, that's a whole nother speech. At any

rate, but even given that, I like it, anyhow. Maybe because I like paradox.

Uh ... I enjoyed working with undergraduates and graduate students and my

fellow faculty and I've no interest whatever in going to faculty meetings, much

less in being the dean. But, I was sort of moved out of my little nitch back

at the time of the Dallas sit-in. I guess the Dallas sit-in just got me incre­

dibly angry. And it got me incredibly angry in that anybody would presume

that their moral values justify the physical interposition of themselves between

two people with violence on an university campus. For me, the university .

the university's most important role was to be an open forum. Uh ... the

natural bent of societies is to burn headaches. And, properly so, I ~uppose,

because societies are rooted in their own mores, predictable behavior on the

part of people, the security of society offers people as a society as against

being the jungle, that the people can predict what other people are going to

do. And, so, society is very protective of their mores and of their (unintel-

1 igible) and I understand all of that, and I suppose it's a functional neces­

sity. However, societies also, because of that, run the risk of self-culture.

Just blinding themselves to what's the truth, blinding themselves to their own

faults and then perishing as a result. And, the university is the place that's

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A. (Continued) committed to the open expression of ideas and from the point of

view of society in general, there's been a war between society and universities.

And, you can go back to British history and, the stories will be there. Marty

(unintelligible) got a whole book on the subject. The university's great

value is that if if it's a place where free and open dialogue, nobody

has to listen, nobody has to prove, people can talk. And, the idea that

(unintelligible) are just inferior to me, and I sort of watched, and I under­

stood their problem and their complaint (unintelligible) is inferior to me

nonetheless. One of my good friends, not a good friend but a fairly good

friend, someone who acts really friendly, was leading one side of that argu­

ment and he and I started out (unintelligible) My position was, well, okay,

now what if the young Americans are free to go around and get a bunch of

muscle and decide that your lecture is corrosive of the good values of our

society and they sit down in front of your door and say nobody's coming in to

hear your lecture unless you walk over us. That's what you're asking for.

But that got me started in a whole series of arguments that eventually got me

to be known as a hawk, I guess. think nobody who really knows me can

characterize me as much of a hawk, but mostly in a large theater people don't

really know you. And a university, to some extent, is a large theater. So,

I've been shooting my mouth off here and there, and occasionally shooting my

mouth off at faculty meetings, trying to head off various (unintelligible)

and self-rightous resolutions of one sort or another that I thought were

either designed to do some ridgible cleavage within the academic end, or

just thought it was wrong for the academic community as a community to take

a position on anything as tense as Viet Nam or anything else that had a major­

ity, minority characteristic to it. If it were unanimous, that's all fine,

it's also an accident, but it's fine. But what's the minority supposed to

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A. (Continued) say? Let 1 s just say it came out the majority of the faculty

supported the war? Then what 1 s the minority supposed to do, say we 1 ne not

part of this community, we ... you know ... Anyone could sign any paper

they wanted. You know, here or ... we the faculty abate the war, or a

local war or whatever. I couldn 1 t understand the meaning of that. He

said, we the faculty .. within which there was buried some minorities

who didn 1 t subscribe to that statement, we the faculty. On an issue like

this that had no internally ... you know, if you pass a regulation around

and argue (unintelligible) and that 1 s a necessity of function. There was

nothing that could happen internally, except to produce a cleavage, you know,

a very embarrassing, painful cleavage within the community. For what? So,

fought off those. I also fought off other things that it seemed to be

straightforward threats to academic freedom. I guess I must of shot my

mouth off enough on .those things that I carreto people 1 s attention. It most

surely wasn 1 t my intention to do that. never did ask Kenneth, really,

why he invited me, except that told him I couldn 1 t do any paper work, and

he said that 1 s not really what he wanted. Uh ... the other thing I had done

was to criticize the administration in various ways. These and central. So,

I walked around and I thought about this back and forth six different ways,

and I ... by that time I knew that Kenneth and I saw the college rather

similarly. We had decided on what we thought we ... the things that needed

immediation in one way or another and what we reasonably could change .

I decided that, well I had the following problem. Well, I wouldn 1 t walk

down the road five miles to take the position ... in those days, I wouldn 1 t

have walked down the road five miles to take the position of dean any place

else, much less associate dean. And, if I didn 1 t take this, couldn 1 t shoot

my mouth off any more. Because if I just started taking shots at people

{_unintelligible) what d f ? o you want rom me· I told you, you couJd•ve

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A. (Continued) fixed it ... you didn't it. I think, as I recall, in the end

there, after the discussions with my wife and a couple of close friends, and

just lots and lots of walking around, that's what decided me. That if

really could not find any viable way to function if I said no, I think

deluded myself, at the time, about how much scholarly work I would be able

to do given my own personality, temperment, what not, and, be an administra-

tor. I think I rea 11 y did delude myself. don't have many regrets in

this world, but one of them is that one book that I started I didn't get

finished. I think that book had some useful things to say and I think it

really hasn't quite been said, although, Reicher (unintelligible) ...

it's just pitched a little higher. What was writing was not a profound

book. Some of my research might have been called really important in

breaking new ground. The book is breaking new ground, it's just that the

popularization is a lot of work. (Unintelligible) I think that would

never havecthe patience to start that book over, or to revise that mess.

