“She was completely misconstruing the situation and twisting it,” the student, who wished to remain anonymous, said of Barnard professor Rachel McDermott’s testimony to investigators from the U.S. Department of Education, which is documented in a letter sent by the department’s Office for Civil Rights to Barnard dismissing the case. As Tablet Magazine reported in October, the Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation at Barnard probing whether McDermott, then the chair of Barnard’s Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures department, had in fact steered this student away from a course because the student is Jewish.

The course in question was taught by Joseph Massad, a professor who teaches in the Middle East studies department at Columbia. (Barnard and Columbia have separate Middle East studies departments.) In 2005, Massad was accused of academic intimidation when several students relayed their experiences with the professor in a documentary titled Columbia Unbecoming. But Massad was cleared of wrongdoing by an ad hoc grievance committee set up by Columbia, and he was tenured in 2009.

In this case, the student claims that she met with McDermott in January 2011 to seek advice about what courses to take. She claims that when she mentioned the possibility of taking Massad’s course, McDermott, perhaps noticing her modest dress, told the student to take another class because she “would not be comfortable” in Massad’s course.

McDermott, who declined to comment for this story, denied the student’s account in her testimony to the investigators, which is documented in the Office for Civil Rights letter: “[T]he Chair [McDermott] stated that it was the student who opened the meeting by stating that she was concerned about feeling uncomfortable in the Professor’s [Massad’s] class, and asked for the Chair’s opinion of her potentially taking a course with the Professor.”

The student, both in her official testimony and in an interview with Tablet Magazine this week, contends that this isn’t what happened. “When [McDermott] said, ‘No, she came to me and mentioned professor Massad and her concerns with him,’ ” the student said, “it was a blatant lie because I had never heard of him or what he had done, or Columbia Unbecoming, or any of that, before I went to her. And she was the one who mentioned to me that he was more anti-Israel.”

Faced with no clear documentary proof either way, the Office for Civil Rights wrote in its ruling that “there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the complainant’s allegation that the Chair discriminated against the Student … by discouraging her from enrolling in the Course.”

The Education Department’s investigation focused on the allegation that McDermott “steered” the student away from the class predominantly because of the student’s Jewish identity. Steering is a legal concept traditionally applied to the housing market, when a real-estate agent, for instance, tells a black family that they would feel “uncomfortable” in a particular neighborhood because of its predominantly white population. Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968 to outlaw the practice. In this case, the Office of Civil Rights exercised jurisdiction under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And had McDermott been found guilty of steering, it would have likely resulted in an overhaul of Barnard’s advising policies and, at worst, could have jeopardized the university’s federal funding.

The official complainant for the Barnard student, Kenneth L. Marcus, the director of the Anti-Semitism Initiative at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, a San Francisco-based think tank, contends that the case should never have centered on McDermott and her alleged steering. “There is no question that we urged OCR to focus on Professor Massad,” Marcus, who once headed the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, told me. He believes that the Office for Civil Rights focused solely on McDermott because Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger “seemed to throw his Barnard colleague under the bus, as it were, insisting that the problem was at Barnard College and not at Columbia.” Bollinger’s office declined comment.

Beyond his involvement in the Columbia case, Marcus is engaging in a wider effort to combat extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, which he deems anti-Semitic speech, on American campuses through legal maneuverings, sometimes termed “lawfare.” A handful of other cases brought by several advocacy groups are pending at universities such as the University of California at Santa Cruz. As of now, different organizations are advocating for different cases. Marcus wants to change that by establishing an umbrella group to investigate all such cases.
The organization, which is slated to be up and running in the next few months, will pursue, according to Marcus, “cases where Jewish students are harassed on campus, cases where there’s a hostile environment for Jewish students, and cases where Jewish students are treated less well than non-Jewish students.”

The Columbia case illustrates the pitfalls of pursuing such cases without documentary evidence or effective legal guidance. For example, students who want to pursue legal action often go to other university professors before seeking out proper representation, as was the case at Barnard.

The student said that before Marcus was involved, she came in contact with Judith S. Jacobson, a professor of public health at Columbia who is involved with the Israel advocacy organization Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. (Both Jacobson and Marcus serve on its board.) Recognizing the need for evidence beyond testimony, Jacobson told the student that she should write an email to McDermott outlining the student’s version of what happened in order to get something on the record.

“She spoke to me on the phone and said, ‘But in order for this to happen we need concrete evidence that this meeting happened,’ ” the student recalled Jacobson telling her. “Would you mind emailing her and mentioning what happened in the email?” The student sent that email on May 6, 2011, detailing her version of the event in an effort to have McDermott tacitly acknowledge her version. “I had contemplated taking ‘Arabs in the Arab World’ with Professor Joseph Massad and you had advised me that he was very anti Israel and I may not be comfortable in the class. After speaking with many of my friends they confirmed for me that this was the case and it would not be a wise class to take as a freshman,” the student wrote. “Thank you so much for your advice and I hope to continue to work with you towards my MEALAC major in the future.”

“What a nice message to receive!” McDermott responded the next morning. “Thanks for taking the time to write, and I look forward to see you again in the fall!”

“I am grateful for the overwhelming support I have received from my colleagues, especially those in the Religion and [Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies] Departments, as well as current and former students and many others within the Barnard and Columbia community and beyond,” McDermott said in a statement. Added Spar, “Professor McDermott is beloved by her students and a highly regarded member of the Barnard community. We were happy to cooperate fully with the Office of Civil Rights and were pleased—though not surprised—to receive this favorable determination.”

In October, David Fine reported in Tablet Magazine that McDermott had advised an Orthodox student not to take a class taught by Professor Joseph Massad, who was one of several professors featured in the 2005 David Project-produced documentary Columbia Unbecoming that alleged a culture of tolerating anti-Israel views at the Middle Eastern studies department of the Ivy League university. The complaint was lodged by a pro-Israel group called Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Institute for Jewish & Community Research, whose legal task force head, Kenneth L. Marcus, explained that the purpose of the complaint was less to target the alleged “steering” of McDermott and more the alleged bias of Massad.

“I think that OCR got it wrong factually, but in terms of the law they established a very important principle, and I’m glad that we filed this suit,” Marcus said this evening. “It is extremely helpful that they did nothing in this opinion that undermines the principle that they established before. This will make university administrators more sensitive to the rights of Jewish students.” He argued that, “until this case, there had been no precedent establishing that Jewish students have rights against racial steering in higher education. This provides one more right than students had before.” He said his group has the right of appeal, and that they are considering it.

The DOE Office for Civil Rights did not return requests for comment.

Related: Unwelcome [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: New Charge Over Hostile Columbia Classroom

In her first interview since the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched an official inquiry into possible anti-Jewish discrimination late last month, the student gave Tablet Magazine a description of the incident that sparked the federal investigation. (The Office for Civil Rights confirmed in an email that it is “investigating a complaint alleging Columbia University discriminated against a student of Jewish ancestry/ethnicity on the basis of national origin.”)

“I went to her to speak about the major and talk to her about classes that I was looking at,” the student, who asked not to be named, said of a January, 2011 meeting in which she sought advice from McDermott, the longtime chair of the Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures Department at Barnard. “I mentioned a course taught by Joseph Massad.”

“Oh, he’s very anti-Israel,” McDermott responded, according to the student. “And I said, ‘That’s fine, I’ve heard anti-Israel things before, and I’m fine if it’s a culture clash.’ ”

But McDermott insisted Massad’s course would make the student “uncomfortable,” the student said in the interview. In the end, the student, then a sophomore, took the Jewish history class instead.

McDermott, who stepped down from her position as chair last month, declined to comment for this article. Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar, issued a statement to Tablet Magazine: “It is important to note that the individual complaint appears to relate to academic advising at Barnard College and in no way involves Professor Joseph Massad. Based on these facts, therefore, it is extremely unfair for Professor Massad to be cited in a matter in which he played no part whatsoever.”

