Conference's bar mitzvah held at PSU

By Kaplan Tuttlebaum

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The Western Jewish Studies Association held its 13th annual conference—its "bar mitzvah," in the words of the scholarly organization's president, Professor Lawrence Baron of San Diego State University—at Portland State University on March 18 and 19. Local professors, as well as scholars from across the United States, Europe and Israel, participated in the conference's more than two dozen panels.

The conference keynote talk, attended by 120 people, was a novelty in that it featured not one but two speakers, each on a different but complementary aspect of American Jewish politics. The first historian in this double-header was Professor Marc Dollinger of San Francisco State University, who spoke on the history of Jews and American liberalism.

Dollinger argued that American Jewish liberalism has always had to negotiate between universal concerns and the Jewish "quest for inclusion" and security in the United States. Rather than falling on hard times since the heyday of the civil rights era, Dollinger suggested, Jewish liberalism has instead taken on different forms as regional differences and new perceptions of Jewish group interest have emerged.

Dollinger was followed by Edward S. Shapiro, professor emeritus of Seton Hall University, who spoke on Jews and American conservatism. Shapiro began by joking that a colleague had quipped that, given the subject, his would likely be "a very short talk."

He agreed that most American Jews have, in the years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, shown little enthusiasm for political conservatism. Yet he cautioned that in analyzing the political tendencies of American Jews, care should be taken with both how the question is formulated, and with how terms such as "liberalism" and "conservatism" are defined, since these factors can predetermine the answers.

A vigorous question and answer session ranged over such issues as Jewish attitudes towards the Democrat and Republican parties, the role of Israel in American Jewish politics, and the Jewish ambivalence toward political power.

Panels covered a variety of topics, from Jewish-Berber relations in Morocco to Jewish philanthropists in Russia, Canada and the United States. A panel on the Six Day War's effects in Israel and America included a social history by Sylvia Frankel of Lewis and Clark College, an analysis of two post-'67 Israeli films by Miri Talmon-Bohm of Florida Atlantic University, and a discussion of Senator Fulbright's anti-Israel sentiments by foreign policy historian Arlene Lazarowitz of California State University.

Other talks featured local faculty, educators and rabbis such as Bob Liebman, Ellen Eisenberg, Judy Margles, Rabbi Ariel Stone, Linda Maizels, Craig Wollner, Alon Raab, Laura Leibman, Matthew Warshawsky, Marat Grinberg, Neil Davison, Oren Kosansky, Chana Cox, Michael Weingrad, Gail Sherman and David Horowitz.

Michael Thomas, a professor at Portland's Concordia University who delivered a talk on Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity, cited one of the conference's two roundtable discussions as his favorite session. Entitled "That Angry God, The Old Testament, and the Other Holiday at Christmas," the session was devoted to challenges in teaching Jewish studies to students who are unfamiliar with Jews and Judaism except through Christian religion and culture.

Thomas explained: "It was very helpful to break from the ordinary academic panel setting to discuss the issues one faces when teaching Jewish studies courses" both to "students who have little or no knowledge of the Bible or the varieties of Judaism and Christianity," and to students from Christian evangelical backgrounds who may "approach Biblical texts from a literalist viewpoint" or a "supercessionist theology."

Faculty at the lively session "shared pedagogical strategies, best-practices, and even book titles."

PSU Dean Marvin Kaiser addressed the attendees at the conference dinner, welcoming them to the campus and the city, and noting the intellectual contribution of the Judaic studies program to PSU. He praised Rabbi Joshua Stampfer, in attendance, for his work in promoting academic Judaic studies in Portland.

A number of local community members attended the conference.

"I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to learn" at these sessions, said Marjorie Janove, who attended Monday's panels. Janove was particularly intrigued by UCLA professor Yona Sabar's talk on "Searching for Vestiges of Past Jewish Life in an Iraqi Kurdistan Town."

Sabar presented video footage, and contemporary and historical reflections concerning his recent visits to the Iraqi town in which he was raised before his family immigrated to Israel. His historical overview included such surprises as the existence of a female rabbi in 17th-century Kurdistan, while his more contemporary reflections described the personal relations, often quite positive, between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Iraq.

Another local attendee, Jared Gellert, singled out University of Memphis professor David Patterson's talk on Jewish environmentalism as particularly thought-provoking. Patterson "raised the question of how you can have an ethics, specifically an environmental ethic, without being commanded by something outside of oneself," which Gellert sees as a necessarily "compelling question" for non-orthodox Jews such as himself.

Throughout the conference, people browsed books at display tables set up by academic presses including Rowman & Littlefield, the University of Washington Press and the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.

The conference organizer, PSU professor Michael Weingrad, was "extremely pleased" by the conference. The conference "created important connections between Judaic studies in Portland and university programs across the western U.S. and beyond," he said. "I've had wonderful feedback from our out-of-town guests, who were really taken with our campus and our city. An event like this helps put PSU Judaic studies on the map."

The conference was co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Washington, and the Department of History at PSU. The keynote talk was co-sponsored by the Institute for Judaic Studies.