If I went back to it I'd probably start from scratch. It's a very painful

business. However, in general, I didn't exactly give up political science

when I took the deanship, I just gradually lost my grip on it. I didn't

intend to give it up and it's sitting over there just behind me, there's a

big stack of political science stuff that (unintelligible) sent me to read.

But all the stuff (unintelligible) has to do with coalition maintenance.

And, uh . I may yet get a modest thing out of that. So, that's what

happened there and I guess I've always thought of it as worthwhile. This is

a good university. would not care to be an adminrstrator except in a

place where the y~eld on the scholarly end, warranted all that. Duplicating,

maneuvering, which one does to keep the system from . systems which

serve other pur,poses perfectly well, and I'm perfectly happy with somebody

else having to make those run, and I don't have my (unintelligible) But,

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A. (Continued) this is a system, I think, uh ... from which I derived a lot

of gratification, just seeing the thing run well.

Q. How many Jewish people are administrators here, do you think?

A. I haven't the foggiest idea. You know,

think without blaming it well, as

know a couple, mainly me, and I

said, I think (unintelligible)

the parents of Jewish, I don't know what else comes in and out of being

Jewish. Uh . . I haven 1 t any idea.

Q. How about the faculty, do you have any idea?

A. haven't any idea there. Now, I'm really different, I never think about it.

can't tell you in my own department who's Jewish and who's not Jewish.

find out from time to time, you know, I mean (unintelligible) is obviously

Jewish.

Q. I guess I was curious because, although I also have no numbers, but, it seems

that a large number of the student population is Jewish, and I was ... and

I know in my department that a large part of the graduate student population

is Jewish, and I was wondering if that sort of thing translated into other

reaches of the university, you know, such as ..

A. Some of it is artifactual. Uh you open up the university 1 ike this,

it opens itself on different levels. Different geographic ... well, it

opens its various levels open in different geographical ways. The faculty is

drawn from an international pool. As are the graduate students to some

to some lesser extent. The student body is drawn much more through, at least

the undergraduates, are drawn much more from a regional pool. So when the

thing starts, when the university opened up and started to seek students on

a very broad base, it didn't go to the southwest, and the nearest large popu­

lation then is New York City. I think if it had been populated wall to wall

with any group that had the upward educational aspirations that Jews have,

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A. (Continued) that would be a significant factor ln some regards, to the

student body. And, so, the undergraduate student body by simply drawing

heavily on New York, Washington access, has a Jot of Jews. The faculty is

drawn on a, well, I wouldn't know the whole history on this, there's more to

know, but the faculty is in the time I've known it, (unintelligible) in a

national sample, I have never seen on a national basis, international in some

cases, I have never heard or seen intimated in any way shape or form, the

least concern with anyone's religion. I think we have a sub-

stantial number of Jewish faculty in various degrees of activism in their

identity. say substantial simply because I attend from time to time

an EJA lunch or I'm over to the Temple and I run into people ... well,

look, take Al Sheffren, in economics. Okay, Al Shreffen, I never thought

about it. Al Sheffren Jewish or not Jewish. I look (unintelligible)

I know what he does. And, then I met him in a Temple one day ... aha!

Now, Malcom (unknown) is quite accurate. And, I've come to know Malcom

as being Jewish. Bill Brawn in a ... Bill Brown in Fine Competitive

Literature is Orthodox, but . in fact, didn't know that until he

it was during the time he was chairman, he explained to me one day that on

Fridays he liked to go home early and (unintelligible). If you take some­

body like Moshe Lugen, you know Lugen's Israeli, Jewish, and basically seen

as a damn smart scientist, I'm not sure anybody worries or thinks that's he's

got at any given time, there's always a couple of Israelis and a couple of

Arabs working in his lab. It is a peculiar place the ... this university.

Maybe think most universities. It really is an achievement in it's own

right. And if you can do the particular thing of your profession extraor­

dinarily well, it doesn't make any difference if you' re green and have two

heads. Uh ... it has something to do witlil exaggeration. If you're suf-

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A. (Continued) ficiently obnoxious as a human being, uh .

people for it, but there's a funny kind of trade-off.