But Massad’s notoriety was clearly enough of a problem that McDermott, an India specialist with a stellar reputation, felt the need to counsel a student away from his course. Indeed, the student “was apprehensive” to refer the investigation, she said in the interview, “because Prof. McDermott was just protecting me.”

The student, now a Middle East Studies major, knew about Massad’s reputation: In 2005, a short documentary called Columbia Unbecoming featured a number of Jewish students recalling instances of intimidation they faced because of their pro-Israel views. Many of their testimonies focused on Massad, then a tenure-track professor. In one particularly chilling account, a student who had served in the Israeli Army recalled Massad asking him at an off-campus lecture how many Palestinians he’d killed.

And so, the student said, she wasn’t much surprised by McDermott’s advice until last May. That month, she met Peter Haas, a professor of Jewish studies at Case Western University and president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a network of pro-Israel academics and professors, and told him about what happened. Another member of the pro-Israel professors’ network, Judith Jacobson, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s School of Public Health, followed up by calling the student. Jacobson wanted to know if the student was interested in talking to Kenneth L. Marcus, who heads the group’s legal task force. The student agreed.

Marcus, the director of the Anti-Semitism Initiative at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, headed the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency currently investigating Columbia, in 2003 and 2004. According to Marcus, what happened at Barnard was an instance of “steering”—a term that typically refers to housing discrimination, when a real-estate agent tells a black family that it would feel “uncomfortable” in a particular neighborhood because of its predominantly white population. Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968 to outlaw the practice.

What McDermott allegedly did, according to Marcus, who handled cases of alleged steering as the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in 2002 and 2003, was a form of steering and thus violated the Jewish student’s civil rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He said in an interview that he knew of “no other steering cases in an educational context,” but that if the student’s allegations are verified, “it would be extremely difficult for Barnard to say that any steering would not have any harmful effect.”

It remains to be seen whether the Office of Civil Rights agrees with its former director.

“The University has strong policies against discrimination and we treat allegations of discrimination of any kind very seriously,” Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger said through a press officer. “It is important to note that the individual complaint appears to relate to academic advising at Barnard College and in no way involves Professor Joseph Massad. Based on these facts, therefore, it is extremely unfair for Professor Massad to be cited in a matter in which he played no part whatsoever.” Added Barnard Vice President for Communications Joanne Kwong: “We do not tolerate discrimination by any member of the College community, so we are carefully exploring and reviewing the claims made about this alleged incident. As this is a pending investigation, it would be inappropriate and premature to comment any further at this time.” OCR has not replied to a request for comment.

Massad was one of a few members of Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies faculty who came under fire in 2005 in a film produced by the David Project, a pro-Israel advocacy group. The documentary, Columbia Unbecoming, featured several students alleging that Massad and others had cultivated classrooms hostile to pro-Israel voices. Maybe most memorably, Massad was accused of asking one student, who had identified himself as a former Israeli soldier, how many Palestinians he had killed. Massad disputes the story. (He has not replied to a request for comment.) A subsequent investigation by Columbia did not lead to any of the professors leaving, prompting critics to call it a whitewash.

Technically, “Barnard’s Middle East studies department chair” (Barnard is an all-women college at Columbia) is accused of encouraging the student, who was dressed as an Orthodox Jewish woman would be, not to take a particular class in January 2011, in violation of federal civil rights law. (In the spring 2011 semester, Massad’s class was a seminar on “Contemporary Culture in the Arab World”; this fall, he is teaching an open lecture on “Palestinian-Israeli Politics and Society.”) But Marcus’ actual beef is not with the act of steering by the individual department head. It’s with Columbia’s alleged failure to address the perception that Massad’s classes might make Jewish students unduly uncomfortable.

“The big question is whether Massad is violating students’ rights too,” Marcus wrote. “If there is a problem in Professor Massad’s classroom, as the Barnard chair may believe, then steering Jewish students away is not the solution. Nor is it the biggest problem. The biggest problem may be the failure of some universities to take anti-Semitism allegations seriously, especially when academic freedom is frivolously invoked.”

In an interview this morning, Marcus said that he looked forward to the investigation itself and for the potential for Columbia to negotiate a voluntary settlement. “We would want to see Columbia take firm actions to ensure not only that the steering problem is addressed, but more importantly that Jewish students are not facing a hostile environment in Middle East studies classes,” he told me. When asked if that meant he wanted Massad’s resignation, he demurred, slightly: “We would like for Columbia to look into what’s going on, especially in Professor Massad’s class, and reconsider whether the investigation they did a few years ago is really adequate,” he said. “If it turns out as a result of the investigation that there’s a hostile environment for Jewish students in any Columbia classes, then the instructors need to be dealt with.”

In addition to working at the OCR, as assistant secretary of education for civil rights, Marcus was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. That independent commission has a mandate to examine all charges of civil rights violations, although on its Website, the most prominently trumpeted specific issue is, “Ending Campus Anti-Semitism.” According to Marcus, he issued a guidance for the OCR to police campus anti-Semitism, which, he said, it not do since he left the office, in 2004, until last year, when, partly after the lobbying of several Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League, the Obama administration adopted an anti-bullying policy that reinstated that mandate.

Marcus has also served as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Indeed, the legal notion of “steering” primarily comes out of that jurisprudence; “It is similar,” Marcus wrote of what allegedly happened to the student, “to what happens when a realtor tells a young African American couple that they would not be ‘comfortable’ living in a particular white neighborhood.” He told me that applying steering in this context was “a somewhat novel theory, but,” he added, “it fits exactly.”

OCR Opens Investigation Against Columbia [IJCR]
Related: Columbia’s Own Middle East War [NY Mag]

• Syria and Israel are engaged in a pissing contest about each others’ nuclear weapons programs. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Contributing editor Joan Nathan has the remarkable story of Michael Solomonov, the chef at the Philadelphia Israeli-cuisine restaurant Zahav. [NYT]

• John Mearsheimer blurbed a book that seems to argue that some Jews exploit the Holocaust “religion.” [Harry’s Place]

• The Iranians uninvited the Columbia students to a small dinner in midtown after there was an uproar on campus. Roar, Lion, Roar! [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• The avant-garde of siddurim. [JTA]

Metamaus: the book trailer! (Is that extra-meta?)

Still, this is red meat for hawks. I don’t mean people who want to bomb Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons facilities. I mean actual hawks! You see, Ahmadinejad’s arrival at Columbia in 2007 roughly coincided with the discovery of a red-tailed hawk on campus; quickly dubbed Hawkmadinejad by the campus blog Bwog, he was periodically spotted killing pigeons and squirrels and feasting on their remains, because let me tell you hawks are insane. (Don’t believe me? Squirrel. And this the French call squab.)

So here is hoping that a new fall brings a new Columbia controversy and a new bird of prey to bear his name. Ahmadinejowl, anyone?

Members of CIRCA to Dine with Ahmadinejad [Columbia Spectator]
Related: Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles [NYT]
The Bird, the Legend: The Genesis of Hawkmadinejad [Bwog]

In the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to enroll in his final class at Columbia University and experience his teachings first hand. While the class was primarily made up of devotees—and make no mistake, he had many—as a philosophy major, this was the first and only history class I ended up taking. Even for me, a history novice, his clear thinking and beautifully wrought narratives brought life to the stories he told.

Praised primarily for his historical writings (most famously, Zakhor) and his teachings at Columbia, Yerushalmi hadn’t been known for his fiction. Until now. This week’s New Yorker features his posthumous debut, Gilgul (subscription required). The story within a story deals with themes familiar to Yerushalmi, touching on messianism and reincarnation (or gilgul).

In the story, Ravitch, himself a historian who has written a study on the Jewish tales of Sacher-Masoch, visits the sorceress Gerda at the behest of one of his friends. While at the time he has no interest, life’s events four years later, including the divorce from his wife and his father’s death, leave him overwhelmed with the need to visit her again. Gerda speaks in riddles of sorts, as all good sorceresses do, and tells him the story of a man who was “pathologically rest-less.” While he had no desire to travel, the man felt a strange compulsion that would constantly drive him away from wherever he was settled. Gerda explained to him that while he was born in Bucharest, his soul was the soul of Isaac Benveniste, a 15th century physician born in Spain and exiled during the great expulsion of 1492. He tried to reach Israel, but ended up dying in Rhodes. His restlessness is what inhabited him. Ravitch, captivated by the story, asks her if this is the source of his troubles as well. But all Gerda tells him is, “this story was meant for you, but is not about you.” Like Ravitch, we are left wondering about the meaning of such a tale and how this fits into our lives.

