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January 22, 1999/5 Shevat 5759, Vol. 51, No. 17
Jewish studies director forges full speed ahead
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Jack Kugelmass
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An engine, not a caboose.
That's how Jack Kugelmass, director of Jewish studies at Arizona State University, envisions the 40-year-old program.
With just one semester under his belt and the train literally just leaving the station, Kugelmass, the dynamic conductor, clearly is on track. He's committed to putting Jewish studies in the forefront of emerging areas of scholarly pursuit crossing traditional disciplinary lines.
"Jack has a broad and original vision of what Jewish studies can be," says Charles Delheim, chair of ASU's interdisciplinary humanities program, which includes Jewish studies among the subject areas it encompasses.
The program began with a single class at the Tempe main campus, taught by Albert Plotkin, now rabbi emeritus at Temple Beth Israel. It grew gradually to a full-fledged institute with six full-time faculty members and 18 adjuncts and associates under the stewardship of Professor Joel Gereboff, who now chairs the university's religious studies department.
It is growing and changing even more under Kugelmass' leadership and as a beneficiary of ASU's Campaign for Leadership, a $400 million university wide capital campaign aiming to expand programs and to attract top-notch scholars to ASU. Jewish studies hopes to raise $5 million by the end of 2000 according to Jewish Studies Campaign Chair Seymour Sacks.
Kugelmass, an anthropologist who came to ASU from the University of Wisconsin a year ago to assume a professorship in the interdisciplinary humanities department, has a broad and varied background.
A native of Montreal, he did his undergraduate work at McGill University and received his master's and doctorate degrees from New York's New School for Social Research. He also studied, and later taught, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, where he pursued an interest in Yiddish language and literature and Polish history and culture.
He has traveled and written widely about Polish Jewry - his doctoral dissertation is about "Native Aliens: The Jews of Poland as a Middleman Minority" - and about many other facets of the Jewish experience including American popular Jewish culture.
"Jack is a highly creative scholar with an original mind," says Delheim of his colleague. "He has an uncommon literary skill, which allows him to take his readers into the everyday life of Jews."
A self-described "son of a peddler," Kugelmass traces his attraction to anthropology, the study of people and cultures, to childhood experiences accompanying his father, who sold dry goods door-to-door, often on extended credit, in working-class neighborhoods in French-speaking Montreal. His father was called "le juif," literally "the Jew" in French but translated in the vernacular as "the peddler." Going with his father, who spoke fluent French, to collect from his customers was "like going to another country," says Kugelmass. "I was fascinated."
Kugelmass attended a Yiddish day school in Montreal, still in existence today, where half of each day's classes were taught in the hybrid German/Hebrew language of Yiddish, and half in English. Even Torah was studied with a Yiddish/Hebrew Bible. Kugelmass explains that both his mother and aunt, who came from a Ukrainian family with strong Yiddish roots and ties to the Labor/Zionist movement, had attended the same school.
"They went, so we went," says Kugelmass of himself and his older brother, now a psychiatrist in Toronto. "There was no debate."
His father, whose family had emigrated to Canada from Eastern Galicia (now Poland) a generation earlier, did business with the Yiddish-speaking community as well and often took his son along, reinforcing his facility, and fascination, with the language.
Later, graduate classes at YIVO inspired scholarly interest in the Yiddish language and Eastern European life. "At that time (the mid-1970s) YIVO was very much a Polish institution," says Kugelmass. "It was very nostalgic about Poland."
Kugelmass made his first trip to Poland in 1987, when the country was still Communist, and has returned three times to do research. He says his travels have deepened his understanding of the Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism and have affected his perceptions of the value of teaching about the Holocaust and other Jewish subjects in a university setting.
"Students are attracted to the Holocaust because it lets them think of larger, moral issues," says Kugelmass, who notes that one-third to one-half of the students who take his course on the Holocaust are non-Jews.
Jewish studies should not be an isolated department in the university but rather a dynamic program that cuts across diverse areas of intellectual inquiry, integrating the study of Jewish subjects in the full spectrum of disciplines, he says. As such, it elevates the study of Jewish subjects and exposes the university population to the value and relevance of such study.
"It (Jewish studies) is an engine to make people think about larger issues, in broader terms," he says, and exposes non-Jews to a culture that exists contiguous to theirs, but about which they may know very little. It furthers the university's responsibility to "make a student a better person by enriching knowledge of others," he says.
But it is not the university's job to enrich the Jewish identity of its Jewish students. "That would be the ruin of the Jewish studies department," he says. "It would become politicized; it would be saying that it is just for Jews. And we have no business as a state institution insulating Jewish studies."
Notes Delheim: "Jack is aware that Jewish studies is not a celebration of Jewish identity, but a critical look at areas and aspects of Jewish life. It's not supposed to make the community feel good." Nonetheless, Kugelmass notes that a frequent side benefit for Jewish students enrolled in Jewish studies courses is a heightened sense of identity.
Kugelmass hopes to expand opportunities for intellectual discourse with the general community through increased offerings, such as the recent consortium on cultural intersection. He envisions lecture series, concerts and film festivals.
"I'd like to go partners with other departments in the university," he says.
Most important, he says, is to make people think.
"Judaism is all about engagement with texts and critical thinking," he notes, adding that "an intelligent Jew is a better Jew."
Critical thinking will strengthen the Jewish community, he says. "The more intellectual, the more theoretical (we are), the more we raise questions and make people think," he says.
Kugelmass lives in Tempe with his wife, Esther Romeyn, an ASU assistant American studies professor; 16-month-old son, Eli; and pet parrot, Ruby.
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