. I forgive

mean, you'd really

have to be incredibly obnoxious (unintelligible). So, it's for me, never

been a very high-cued thing around here. I'm not sure you're gonna find

that that's a perspective that's shared by everyone. When I first arrived

here, I had somebody tell me all kin:lof speeches about how anti-semitic

this place is, and that person was a faculty member, not here now

seemed to me that he was a real paranoid, although it may be that some of

what he said was correct, he had been here, I had just arrived, he had been

here for quite a few years. Uh . and think, men may have a much

better sense of what the place is like in the last . in those days, when

she was young, she and her husband were both alumni of this school and have

known it fairly closely for many years, since she was a physician. Julie was

the .. kind of, the leading obstretician in this town for twenty years, and

was affiliated with the hospital, I believe, and was with the medical school,

etc. It was at one time a Baptist school, and the Baptist's have never been

very bashful about having the true religion, and everybody else better shape

up and understand (unintelligible). And, that had to not be too comforting a

set of thoughts for a . . . Jews or Cat ho 1 i cs or anybody e 1 se.

Q. Did anyone ever mention to you ... um ..• Rush Reeves' supposed anti­

semitism?

A. Uh . . . I can't remember anybody mentioning it. I got the genera 1 sense

that if you go back as far as Rush Reeves, and George Eastman, and uh ..

the earlier group, they probably were anti ... I'd be curious as to the

full range of what they were anti. My problem is that when you say to me,

anti-semitic, I really look for persecution.

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Q. Oh, I see.

A. And, I come out of a background that knows about enough. And, uh . . .

anti-semitic carries that all the time; it doesn 1 t mean the same thing as

discrimination. It doesn 1 t quite mean, to me, the same thing as the fact

that the Irish and Italians hated one another and beat one another on the

head. Uh ... and that there 1 s still some over-tones to that in the third

generation. lt 1 s got a more profound meaning, and I just have never found

that more profoundly. But, I have found in this town, a very substantial

awareness of people 1 s backgrounds, religions, and ties. Coming in from the

big metropolitan area, everybody 1 s anonymous. It starts from scratch with

everybody you know. lt 1 s not really how things work in a town this size.

Particularly in a town this size and thfs stable for many, many years in

its population dates. So, that, in this town you have old money and new

money, and old families, and some old families still have old money, and some

old families don 1 t have money anymore, but they have friends who have new

money or ... the interesting thing to that is, they 1 re all aware of one

another and sort of know what the ties are and who owned what land fifty

years ago and a hundred years ago. And that automatically sorts out people

who are newcomers. In a similar vein in a a much smaller town, when

was doing a study a little bit like yours on ... they were, essentially,

a Connecticut affair calJed, 11 Town Boards of Finance11• ~nd trey really are

the powers in the little towns of Connecticut. Uh .. the Board of Finance,

the town counselors, the Board of Finance and the School Board . And, I

went out in one of the most beautiful regions l 1 ve ever seen: northwestern

Connecticut, right up near the (unintelligible) little town near Kent.

interviewed a chairman of that board, and I got to talking to him about some

of the values of the town, and he was an older man, you know, sixties .

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A. (Continued) and, uh ... when I asked him about the values, and so far I

had asked him about the proceedings of the board and what not, he was fine.

But, when I asked him about the values, he said, well, I don't know.

you really ought to talk to my wife about that. I'm kind of a newcomer.

So, I was a little surprised about him being a newcomer since he was chair­

man of the board and I said, oh really, how long have you lived here? Oh,

ever since I got married, about thirty-five years ago. (Laughter)

Q. (Laughter) Oh. Let me just turn over the tape.

END OF TAPE 11, SIDE A, INTERVIEW 11

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Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 16, 1976 By Tina Isaacs

Interview 11 Tape 11 Side B

Page 52

Q. . .. and, I don't know quite how to put this, but are there any sort of

special problems with the Jewish kids on the campus, do you think, at all?

A. Sure. Uh . . . I don 1 t think ... with some Jewish kids, but I don 1 t see

that they're really big deal problems. Uh ... I think the question of

kosher is real. And, uh needs to be addressed. It 1 s nonsense to say

that's not a problem. don't see it shaking the foundations of anything

very much. think that I'm in a wrestling match about every third year

with students about Jewish students about the High Holidays and the

exams and c 1 asses and a 11 of that. I'm not terribly sympathetic to their

plight having come, fairly successfully, through the whole complex school

system discovering that if you're really smart, you make all those things

up, you made it anyhow. And, if you're really religious, the choice is no

problem at all. The problem is, these are upper-middle class semi-secular

Jewish kids who would prefer not to have the inconvenience and don't want to

feel guilty. They don't have to make a tough ... what's for them a tough

choice, for an Orthodox Jew it's not a tough choice at all . (unintelligi-

ble). So, that I regard as a fairly minor problem which comes up from time

to time. Although, it raises some interesting points in avhol~ secular way

about some of our facilities for making up laboratories. That's a genuine

problem, and I'd like to see that adjusted independent of the reason of ab-

sence. Uh . . that's a whole other thing. I don't see the Jewish students

on campus as a problem called, 11 the Jewish kids 11• justdon't. Uh

maybe it is. I don't see it. Uh ... I do see two groups of students who have

some problems, one of which I think is gradually working its way very nicely,

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A. (Continued) and that's the black skins. The black skins are really a new