On the New Yorker website, Yeushalmi’s widow, Ophrah, discussed her husbands work with fiction editor Deborah Treisman:

Do you know whether this story—or, at least, the story within the story, the history of Isaac Benveniste, the fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish physician—was drawn from his historical research?

It calls on some basic themes that occupied him, such as exile, Israel, the Diaspora, and more. And the choice of a Sephardic name—Benveniste—hints at that; his major historical research was in Spain, and resulted in his book “From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso,” about a seventeenth-century Spanish Jew, who abandoned his post as court physician in order to live openly as a Jew in Italy.

Ophrah goes on to explain that Yerushalmi never expressed any desire to publish the story (“if Yosef hears of this somewhere…he will be astounded”), but a colleague convinced her of the merits of publishing posthumously. She also expressed the hope that the story would “bring him out of his ‘professor’ box and to a new audience.”

This Week in Fiction: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi [New Yorker]
Related: History and Memory

On the eve of Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples and other catastrophic events in Jewish history, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Neria about his own wartime experiences and what his research has taught him about treating trauma. Neria was awarded a Medal of Valor for his service, and in 1986 he published the novel Esh, Hebrew for “fire,” a fictionalized account of his time in combat. He and Ivry discussed the psychological benefits and risks of revisiting traumatic events year after year, as Jews do with the ritual reading of the Book of Lamentations. [Running time: 20:00.]

For 25 years, Lederman has been the boxing judge for HBO, the major outlet for professional boxing, weighing in on some of the biggest fights during that time. On Saturday night, he’ll work the unifying junior welterweight championship between Amir Khan and Zab Judah (a Muslim versus a Black Hebrew Israelite turned born-again Christian; gotta love boxing). If a boxing match goes its agreed-upon number of rounds, its winner is determined by a panel of three official judges, who score each fighter on the number and quality of punches landed each round. But those judges’ scores are revealed only after the final bell has rung. Until then, if it is a close fight and you are not a boxing expert, you are in the dark as to who’s up and who’s down. Enter Lederman (the first syllable is pronounced like the metal). His score for each round is posted as the next round begins, and he steps in to explain his reasoning after every third, sixth, and ninth round, as well as immediately after the fight is over. He offers the experience gained from thousands and thousands of fights viewed (since the mid-1940s) and professionally judged (since 1967). “Without question, Harold is one of the really better judges in boxing,” says Don Elbaum, an old friend and a longtime promoter and manager. The boxing journalist Thomas Hauser concurs: “When Harold and the ringside judges earn a disagreement, almost always I think Harold is right.”

Outside this expertise, Lederman, 71, is widely beloved as a mascot for the sport of boxing, a goofy vestige of its good old clubby days. He offers rushes of passion and emotion, like a young child who is so excited to relate a story that he stumbles over himself and can only relate part of it. He’s gotta tell ya! The sportswriter Bill Simmons once imagined Lederman negotiating group rates at strip clubs for bachelor parties: “ALL RIGHT, guys, I worked them down to TWENTY PER PERSON for the cover charge … we have the WHOLE BACK ROOM … we have THREE WAITRESSES … I started a TAB for us, and you can’t touch the girls BELOW the waist!” I can’t prove it, but Lederman was almost certainly the inspiration for the boxing commentator featured in an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived television show Sports Night, an ancient, eccentric character who only answered to “Cut Man” and who explained of one knockout blow, “It was a right hook, with a bit of a jab.”

Jews are everywhere in boxing these days (except in the ring, of course). There’s Ross Greenburg, who recently resigned as president of HBO Sports, and therefore as the most important person in the sport. There’s Bob Arum, who is the biggest manager (among the many fighters in his Top Rank stable is the sublime Manny Pacquiao). There is HBO color man Larry Merchant, 80, the foremost elder statesman. There is Max Kellerman, 36, an ESPN radio host and HBO color man who is Merchant’s clear successor and who supplies a more nerdy, stats-based approach to the sport. But Lederman is different from them all. It would be an injustice to minimize his formidable boxing genius—he’s no sideshow act—but it would also be a mistake not to appreciate his sense of fun. “Harold is the quintessential fan,” Hauser observes. “He identifies with fans and his enthusiasm is contagious. Harold loves talking about boxing—he’d talk about boxing with a cocker spaniel.”

***

Boxing is Lederman’s life, but it’s not even his career. In his day job, he is a pharmacist, like his father and grandfather before him. Most of his life has taken place within about 20 miles. His childhood was in the north Bronx; he grew up on Pelham Parkway. He spent summer (“summah”) in Rockaway, where his father introduced him to boxing by taking him to fights at Long Beach Stadium, one town over: College was in upper Manhattan, at Columbia. And, now, he lives in Orangeburg, NY, on the other side of the Hudson and just north of the New Jersey border, where he works a day job for Duane Reade, a New York pharmacy chain. When I reached him by phone one evening, he was planning to work the next day at the Duane Reade in the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center on the Grand Concourse, a 15-minute drive from the house he grew up in. “What I do is, I call ‘em every week and tell ‘em what days I’m available,” he explains in his distinctive voice. “They send me to different stores every day.”

Lederman and his wife, Eileen, who periodically interjects comments into our phone interview based on what she hears him saying, have been married for 48 years. Lederman’s father and grandfather were both Columbia grads. After college, Lederman attended pharmacy school on 68th Street in Manhattan—which is relevant because the St. Nicholas Arena regularly hosted boxing matches on 66th Street until 1962. Eileen’s father was an inspector for the New York Athletic Commission, and he advised Lederman that if he wanted to be a professional boxing judge, the thing to do was to first judge amateur bouts, where there would routinely be 20 fights in one night. Lederman says his favorite fight he ever judged was one of those where he needn’t have been there, a contest in New Orleans between 122-pound champion Alfredo Gomez and a 118-pound comer named Lupe Pintor. “It wasn’t a fight, it was a war,” Lederman recalls with excitement, as though talking about boxing with a cocker spaniel. “In the 14th round Pintor fell down, and Arthur McCanty”—a legendary referee—“counted him out.”

In 1986, Ross Greenburg, a relatively new HBO Sports executive producer, recruited Lederman to be the cable network’s judge for a televised fight, and he realized that he had struck gold. “Pinklon Thomas, a seven-to-one favorite against Trevor Berbick, lost,” Lederman remembers of the heavyweight championship match. “HBO loved what I said on the broadcast.”

Lederman retired from judging when it came to be a conflict-of-interest with his HBO gig. But the name lives on: His daughter Julie is a judge. Last Friday, she scored a 95-95 draw in the junior-middleweight bout between Delvin Rodriguez and Pawel Wolak. One of the two other judges agreed with her, and so a draw it was; her dad, who was ringside as a spectator, also saw it as a tie. “I thought that was a very good decision,” he explains, “cause, boy, those guys were killing each other for 10 rounds!”

***

For all its brutish, and brutal, simplicity, boxing has actually proved quite amenable to the statistical revolution that has conquered so many other sports. A company called CompuBox measures, in real time and with widely acknowledged accuracy, stats such as how many punches were thrown, how many connected, where they connected, and whether they were jabs or power punches. Younger analysts like Max Kellerman discuss a boxer’s punches-per-round and body-shot numbers the way baseball’s sabermetricans discuss a pitcher’s WHIP or a hitter’s OBP+.

Lederman, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be a fan of new-school statistics-based commentary. “It helps the people at home a lot,” he says excitedly. “It makes the fights much more interesting. I really like the guys that do it. It’s a really good invention: One guy watches one fighter, one guy watches the other, and they press buttons. It’s really a lot of fun, to be honest with you.” Still, Lederman is ever the judge: “No, it doesn’t have any effect on the judging,” he says of CompuBox. What boxing really needs today, he adds, is a strong, charismatic U.S. heavyweight champion. “Unfortunately it’s just dominated by the Klitschkos,” he says of the Ukrainian brothers. “They’re so far and above that it’s unbelievable.”

Lederman got his first shot at the big time—that is, as a full-on color man—for a Saturday night HBO Boxing After Dark only last month. Title card: Adrien Broner vs. Jason Litzau. The result? First-round KO. “Adrien Broner ended my career as an analyst in two minutes, 48 seconds,” Lederman says, and laughs. “It was fun. I’m there if they need me.”

They do. The sport can survive without statisticians, or even another Ali or Tyson. What it can’t survive without are the Ledermans, the old-school kibitzers who can draw in novices with their credible passion. Listen to Lederman once, and you will be sure to tune in to Khan-Judah Saturday night. You may even start scheming ways to watch the September 17 pay-per-view mega-match between Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. and Victor Ortiz at the MGM Grand. “It’s not gonna be easy,” Lederman explains happily. “Cause Victor can punch. Floyd don’t like to fight southpaws and he don’t like to fight guys who can crack, and Ortiz can do both.”

Bloomberg dispensed wooden handshakes and rubber smiles as he shuffled to the stage, where an orange banner boasted “Progress at Work.” This was in January, at Bloomberg’s 10th State of the City address, and his public speaking skills were as remedial as ever. He paid slavish attention to the two teleprompters, switching screens at each punctuation mark. “Let me be clear,” he said, whipping his eyes from left to right, “we will not raise taxes to balance the budget”—right to left—“we will choose a third approach”—left to right—“a smarter approach.” Every time Bloomberg neared a potential applause break his words took on more speed and volume but no emotional valence, so that he seemed to be shouting his audience down, preventing them from clapping.

Voters do not want to have a beer with Bloomberg. He is no Bill Clinton, who charmed his way to prominence despite humble roots, and he is no George W. Bush, who managed to seem approachable despite a privileged upbringing. Raised a Conservative Jew in Medford, Mass., Bloomberg is a middle-class boy who likes getting things done. The mayor’s detractors say he has succeeded in electoral politics only because his personal fortune allows him to buy up huge amounts of campaign advertising and because Americans, despite a stubborn streak and a growing antipathy to government, tend to do what television tells them to do. His boosters say that with no debts to unions and no rainbow coalition, he has nothing to run on but his record. He can’t even count on fealty from his younger daughter, Georgina, who recently released an autobiographical novel that may prove embarrassing to the administration. (Asked about her father by the New York Times, Georgina responded with nervous laughter before hopping a plane to Bermuda.)

When reporters ask him if he’ll ever run for president, Bloomberg usually quips that a short, divorced Jewish billionaire could never win. “Part of that joke is that being Jewish is actually not a barrier to running for president, not anymore,” says William Adler, who teaches political science at Yeshiva University. The other part of the joke is that this is more or less the only time Bloomberg plays up his ancestry. “He doesn’t talk Jewish, he doesn’t act Jewish,” says one prominent Jewish (and Jewish-acting) New York Democrat. “I don’t hear anything out of him, in pacing, in tone, in Yiddishisms—it’s even less than the average gentile New Yorker.”

Like most big American cities, New York has a history of sectarian politics. Tammany Hall was an Irish organization. Fiorello LaGuardia, the most revered mayor in the city’s collective memory, succeeded partly because he was a powerful ethnic hybrid—half Italian and half Jewish, fluent in both Italian and Yiddish. “Bloomberg is not interested in ethnic power plays, pitting blacks against Italians—he’s not interested in playing that game,” said Adler. “Then again, he plays a different game, which is called buying your vote. Maybe that’s one of those ‘only in New York’ things. Maybe a rich Jew buying power in Denver or Atlanta wouldn’t play so well.”

In a way, it’s remarkable that anti-Semitic tropes are not more widespread among Bloomberg’s detractors. Among other things, he comes about as close as one person can to controlling the media and finance, with his Bloomberg news service and omnipresent Bloomberg terminals used by Wall Street traders. It may be a testament to his political skill, or to the permissiveness of the current cultural moment, that Bloomberg has still been able to render his Jewishness moot. Whereas Ed Koch used his conspicuous Jewishness as a political tool, Bloomberg is Jewish by blood but not necessarily by temperament. Even Koch notices the difference. “He has his own style,” Koch told me of Bloomberg. “I get emotional. His style is much cooler.”

Bloomberg is a technocrat first and an assimilated Jew second. “Bloomberg has created a space where a Jewish politician no longer has to choose between two traditional molds, the left-wing social justice model or the neocon model,” said the Columbia University political scientist David Epstein. “Any politician—but especially a Jewish politician—can now campaign saying ‘I’ll be an effective Bloomberg-style manager,’ and everyone will intuit what that means.” A few weeks after we spoke, a Jew was elected mayor in Chicago, giving credence to Epstein’s words. Rahm Emanuel is less quiet and less rich than Bloomberg, but he won by playing down his partisan past and running as a pragmatist.

Up the block from Epstein’s Columbia office, at a deli on the corner of West 121st Street and Broadway, I asked the owner his opinion of the mayor. Amni Samhoury was born in Jordan but has lived in Bensonhurst for the last 40 years. “So far he’s a good mayor,” Samhoury said from behind the counter. “The problem is he’s making no place for poor people in the city, no place for middle-wage people.”

I asked Samhoury if he’d voted for Bloomberg. “Of course,” he said. Explaining that I was writing for a Jewish magazine, I asked if his opinion had been swayed one way or the other by Bloomberg’s Jewishness. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Samhoury told me in a bright, helpful tone. “The Jews control the economy. It’s been like this for decades. Not only the United States—they have so many countries under their control.”

“And you voted for a Jew anyway?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Samhoury said. “He knows business, he knows politics. He performs the job well.”

Samhoury then overcharged me for my soda and gum, but I kept quiet.

***

Both of my grandmothers live in Manhattan—Clare on the Upper West Side and Dorothy near Sutton Place, not far from the apartment where Bloomberg lived before his move to East 79th Street. Grandma Clare aligns, at least superficially, with the kvelling, brisket-cooking, calling-to-make-sure-you’re-warm-enough stereotype of a Jewish grandmother. Grandma Dorothy is also genetically Jewish, but quietly so. To put it crudely, Clare is a brash, Koch-style Jew, while Dorothy is an assimilated Jew of the Bloomberg variety.

I went to visit Clare in the cafeteria of her senior home on West End Avenue. “Maria, this is my baby boy,” she told a woman wearing a hairnet and scooping potato salad onto my tray. “He’s come to put me in an article and make me famous!” I carried her tray to the table, where we sat in plastic rolling chairs and ate our toast. I asked her what she thought about Bloomberg. “I don’t like what he’s doing to the unions,” she bellowed. “And housing! Where are middle-class people supposed to live? Long Island?” Clare grew up speaking Yiddish in Brooklyn. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a member of the Workmen’s Circle, a labor-rights organization founded by socialist Jews in 1900. When David Epstein talked of a “left-wing social justice” tradition in Jewish politics, he was talking about my grandma Clare. Bloomberg got no points with her for being nominally Jewish—it didn’t count against him, certainly, but it did not excuse his centrism.

The next week, the doorman at Dorothy’s building showed me upstairs. Inside, Dorothy apologized for the mess in her foyer: She’d been redecorating. She showed off a new batch of Zimbabwean sculptures she’d placed on pedestals in the living room. Three books were stacked on her mid-century coffee table under a crystal paperweight: Glitter and Doom: German Portraits From the 1920s, The Jews of Germany, and The Very Rich: A History of Wealth.

Dorothy’s father was an Orthodox immigrant who owned a laundromat in the Bronx. Dorothy worked her way through night school to become one of the first women to join the NYU Law Review. She made her own money and invested it wisely and still works part-time as an arbiter at the New York Stock Exchange. She thinks in contemporary American society hard work and intelligence are rewarded.