part of this community, and are very sensitive and hurting part of this com-

mun i ty. don't think that's all gone, but I think there's enormous problems

within the black community, w1thin this community, and between the black

community and the white. And, that's really come a long way. I think that

another set of students around here that get lost altogether, and that

troubles me sometimes, and that's the foreign students. The~e's really not

a good vehicle here, yet, and this is said with no disrespect for the foreign

student counselors, I think that they work very hard, but I think that there's

sort of an unaddressed need and, I've become a little more aware of this since

I've taken un-rlergraduate student responsibilities. But, in general, I think

none of us looks at the students on tHs campus in terms of ethnic or reli­

gious or regional grouping. I think we tend to look at them much more in

terms of their intellectual interests. If you ask me, are the pre-meds a

problem, the answers yes. So, that, I don't think . typically that's

if you listen to discussions among the three deans in this office and between

us and Bob (unknown), talking about undergraduates, we talk about two kinds

of problems; one is this straight, scholarly, academic kind of question ..

how smart, what lines of development are the students pursuing, are we ade­

quately staffed in those lines, what about the transition problems. The

other is the student mix and the value mix and whether students are getting

broadened or simply reinforced, you know, it's . not desirable to come

out of highschool and reenter the same highschool, except now you take

advanced calculus. Since we hope to be producing students who will play

some leadership roles the question of whether the mix of students adds to

the educational richness of the (unintelligible). So, one would 1 ike to

spread a recruiting base more into the midwest, more into the south. It's a

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A. (Continued) little elusive when you talk about leaping out to the coast •

the cost . the sheer cost to people of placing students on an opposite

coast is somewhat prohibitive. But, I just never hear anyone say, less Jews;

more Jews; more Italians; less Italians. never, it just doesn 1t come up.

Maybe because l 1m Jewish, nobody 1s ever said it to me.

Q. 1 Yea, well, as I walk around campus, and especially see the library, there 1s

all sorts of anti-semitic graffiti around. Um

just taking off of that, if you think that

. and I was wondering,

suppose most of the under-

graduates perceive an anti-semitic ... that the Jewish undergraduates per­

ceive their fellow undergraduates as being anti-semitic.

A. I haven 1t the foggiest idea. You see that 1s ... I ... l 1ve never had

any complaints about it.

Q. That 1 s ... that 1 s all.

A. Oh. The issue of graffiti is a funny one. You have to recognize that one

person with one stick of chalk can mark up about a hundred acres of walls if

you give him si.x months. And, in fact, the most offensive graffiti l 1ve seen

are anti-black. In fact, I washed one off the lavatory wall the other day.

lt 1s not really (unintelligible) but I did. It was sufficiently offensive,

and I don 1t normally bother, but that was sufficiently offensive that I

washed it off. And, I see some anti-semitic ones and some anti-black, I see

anti-gay, and I don 1t see anti-women lately. l 1m sure you 1ve women have won,

I 1m not sure to date ... when they 1 re really secure, that 1 11 come back.

It annoys me, but l 1m also just terribly aware that graffiti aren 1t repre­

sentative of much. Since, as I say, you know, you can have a very small

number of people produce an enormous impression like that. think the

that the test of whether there 1s anti-semitism that characterizes the

community is whether Jewish students feel rebuffed by other people who are

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A. (Continued) not Jewish. I don't think the real test is whether they.

they mix a lot with non-Jewish students. That's a test of a different

thing. That's a question of how much integration. But, a lot of Jews

mixing with Jews just has to do with their own preference. So, I don't

exactly take that sociometric as much of a mention. But, I take the

very straigf-t forward sense of whether you were rebuffed, whether you ran

for office and people put you down in the course of your interaction because

you were Jewish; whether you can't seem to talk to people who are in office

and it seems, to you at least, that (unintelligi1ble) can. Then, I guess,

that there really is something. But I haven't heard word one about that.

Q. Okay. Are there less blacks on campus now than there were five years ago?

Percentage wise.