We walked down East 58th Street to a French bistro in a converted townhouse. Grandma Dorothy ordered salmon, well done; I had the striped bass in lobster sauce and Diet Coke in a cocktail glass. “I admire his integrity, the way he’s willing to stand up to the unions,” Dorothy said about Bloomberg. “He grew up middle class, but he happened to be smart enough to develop an amazing company, and now he’s brought his skills to politics. I think he’s a wonderful manager, and his money allows him to maintain his independence. I also like that he calls his mother on the phone every day.” (Bloomberg’s mother, Charlotte, a New Jersey native and the daughter of a Russian immigrant, died at 102 on Sunday.)

“Does your support of him have to do with the fact that he’s Jewish?” I asked.

“I like that he’s Jewish,” she said, “but it has nothing to do with my opinion of him. Ed Koch was Jewish, and I hated him. He was an egomaniac.”

“You don’t buy the rap that Bloomberg is out of touch with the common man?” I asked her.

“Of course not,” she said. “He takes the subway to work.”

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in New York, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

The day after graduating from Columbia University, 56 years ago this month, a 21-year-old writer headed straight to the artists’ colony Yaddo, where Lionel Trilling had secured a room for him. The young man, Sam Astrachan, had caught Trilling’s attention by publishing excerpts from his novel in The Columbia Review. According to contributing editor Josh Lambert, “Trilling, the genteel idol of all of Columbia’s aspiring writers,” requested a room at Yaddo “where the kid could finish his novel about the genesis of a Jewish family in Russia and their transformation into Americans.”

Lambert points out that while Trilling encouraged other Jewish writers like Irving Feldman and Allen Ginsberg, “Astrachan’s embrace of an earthy Russian Jewish past rather than the materialistic American present goes a long way towards explaining Trilling’s zealous support of him.” That summer, Astrachan wrote to Trilling:

“Certainly, if the Jew is to accept the heritage not simply of the ghetto and the concentration camps, but of the Old Testament, he must search out the primitive and appreciate that purity of action. In the first part of my book, Kagan must be seen as a man of natural force and abilities, to be contrasted in the second part with the new-type ghetto mediocrity of the family after arrival in New York City.”

Astrachan’s debut novel, An End to Dying, signed by publishing house Farrar, Straus and Cudahy that September, “traces the degeneration of a hardy family of nature-loving Russian lumbermen, the Kagans, into a tribe of slick American shysters, the Cohens.” The largely-autobiographical main character, Sam Star, resents his family’s transformation, lamenting that children of immigrants are “sucked into the watered-down version of their parents’ watered-down new world existence.” Astrachan himself was born in 1934 into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants in the East Bronx, though his real-life parents died when he was a teen.

So what happened to Sam Astrachan—“who had been nicknamed “Dostoyevsky” when his mother found him reading Crime and Punishment, with tears in his eyes, at age 12, and who, a few years later, read his first short story aloud to his English class at Stuyvesant High School”? Mixed reviews and poor sales of the hurriedly published novel and its follow-up, The Game of Dostoyevsky, made Astrachan too expensive for Farrar, Straus and Cudahy to publish. Today he lives in the south of France with his wife, Claude Jeanneau, a French sculptor.

“Astrachan says, now, that he has no regrets about publishing so early,” Lambert reports. “We’ll never know whether a longer road to publication—a year or two sweating through a rewrite, maybe—would have been the apprenticeship he needed to achieve something even greater.”

Read Big Bang, by Josh Lambert

The biggest saw the campus Hillel pressure the Manhattan university’s J Street affiliate into cancelling its co-sponsorship of a talk that John Ging, the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency’s Gaza operations who is an outspoken critic of the blockade, gave at Barnard, the university’s all-women college, even as J Street U’s national director introduced Ging at the event. (Part of the issue—and I cannot stress enough that this sort of technicality is de rigeur at Columbia—is that the affiliate is actually under the Hillel umbrella.) Via New Voices, some Columbia/Barnard alumni, including several rabbis, wrote the Hillel director protesting the withdrawal of the co-sponsorship.

On a lesser and lighter note, Bwog, the campus blog, reports that Columbia University Students for Justice in Palestine set up a mock Israeli checkpoint on the steps of Low Library in the center of campus last week, complete with “Israeli guards” with cardboard guns and blindfolded “Palestinians.” Several Hillel groups protested, and handed out a flyer entitled, “It’s Complicated, Let’s Talk,” which ought to be Columbia’s official motto.

Columbia Student Groups Drops Sponsorship of Gaza Talk Under Pressure [Forward]
Checkpoint on Low [Bwog]
Related: Columbia’s Own Middle East War [NY Mag]

• Nextbook Press author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein raves over Nicole Krauss’s new novel Great House. [NYT Book Review]

• Another Nextbook Press author (and Tablet Magazine contributor) Ilan Stavans thinks you should go see Nora’s Will, a new film centering around a Mexican Jewish Seder. [Forward]

• Another Tablet Magazine contributor, Michelle Goldberg, upbraids the Anti-Defamation League for unfairly painting legitimate critics of Israel with the anti-Israel brush. [The Daily Beast]

• Famed and pioneering Columbia Law School Professor Louis Henkin died at 92. [CLS]

• Great pitcher Rube Marquard was not a Jew. But he was buried in a Jewish cemetery with his Jewish wife. [Kaplan’s Korner] Which is my way of reminding you to watch the Philadelphia Phillies’ Roy Halladay take on the San Francisco Giants’ Tim Lincecum tomorrow night in the National League Championship Series.

Sheila Broflovski, the most ostentatiously Jewish character on South Park, has a confession to make: She’s from New Jersey.

• The IDF killed two senior Hamas operatives in Hebron, in the West Bank, drawing (eminently not-Hamas) Prime Minister Fayyad’s condemnation. [NYT]

• Our very own Liel Leibovitz chats about his new book, The Chosen Peoples. [The Jewish Star]

• Hezbollah continues to train in Syria. [Haaretz]

• Columbia University initiated a first-of-its-kind Center for Palestine Studies, co-directed by Professor Rashid Khalidi. There is little if any controversy surrounding it, although the David Project has yet to make a documentary about it. [Forward]

• If you’re in the mood for some off-color but orthodox Freudian sex advice, Bambi Shlomovich is your new girl (on) Friday. [Jewcy]

Shalom Rubashkin was convicted of massive financial fraud. So naturally he is worthy of a “We Are The World”-style tribute.

First there’s Sam himself, who teaches (and models) a combination of reportorial skills and deep background knowledge of subject matter in a way that I think would have inspired me even had my beat been technology or theater or anything, rather than Jews. He provides feedback on student work that, frankly, would ordinarily cost you upwards of $50,000 a year. The students in my class ranged from talented freelancers just out of college to tenure-track Jewish studies professors, which meant highly engaged discussion during class—and a cohort of folks helping each other get their stories published, to this day.

My favorite thing about the class, though, was that I got to read, discuss, hear from, and meet about a dozen of our foremost experts on Jewish history and Jewish life: The same scholars and writers one often needs to call when writing, say, a Tablet Magazine article, would show up as guest lecturers.

All of this gets done in only four or five all-day meetings over the course of a school year—which I found to be a reasonable time commitment even as a full-time reporter.

Application guidelines and more information about the seminar are here. Enjoy.

Mauskop’s paintings are generally large-scale and include different colors and motion. Some feature integrated photographs or dancers, as dancing is one of Mauskop’s passions. Mauskop also uses outside materials, such as the attached leaves and painted-over newspaper in her painting, “Untitled.”

Said Chanel Dubofsky, Coordinator of Social Justice and Israel Programming at the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, “[Mauskop] made an interesting connection between art and history and identity. I just think it’s compelling, because it’s very much about life and what it means to be alive, not just to have survived.” She added, “I think it’s a different way of relating to the Holocaust: How do we keep stories alive? How do we retell?”