A. I'm sure there are.

Q. Why?

A. The admissions cranked down. What happened . . we did a study of what was

happening. I was part of that group. We did a study of what was happening

to the students who were taking on a special admission. I ran that data my­

self and analyzed it, and it was a pretty clear breaking point, and it appeared

as though we were admitting students for whom we really had no appropriate

educational vehicles. They were just getting their heads busted. And, it

wasn't good for their psyche, it wasn't good for the black students as a

whole, it wasn't good for black-white relations, and mostly it wasn't good for

those students themselves. You know, they were really getting chewed up by

this system. No way were they prepared to cope with this and in no way were

we prepared to help them cope with it. We didn't ... we did not know how

to do a thing like that. We have no. no effective vehicle for working

students whose board scores are below certain levels and who accurately reflect

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A. (Continued) where those students are at in terms of the language skills.

There was a tendency to think that every black student who had a low boards

score was suffering from culture shock. Not true. In fact, my experience

of it was that there was some place between a fifty and a hundred point

(unintelligible) and yes, the testing undermeasured the black students'

ability. But only by about that much. And if you put, say seventy-five

points on, you sort of knew where the kid was. And, if you put seventy-

f ive points on and you're still one hundred and sixty away from four ..

that kid was really gonna get killed. Now, we just had overwhelming evi­

dence of that attitude. Well, what ... I don't know what this is about

it's enough, you can't keep doing this anymore ... We have to go for stu~

dents that apply that cut (unknown). Now, the competition for students above

that cut (unintelligible) is just much keener. And, what we've done is to

say all right, we' 11 take the students that we can get, who seem to be qua!-

ified, and we' 11 provide them a proper an appropriate surround them of

supports in a variety of ways. Fred Jefferson spends a great deal of time

with the parents of students who are coming here, because if you read

a ... soul book, I have it somewhere; he describes his problems in going

on to school and while his parents had moved twice which enabled him to go to

better highschools, when he wanted to go off to college and therefore not

work and bring income to the family, it really began to open a breech be­

tween him and his family. And, uh, and Fred Jefferson has worked on this and

there's much better relations between the black students and their families,

and the families and the university, so, I think we're running about five

percent. When one was eighty to ten percent, and we just can't seem to close

that gap. Now, it might be that we could close the gap if we offered more

scholarship money, but we've stretched out so thin now that the only way to

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A. (Continued) do that would be to cut back on something else. To bring the

students in and not provide the appropriate support services seems unconstant.

So, I think we're gonna run between five to seven percent probably for the

next several years. It's hard to predict that. I don't quite see how we

can push it back to ten, but that's what happened and (unintelligible) worked

out reasonably well.

Q. Okay. Um ... this is a two-part question: how do you think the first,

Rochester Community in general, and then specifically, the Rochester Jewish

Community perceives of the University of Rochester?

~. We 1 I , . wow.

Q. A large one.

A. No, my problem simply is that I can't Ht the Rochester Community into a

piece. can tell you about pieces. Okay. I think from the river to ~cross

the river this school is still the man's toast, in that the archetypical

man's toast. think from people in Greece and Irondequoit and the surround-

ing suburbs, in general, except maybe for Brighton, Perington, we're some

kind of rich powerhouse school that they don't quite understand. We don't

seem to be community service oriented as they might like. We do, in fact,

make enormous contributions to the community in two ways that almost nobody

understands. One is simply that we're the third largest employer in the city.

And the other is, the hospital. The appreciation if any, that people have of

the university is not very much into the basic research end. So, you know,

in general they think our chemistry department should address itself to

cleaning up the air and catching rats or something. And that's not what our

chemistry department does. They're not against it, but it would be silly to

them to do that, plenty of people can do that or can't do it. The chemistry

department does, it figures out the basic structure of things so that maybe

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A. (Continued) one synthesizes some day, or do whatever you want to do, and ..

Any (unknown) does research which eventually led to synthesizing very impor­

tant joints in cancer, but his real interest tended to ... I mean, he used

that drug, of course he knew that there was a practical end interest in the

drug, but, think of a syn~sis question that he was interested in and there's

a much more broad question than simply that drug. Very few people understand

that about any of the universities. think we have no worse town john

relationships than Yale or Chicago or any other major university that's

located in a city today, in a city which believes itself to be in dire

difficulty and that this place would bail it out. Almost nothing that goes

on in a university, in some ways almost none of it, altered that application

in anything under twenty years. That's silly, it could be ten years. The

point of it is that for me the applicat1on; and you got research labs all

over the place. Kodak has labs that know all what's gonna happen in five

years. Well, that's one set of problems. The people in the community who

view themselves as deeply interested in so called high culture, or who view

themselves as intellectuals, I'm always nervous about people who view them­

selves as intellectuals, I think have a happier attitude toward the university.