Dubofsky was particularly impressed by how Mauskop moved out of the usual “stillness” of Holocaust art with her busy paintings: “It’s not just a photograph with a [concentration camp] number,” as she put it. Her work, Dubofsky said, reminds her of “what Faulkner says about how the goal of every artist is to arrest motion, and that’s ultimately what Jews want to do with survivors: stop time so we can learn as much as we can. But Julie’s work is about color and motion.”

Dubofsky said that “Survivors” is a complete departure from the Holocaust art Columbia/Barnard Hillel usually exhibits. “There is so much detail and there is so much to pay attention to,” described Ms. Dubofsky, “everything is really purposeful. If it were just a photo of this bubbie who is praying that would be one thing. With all the different things going on in the picture that you may not notice from afar, you get all these chances to think about what the possibilities could be within the picture.”

“Survivors” runs through April 21 at the Columbia/Barnard Hillel, 606 West 115th Street, New York, NY.

Specifically, Ellenson predicted that in the next decade, the number of Israeli Reform rabbis will increase from 60 to 130 or more. “What an Israeli expression is going to require is Israelis who are alive to the culture of what Israeli society is,” Ellenson said: a future brand of Israeli Progressive Judaism will not “progress very far at all” if the movement consists solely of Americans. However, he acknowledged that many of the Israelis studying at HUC’s campus in Israel were influenced by a trip to the Diaspora, where they gain “a broader sense of what the possibilities are.”

As for how Progressive Judaism will grow within an Israeli political and economic system that doesn’t support it, Ellenson argued that it will be able to move outside of the existing structures; he cited two thriving congregations in Tel Aviv that receive funding from the municipality.

Ellenson made it clear that Reform Judaism’s Israeli future is about Israel’s future, too. “You cannot have a country where 20 percent of the people… cannot have a union sanctified,” he argued, adding, “this type of monopoly is seen as pernicious. … I don’t want to be overly Pollyanna-ish about it, but I do believe you can begin to see certain chinks in the formerly monolithic armor.”

Among the results of what Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, describes as “the ivory tower…prostituting itself for money” were Columbia’s hosting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 and its hiring of Professor Gary Sick, who has expressed the following:

He [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] made it very clear that, whether he is talking about ‘wiping Israel off the map,’ or ‘erased from the pages of time,’ or whatever the quote is, what he means is that there should be a free referendum among the peoples of the Palestine that existed to the partition in 1948 to vote about the kind of a government they should have. He is confident that, in a free vote, Israel and Israelis would lose that vote and it would turn out to be something else: a unitary state, probably run by the Palestinians.

Schools’ Iran $$ Pipeline [NYPost]

“He made three crucial mistakes,” Abu-Toameh said of Obama in an interview after his talk. “The first was manufacturing a crisis out of the settlements issue; the Palestinian Authority never made an issue of the settlements until Obama demanded a full freeze. The second mistake was dragging [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas to New York to meet with Obama and Bibi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly—that was a humiliation for Abbas because the Friday before the meeting Abbas had announced he unequivocally that he would not restart the peace process until all settlement activity had been frozen. Then the third mistake came with the Goldstone Report scandal, when the Americans forced Abbas to pull the Goldstone petition from the U.N., and then the story leaked. So this administration has wrecked Abbas’s reputation and credibility.”

Abu-Toameh argued during his speech that demands that Israel leave the West Bank don’t help, either. “Fatah has an interest in keeping Israel in the West Bank because Israel is doing its job by cracking down on Hamas there.” If Israel were to disengage, he noted, “the place would fall apart, and Hamas would win an election in the West Bank.” The top priority in an attempt to restore peace negotiations, Abu-Toameh said, needs to be political reconciliation among the Palestinians. “Instead of putting all the pressure on Bibi, I would go to the Palestinians and say, reunite the West Bank and Gaza, establish good government, speak in one voice, then go talk to the Jews about peace.”

Oren and Gold were rivals in that case, but the small world of Israeli politics has a long history of old friends competing with one another. Indeed, the two are friends and colleagues who—as went unmentioned in press coverage of their May competition—found their commitment to Zionism and Israel at the same and time place, as undergraduates and then grad students at Columbia University in the 1970s. They were part of a group of activist Jewish students who thrived in an atmosphere of urgency and fervor alien to college campuses today, and their story provides a glimpse into a generation of American Jews who decided to make aliyah and an idealistic Jewish world—centered around a Jewish commune at just off Columbia’s campus called Beit Ephraim—long past.

Last month, Oren was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly; he told the international press that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks there were “classic anti-Semitism.” Thirty-five years ago, at the 1974 General Assembly, Yassir Arafat made his first speech to the United Nations. The Palestinian leader was received like a celebrity, to raucous applause. And, by all accounts, it was his speech that moved Oren and his circle to action.

Eric Sokoloff, then a Columbia undergrad and prominent campus Zionist, started organizing opposition to Arafat even before the speech, founding a group called Student Mobilization for Israel to unite like-minded college students across the city. SMI was dedicated to pro-Israel political activism and education, staging rallies and demonstrations to present what Sokoloff described to me as “a more accurate portrayal of the issues” than Arafat would.

Sokoloff would later make aliyah, change his first name to Yitzchak, work for the Isreali Ministry of Defense, and teach political science at Hebrew University. But back in 1974, he and SMI began publishing the Middle East Observer, a leaflet featuring news and opinion by Columbia students. As the paper exploded in popularity, it helping SMI establish a national network of student activists. “Soon after we started the paper, we were printing 50,000 copies a week and shipping them across the United States,” Sokoloff recalled.

He worked with SMI, and on the Middle East Observer, with Jeffrey Fine, another Columbia undergrad who is today a lawyer and leader of the modern Orthodox community in Dallas, canvassed Manhattan preaching to their often-offended fellow Jews that service in the Israeli army was a moral obligation for all Jews (though Fine himelf never ended up moving to Israel).

SMI held court at Beit Ephraim, which Fine described to me as a “countercultural hub” for the Columbia Jewish community. Also known as “the Bayit,” it had been founded in 1972 with the financial assistance of the author Herman Wouk, a Columbia alumnus. “The establishment Jewish institutions were not particularly attractive to us,” Gold told me. “So a number of us got together and formed the Bayit as an alternative.”

Steven M. Cohen, one of the Columbia students who helped found the Bayit and now a prominent sociologist, told me that the Bayit, which in its early days actively recruited campus Jewish leaders, sought to “cull Jewish activists from various walks of life, people sometimes ideologically opposed to each other, and see if they could live together.” Amid what Cohen described as a “swirl of self-motivated Jewish activity” at Columbia—from left- and right-wing Zionist organizations to advocates for Soviet Jews to various religious groups—the Bayit selected students like Sokoloff and Fine to create and maintain a dynamic atmosphere of young Jews who fiercely celebrated their Jewish identities.

Oren—who changed his name from Bornstein when he made aliyah, though he retained it as his middle name, in deference to his father—and Gold met for the first time at the Bayit, at a guest lecture by an Israeli author. They soon connected with Sokoloff, Fine, Cohen and others at the Bayit’s weekly Shabbat dinners and educational seminars. Eventually, they both moved in. They were joined by a remarkable cast of future Jewish luminaries who frequented the Bayit in the mid-1970s. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic lived there there, as did Rabbi Joseph Teluskhin, the Jewish author. J.J. Goldberg, a former editor-in-chief of the Forward, lived at a different Jewish collective, but he spent time at the Bayit. So did the nationally syndicated conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager.

Oren and Gold were particularly committed to their Zionism, the other former students said. One Friday night, Fine recalled, Gold discoursed on the potential difficulties of reaching a two-state solution with Palestinians. “We would sit there thinking, what is this guy talking about?” Fine said. “Back then, the PLO was seen as the root of all evil, and here’s Dore postulating all sorts of scenarios, 20 years in advance.” On another occasion, Fine remembered, he was studying Arab nationalism and commented to Oren that he’d encountered a great deal of scholarship in German. “If you want to become an expert in Middle East studies, you probably have to learn German,” Fine recalled saying. Oren pondered him for a moment, then agreed. “Six weeks later,” Fine said, “Oren came back, fluent in German. He was a wunderkind.”