A Jot of that's due to the Eastman School or the Eastman Theater. But

increasingly, I think, in recent years we! I, just last night ... a good

case in point. Dick Fenno talked and they practically packed out. In as

much as .. so, in otherwords, the community, we've gotten increasingly

community focused. I think what's happening in the upper straighter of this

town, in terms of economics and intellectual interests, is that while before

the Second World War this school was sort of . theirs. And then it went

national in terms of what I mentioned yesterday. The (unintelligible).

Throughout the community, sort of, got a little put off about what was going

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A. (Continued) on here. What are all these bigshots corning in and they don't

care about us. I think the last five years or so, has seen us addressed at

head on and invite the community, all of the community, to participate more

and more in the university concepts. It's impact's differentially on it.

The average person who is a blue collar worker and bowler, would rather spend

an evening bowling than listening to Dick Fenno. Now, that's may not

be accurate if that person really knew what listening to Dick Fenno meant,

maybe he'd like to listen to Dick Fenno. The communication network, the

signaling, and all of that is such that it's just not likely to occur to that

person. The common (unintelligible) that's all. But I think our ties with

the community are significantly improved. Incidentally, one of the things

that turned out to be a great plus for us occurred during the Kent State

and Cambodia. Students went out with . . on a petition jogging. It cost

fifty cents or a quarter ... a quarter, guess the (unintelligible).

And they were raising funds and the funds were to be used to support the anti­

war candidates for congress. And they went all over this county. And they

went right up into Greece, Chili, Gates, supposedly tough country. The kids

who went out on that were all straight kids, by kids standards, okay, and the

one's who weren't all that straight made themselves look straight. The really

spaced out types were literally spaced out. They were laying on the grass

here listening to acid rock and thinking odd thoughts and doing their bit for

the cause that that was their bit ... they were laying there. The kids who

went out to petition, and got themselves haircuts, and all kind of clean,

whatever ... and, the feedback I got out of that was just unbelievable.

People of the community really liked the students. They weren't obnoxious.

They weren't funny. The kids knew what they felt, and they talked to people.

They respected other people's views. And, the feedback I got through such

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A. (Continued) places as the Chamber of Commerce, all right, people I knew who

lived up in Kodak Park area were all to the effect that it was terrific meeting

the kids. That they were nice kids, and good kids and all of that. I think

that was a very propitious moment for us to ... to surface in the conscience

of people in this community as something positive. So even if ... altRough

the community wasn't particularly anti-war, the fact is that those students

raised something like $40,000 in quarters in this community. Now, that wasn't

lost on people like Barber Conable and Frank Horton. You can't raise that

kind of money in democratic quarters. There aren't that many democratic

quarters. (Laughter) There's a lot of republican quarters in there. Well,

that was one thing and then things have just evolved. It's a slow process,

there will be more of it, I think it's going reasonably well. On the Jewish

side, the situation is really much more clean-cut. And, I will say for the

record, any place you want to go, if anyone desearves credit for improving the

relations between the community, the Jewish Community and this university, and

that's Miriam (unknown). And, then you have to go beyond that to give good

credit where it belongs and that includes (unknown) Goldberg, Abe Karp and

Alan Wallace. I don't think people would lead to the notion of Alan

Wallace. Okay? But when he was in Rochester, he said let's get Golda Meir

and Alan said, why not? And did. (Laughter) Alright? Uh ... Now, the

community here has The Jewish Community in this town have really not

seen this university as their place. That I knew from when I came here.

People heard I was here, Jewish people in this community, heard I was here

and they would ask me: what's it 1 ike7 That's a funny thing for people to

ask in a small town like this, where everybody knows everybody else. What

do you mean, what's it like? Why don't they know what it's like, I don't

know what it's like yet, I just got here.

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Q. (Laughter)

A. Clearly, I didn't feel that it ... if they had much to do with any of this.

And, it may well date back to the hard Baptist days or whatever. I don't know.

In fact, I'm given to understand that in the old days of Rush Reeves or

somebody (unintelligible) give a speech. 'This school is up by Baptists, for

Baptists, and whoever is here that's not a Baptist, better pray hard for their

mandatory chapel', and all of that. Well, that's a long time ago. What sur­

prised me was that here I had an obviously substaitially Jewish.student body:

thirty, forty percent, really, and the local Jewish Community didn't seem to

know anything about that. (Unintelligible) Uh ... they just didn't feel

anything towards the place particularly. Okay. Nevertheless, we had some

limited set of time and we got going on well, one early thing was recruiting

Abe Karp which was not known as a gesture in any sense, but rather a need that

we had for certain offerings and a clear interest on his part. He's a histor­

ian. Hes a ... he became a rabbi but he is a historian, in fact. A

and, a ... it was very clear that he wanted to do history that he was just

right for a career realignment and things fit together. And, that surprised

people. It surprised them much more than it surprised us. Then the ques-

tion of the Be-rntein Chaitycame up with ways of ... including. . You

gotta get Kenneth Clark to remind you of this. Kenneth is really a joy at

sensing these things and leading the way and, uh ... The discussions began

and it was a remarkable exercise. The discussions ranged from 'gee, would

that really happen given the distance that the Jewish Community felt for the

place' to other people saying 'well, I think people are just waiting to be

invited' and still other people were saying 'well, it depends on what you're

talking about'. Now, the only complicated problem, first of all getting

Phillip Bernstein to endorse this required that he wouldn't be embarrassed

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A. (Continued) either by what you may do or how you may do it. On the other

hand, Phil has been a friend of this place for years. It required a very

astute sort of sensings of feedbacks, that people were nervous. It

was beautifully done. And, then, the Golda Meir thing absolutely counted.

I have not seen anything like that, in terms of the bhe warmth of an audience

in all the years I've been here, no matter what the audience was. And I

think that this straight open the door to this place to the Jewish Community

who never felt a part of this university. And, it's hard to explain it.

It just sort of did, that's all. They don't think this is the yeshiva

university. That's really not the point here. But, I do think the com­

munity feels welcome, and comfortable, and they still may be a 1 ittle puz­

zled but, it's all right. So, I think that we made a major transition in

that regard and think that it's very much to the benefit of the university.

Because, that's a very vital part of this community and to not have been able

to draw upon it as a sustaining force, is a mistake. think we crossed that

threshhold rather well. And, I think as a problem, it is behind us. That's

not to say that there won't be a complex set of demands that might spin up

someday in one way or another for something that we won't want to do. Could

happen. Happens with lots of our constituencies, not just the Jewish commu­

nity, happens with trustees who call up from time to time to say they'd like

this or that. And, we have to explain why this or that isn't such a bright

idea. Or they don't 1 ike something that we did. would imagine that if

(unknown) were invited to speak on this campus that if we say we were a

Jewish Community here which would be absolutely offended and they would find

me defending (unknown) right to speak on this community, uh .. on this

campus. So, that's just the normal part of the ballgame. And, uh. we

have had that with any group of self intensity. But, I think that we're really

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A. (Continued) ~n rather good shape in that regard.

Q. Is any substantial part of your endowment from Jewish sources?

A. Well, it is now. (Laughter)

Q. Is this from the past two years, really?

A. Well, now you' re really .. you really have to ask other people (unintelli-

gible) myself about the endowments and Roger Latham is the guy. don't know

all the details on the endowments, no question about it. That the Bernstein

(unintelligible) heavily subscribe to what is Jewish Community. And, that's

three quarters of a million dollars. That's recent. It's not by any means

exclusive to Jewish Communities; as a matter of fact, one of the leading

prelates in this area has made a personal contribution of a very large amount

of money to that charity. Now, there certainly has been a donation to this

university by Jews in a larger amoun~ prior to that, Maney Goldberg is on the

Board of T~ustees; he's himself not destitute and certainly has given money.

We have gotten money from several foundations that I know about over the

years the names of which are very Jewish or sound Jewish, I don't know that

they really are Jewish, because never asked. We certainly got Jots of money

... I don't know if the Sloan Foundation, for example, is Jewish or not.

It sounds it. We've gotten a variety of monies (unintelligible) money from

the Sloan Foundation. The Foreman Family, there' re old families in this

town and Jewish families that have money and which have been supportive of

us in a variety of ways.prior to the Be111>tein Charity. I really couldn't say,

tnough, what fraction and most especially since that the biggest fraction of

our endowment is clearly a major corporate gift. Xerox. Kodak. So, it's

really difficult to say who's private ... offsets that.

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Q. How ... how did ... um ... or, how has, and I 1 m sure he 1 s still doing

it, Phil Bernstein contributed to this university? don 1 t mean financially,

I mean just in general. And, what are your impressions of him?

A. Well, you know, I have only gotten to know Phil Bernstein since the charity

began. was not in his congregation. I was enormously impressed by the

man, as got to know him. (Unintelligible) knows the answer to your question

thoroughly, and I really don 1 t. The thing I know that he 1 s done for a variety

of ways ... the simple thing he gave us was the paper, l 1 m sure. But,

that 1 s recent. think that what Phil has done for this university has

probably been to be among the people encouraging the opening of the dorm

for many years without self-interest in money. I think that 1 s one of Phil 1 s

roles in this world has been opening doors. Not just this door. And some-

times when you have the door open, it .. it 1 s hard to get people to walk

through, and I think actually the door is opened to more people walking

through (unintelligible). think Phil is far less 1 ikely to, to many people

in fact it 1 s almost alien to Phil 1 s thinking to postulate a we versus they

kind of looking at things. But that really is all I know about the guy.