Members of the Bayit and the activist Jewish community shared a sense of kol yisrael arevim zeh la zeh, all of the Nation of Israel are responsible for one another, reveling in each other’s diverse yet strong expressions of Jewish identity. In some cases, Fine recalled, this exuberant Jewish pride bordered on the ridiculous: “Some guys would wear kippot and then march into a trayf Chinese place and chomp on their pork,” he said. “They identified by external symbols.”

These students channeled the prevailing culture of youth protest and ideological zeal into Jewish causes. SMI’s cadre of activists, Sokoloff said, “never took no for an answer” and weren’t afraid “to be angry when necessary” in fighting for Jewish causes. But even among that crowd, Oren, Gold, Sokoloff, and Fine sensed a particular calling above all: Zionism. Columbia’s Middle East and Jewish studies departments allowed the four friends to couple their devoted activism on behalf of Israel with equally dedicated scholarship.

At the time, Israel’s most prominent global representative, the Cambridge-educated diplomat Abba Eban, recently replaced as Israel’s foreign minister, was teaching a weekly seminar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. (Gold took the class; Fine audited it.) The four friends also studied under J.C. Hurewitz, then director of SIPA’s Middle East Institute, who was among the pioneers of Middle East studies in the 1930s. They learned Zionism from Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, author of The Zionist Idea, a crucial compendium of Zionism’s intellectual history. Zbigniew Brzezinski instructed several of them in international affairs, while David Sidorsky interrupted his moral philosophy classes to expound upon the Hebrew meaning of the word “men.”

Yet they also refused to sequester themselves in a Jewish cocoon, the students said, seeking out classes on Arab nationalism and learning the Arabic language. They thrived on a campus that hosted Edward Said, already a prominent Palestinian activist, as well as Charles Issawi, a former member of Egypt’s finance ministry who specialized in Arab economics. The Middle East studies classrooms at Columbia were not the dens of controversy and ideological warfare they’ve become more recently. Gold recalled Arab professors such as Issawi encouraging him more than any other faculty members to pursue Middle East studies. Fine remembered taking a course on Arab nationalism in which the professor instructed his Arab-dominated classroom to engage with Fine rather than spout polemics. “Here you have an opportunity to talk to a Zionist, and he wants to learn about your faith and your nationality,” Fine recalled the professor saying. “Take advantage of it.”

Though professors encouraged dialogue, meaningful engagement between Arab and Muslim students and their Jewish peers hardly seemed a foregone conclusion. Though the many Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis in his classes had their own divisions, Fine said, “they certainly united to hate Israel.” Twenty years prior to the start of Oslo peace process, said Sokoloff, “PLO supporters didn’t mince their words: they believed in the destruction of Israel, as did the rest of the hard left on campus.”

But Sokoloff and Cohen both described debates with those students as arguments with “worthy adversaries.” In an academic environment “largely untainted by polemics,” said Sokoloff, “Dore and I sat shiva for our Arabic friends.” Arabs and Jews “understood each other’s passions and respected them,” he said. As a leading Zionist activist on campus, Cohen sat on panels with Edward Said and hosted Middle East negotiations between Arab and Jewish scholars in Columbia dormitories.

After Columbia, Gold, Oren, and Sokoloff each fulfilled their pledge to make aliyah. They all served in elite army units and fully integrated into Israeli society. Sokoloff founded and runs Keshet, a educational touring agency, and works with the Israeli Ministry of Tourism to bring thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish visitors to Israel each year. Gold has spent twenty years in the Israeli diplomatic corps, facilitating secret meetings between Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Hussein in the early 1990s and engaging in high-level diplomacy with the Clinton Administration as one of Netanyahu’s chief policy advisers.

Jerusalem Post columnist Shmuel Rosner noted that Gold and Oren’s success in Israeli government is incidental, not a sign of American immigrants establishing a larger role in the country but only of the two men’s relationship with Netanyahu. “You see the exception now rather than the rule,” Rosner told me, with a prime minister who uniquely relies upon “Anglo-Saxon advisers” in his inner circle. American immigrants, Rosner said, “remain too small in number, too diverse, and unmotivated” to form an interest bloc achieve true political visibility among Israelis—unlike, say, the politically powerful Russian émigré community.

“My generation of American immigrants came of age with the Second Intifada, when a group of us spontaneously, as individuals, realized we have something essential to contribute to Israel: the opportunity to explain Israel to an American audience in ‘American,’” said the writer Yossi Klein Halevi, a Shalem Center fellow and Oren’s close friend. Oren’s appointment represents “the coming of age of American immigrants” not as a communal political force, he argued, but as a loose movement of public diplomats acting as “counterweights against the demonization of Israel.”

Gold told me in an interview that he and his fellow Columbia Zionists had decided back in Morningside Heights not to “develop careers just for income and needs, but to do something socially and politically meaningful.” That’s what they’re doing. Columbia in the 1970s, Sokoloff said, encouraged altruistic careers. “Israel,” he said, “was our altruism.”

Jordan Hirsch, an intern at Tablet Magazine, is a senior at Columbia University.

On June 1, 1955, Sam Astrachan graduated from Columbia. On June 2, he moved into a room at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. He was 21, one of the youngest writers ever to be so honored, and he had been invited thanks to his professor, Lionel Trilling, at that time the country’s foremost literary scholar.

Astrachan, now living in the south of France, was born in 1934 in the East Bronx, into a large and complex family of Russian Jewish immigrants. His maternal uncles arrived in the U.S. first, and earned fortunes selling furs and working in the shipping industry. His father, Isaac, trained as a doctor in Russia and, once in the Bronx, dedicated himself to treating immigrants and the poor for “fifty cents here, a dollar there,” as the author recalls in an autobiographical novel, Katz-Cohen (1978). When Astrachan was still a teenager, his parents died just a few years apart. An uncle suggested he go to work full-time and enroll in night classes, but Astrachan—who had been nicknamed “Dostoyevsky” when his mother found him reading Crime and Punishment, with tears in his eyes, at age 12, and who, a few years later, read his first short story aloud to his English class at Stuyvesant High School—had set his sights on Columbia, where he could become a writer.

The editors of The Columbia Review in 1955. From left to right: Sam Astrachan, Mickey Hollander, Donald Lehmkuhl, and Henry Nathan.

On campus, he made a name for himself in the literary crowd, becoming editor-in-chief of The Columbia Review in his senior year. A friend, Dan Wakefield, describes him in a memoir of the period, New York in the 50s (1999), as the “fledgling novelist who paced Broadway late at night with his hands clasped behind his back.” Trilling, the genteel idol of all of Columbia’s aspiring writers, was so impressed with excerpts of the novel-in-progress that Astrachan published in the Review, and sufficiently sympathetic to Astrachan’s plight as an orphan, that he asked Elizabeth Ames, Yaddo’s director, to set aside a room where the kid could finish his novel about the genesis of a Jewish family in Russia and their transformation into Americans.

After a couple of months at Yaddo, Astrachan returned to Manhattan with a complete manuscript. Trilling then brokered an introduction to another former student, Robert Giroux, the recently named editor-in-chief at Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. “I almost never get myself involved with students who are devoted to creative writing, as it is called nowadays,” Trilling wrote, going on to suggest that Giroux read Astrachan’s manuscript and mentioning that one Columbia colleague had compared the young writer to Thomas Wolfe. “I have it in mind,” he went on, “to bring Astrachan to your attention not as the author of a particular novel but as a writer with a long career before him which you might want to advance and help shape.”

Yaddo, summer of 1955. Top Row: Isadore Freed, George P. Elliott, Michael Seide, Katherine Shattuck, Virginia Dehn, Geoffrey Wagner, Milton Avery, Sally Avery, Sam Astrachan, Edgar Johnson, Earl Zindars (in rear), Eleanor Johnson, Neil Weiss, Jarvis Thurston, Clifford Wright, David Fremack. Bottom Row: Hortense Calisher, Patience Haley, Maude Morgan, Adolph Dehn, Colleen Browning, Anita Lerner, Elizabeth Olds.