(Unknown) knows the stories.

Q. Can you think of um ... anything I might have neglected to ask, or anything

you 1 d want to add to a study of this sort?

A. There 1 s something I want to ask you. I don 1 t exactly understand why this,

you know, become Associate Dean (unintelligible) ... (Laughter)

Q. Oh, just really interested.

A. Okay.

Q. We 1 ve been asking people about not only their straight relationships with the

community, but, you know, how ... what their jobs entail and, you know,.

A. Yea. I can 1 t think of anything in particular that I wanted to give you a

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A. (Continued) particular speech on at this point in regard to the university.

I think a thing I eluded to earlier is very relevant for the Jewish religion

and from that, of course, I think the Jewish ethnicity, and that is: tnat

either the religion is going to deal with a set of ideals which is .

in which it faces a tremendous (unintelligible) or it will subsequently pass

from the scene. I think that 1 s true, not only in Judaism, I think the great

challenge is to all of western religions. In the current science oriented .

science oriented if ... the findings of science make it increasingly dif­

ficult to give credibility to the notion of (unknown) conception of the

Diety sitting there watching you (unintelligible). lt 1 s just very hard to

do that, whatever the ethical spinoffs may be under those other religion

based in that. If they hope their legitimacy to that conception in the

Diety, they 1 re in big trouble. Tt may not be an insuperable difficulty,

but it 1 s certainly a problem. The eastern religions aren 1 t, on the other

hand, by eastern I mean Japanese, Chinese, have a whole different notion of

what they 1 re talking about. They do not have the equivalent of God. lt 1 s

not an (unknown) culture, (unintelligible) they 1 re not God. Uh and

what' they talk about is coming into harmony with nature and with the universe.

In fact, that 1 s nbt at all (unknown) or at odds with anything science dis­

covers. Une of things science discovered is if you mess around with Mother

Nature, 9he hits you. And, I think that the western religions, in general,

will be regarded as silliness, unless they can take their whole set of moral

values and establish a base for them that goes beyond the question of whether

there 1 s an (unknown) God. And Jews have that problem as much as anyone, and

maybe more. Maybe more because the nature of the religion is so much more

straightforwardly intellectual. The Catholic religion, for example, is never

argued. In fact, quite subconsciously argues the other way. lt 1 s never

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A. (Continued) argued in that it seeks to provide an intellectual vehicle for

the masses. It (unintelligible) the intellectual exercises of a leadership

group for the intellectual exercises of the masses and provides them a proper

guidance by its lights. But it doesn't say that it provides them the base

for their own intellectual growth. But • that's not what Judaism is.

Judaism, the rabbinate is simply stirring the pot, really. And, it is in

many ways a populous religion that anyone could sit down, who wishes to take

the time to be a Talmudic Scholar. Well, then they you know, one has

to change what has been a preoccupation with rituals for the sake of atten­

tion of our identity. To ritual rooted, it's some ethical, moral base that's

credible. Now, the one base that's not gonna work, and that's the basic

problem of the older generation of Jews. And, Bill Green (unintelligible).

It's just not gonna work. have been just of an age when I can understand

why it doesn't work, and yet it troubles me, and yet it's inevitabl·e. The

one thing the kid's don't believe and that's just through luck. Because,

if they did, they'd hate, and we don't need it. That was just an abomina­

tion of the . it's just not gonna work. And it ought not to work. If

you want to see that kind of thing and how it works, you want to take a look

at the way the Armenians view the Turks. If you think that's a viable basis

for morality, then go that route. That doesn't breed anything, except to

sustains hate. So, I think it's better that the kids don't really know.

Because that's not the issue. In fact, the whole. . one of the weaknesses

I think are the Jewish culture (unintelligible) was that Judaism has to do

with suffering. Well being a Jew may have had to do with suffering, but the

moral premise; of Judaism don't have to do with suffering. (Unintelligible)

There's a beautiful book by two authors whose names I could never remember,

called Life is With People. And if you' re interested in the culture of the

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A. (~ontinued) shtetil, it's certainly a book worth reading. And if you ask

Abe, he' 11 tell you the authors. And the title is incredibly accurate.

Judaism is a very life forming (unintelligible) ~hilosophy. And, to the

extent that it got itself ossified (unintelligible) when the religion was

being let go, that was a very dangerous act. Very dangerous. And, I think

there's a healthiness now (unintelligible) whatever shakings up it may do,

is good. That's all.

Q. Okay, well thank you very much.

A. You're welcome.

END OF TAPE 11, SIDE B, INTERVIEW 11