By September of 1955, Giroux had signed Astrachan’s An End to Dying, calling it “one of the most talented first novels to come across my desk in years,” and comparing it to works by Saul Bellow. “We ought to take a lot of time and do a proper build-up,” Giroux suggested in an internal memo, “with advance quotes from people like Bellow and Trilling and Kazin.” The London publisher Victor Gollancz bought British rights to the book for an astonishing $1500, based on Giroux’s and Trilling’s enthusiasm and without even a glance at the prose itself. The young writer, flush with cash, took a celebratory jaunt to Europe. Every indicator augured a colossal debut.

As the months passed, though, problems surfaced. No magazines wanted to print prepublication excerpts, and nobody responded to requests for blurbs. (Trilling remained steadfast in support, but told Giroux that giving “pre-publication statements for promotion purposes” was not his style: “To say yes to some and not to others is an impossible situation for a man who has a great many book-writing friends and acquaintances. . . . I’ll be grateful if your ingenuity can find some way of indicating my strong support of the book without an ad hoc statement.”) In January 1956, Astrachan complained about the book jacket—he felt the photograph made him look too serious, and, contrary to the claim on the inside-front flap that “this is not another autobiographical novel,” insisted on An End to Dying as a fundamentally autobiographical work—but Roger Straus gently informed him it was too late for changes. Then, in April, just as the novel was about to appear in bookstores, Gollancz rescinded his offer to publish in England and asked for his $1500 back. Having only recently read the manuscript, he now predicted it would be one of his “biggest flops,” citing its “positively repellent” subject matter: “Russian background, immigration into America.”

Gollancz was the decidedly universalist, Christian-sympathizing heir of a rabbinical dynasty, but his resistance to An End to Dying can’t be ascribed entirely to distaste for his Jewish roots. As he pointed out, defensively, in a letter to Giroux, he had just purchased Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice (1957), which treats material similar to Astrachan’s, because he felt its “superb” quality helped it to transcend what he called the “immense handicap” of its Jewish subject matter.

While Gollancz and Giroux fired angry letters across the Atlantic, An End to Dying appeared in the U.S. to mixed reviews that justified both Giroux’s support and Gollancz’s skepticism. Trade publications raved, and the New Yorker called it “a splendidly affirmative first novel,” but the New York Times was ambivalent: Anzia Yezierska praised Astrachan as “a new talent, one with perhaps a touch of genius,” yet noted that “he does not stop long enough to flesh out his vision and make vital to the reader what is vital to himself,” while an unsigned review observed that the book is “a consummate story-study of a culture and a religion” that “fails . . . to climax.” In Commentary, Suzanne Silberstein agreed, highlighting the book’s “curious unevenness.” When the novel finally appeared in England, in 1958, the Times Literary Supplement echoed these inconclusive assessments: “Astrachan has somehow managed to give us a solid novel though his style is both careless and pretentious.”

Narrated by an autobiographical stand-in for the author—whose name, Sam Star, suggests Astrachan’s vision of himself as a celebrity waiting to be discovered—An End to Dying aspires to relate not just a young man’s maturation, but his complete family history, a project emphasized by the genealogical chart preceding the first chapter. The novel’s first half focuses on Sam’s uncle Jacob Kagan, the grandson of a nearly illiterate fur trader and son of a lumberyard foreman in Russia. Jacob vigorously contradicts the stereotype of the pale Eastern European scholar: a giant—6’4″ and 230 pounds—he “could lift a man over his head and throw him twenty feet.” Refusing to dodge the Tsar’s draft in 1904, he is shot in the leg by his own anti-Semitic officer at the Japanese front. Upon his return to the village of Nishkovitz, he decides to seek wealth: “Not even the czar will spit at a millionaire,” he reasons. Ubermensch that he is (“the truth of life is power,” he remarks at one point), he’s soon the richest Jew in Russia.

Sam Astrachan, 1960

The novel’s second half traces the degeneration of a hardy family of nature-loving Russian lumbermen, the Kagans, into a tribe of slick American shysters, the Cohens. Like the Kagans, the Cohens rake in the dough; one of Sam’s uncles is featured in Fortune, lauded as “a poor boy who now controlled millions of dollars.” Sam perceives this not as a happy example of American success, but as a tremendous loss of vitality: “I hate West End Avenue Jews,” he remarks. “They’re all fakes.” As Silberstein pointed out in her Commentary review, Sam personifies Hansen’s Law, an immigration historian’s prediction that third-generation Americans will dismiss their assimilating parents as spiritually bankrupt and idolize their old country ancestors for their perceived authenticity. “I cry,” Sam proclaims, “for all the sons and daughters sucked into the watered-down version of their parents’ watered-down new world existence.” Sam recognizes this emptiness seeping into literature, too: he admires a Yiddish storyteller, Shmyola Bernstein, who hangs around with his family in Russia and France (Astrachan reproduces a couple of his I. L. Peretz-like tales as digressions in the novel), while he disdains Jess Kraut, an American Jewish writer who doesn’t understand Yiddish and hasn’t heard of Bernstein. For ambitious Jess, “In business and art . . . it’s the same thing,” while for Bernstein, “A Jew must always work with the knowledge that he is a Jew.”

Trilling encouraged many young Jewish writers—Irving Feldman, Ivan Gold, and Allen Ginsberg, for example—but Astrachan’s embrace of an earthy Russian Jewish past rather than the materialistic American present goes a long way towards explaining Trilling’s zealous support of him. In an introduction to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, first published in 1955, Trilling infamously argued that Babel’s fascination with two qualities “made his art”: the brutal violence of the Cossacks and the soulfulness of poor Polish Jews. Trilling contrasted these with the effeteness and spiritual bankruptcy of Babel’s assimilated Odessa Jewish community. It doesn’t take a psychologist to recognize that Trilling was projecting onto Babel his own failings and his disdain for American Jewish life, as he had remarked in a 1944 symposium that “as the Jewish community now exists it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew.”

Astrachan’s Jacob Kagan personifies both of the qualities Trilling projected onto and admired in Babel. After reading Trilling’s essay during that summer at Yaddo, Astrachan wrote him an enthusiastic letter, pointing out the continuities:

Certainly, if the Jew is to accept the heritage not simply of the ghetto and the concentration camps, but of the Old Testament, he must search out the primitive and appreciate that purity of action. In the first part of my book, Kagan must be seen as a man of natural force and abilities, to be contrasted in the second part with the new-type ghetto mediocrity of the family after arrival in New York City.

Since the recent publication of an unfinished novel unearthed in Trilling’s papers, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Menand, and other critics have observed that Trilling should be understood not just as the major critic of his time, but as a frustrated novelist bitterly disappointed that his fame derived from essays and not fiction. No wonder, then, that he championed a precociously talented student who could flesh out his own theory of Jewishness in a novel; Trilling had managed to express it only in his literary criticism. Trilling’s “support was that of a father,” Astrachan remarked in a recent phone interview, “who let himself think that he himself might want to be living the life that I was living. Because he always wanted to be a writer, a fiction writer.”

As much as it may have gratified Trilling, though, the rush to publish An End to Dying may not have served Astrachan well in the long run. The book sold poorly, and his follow-up, The Game of Dostoyevsky, appeared in 1965 to little fanfare. After a second commercial failure, Giroux couldn’t afford to publish more of Astrachan’s work. A short novel, Rejoice, was published by Dial Press in 1970, and Katz-Cohen, a massive autobiographical saga, appeared from Macmillan in 1978.

Sam Astrachan in August, 2008, at home in Gordes, France

Having married Claude Jeanneau, a French sculptor, in 1959, Astrachan split his time, beginning in the 1960s, between Provence and Detroit, where he taught creative writing off and on at Wayne State University. He retired in the late 1990s to Gordes, in the South of France, writing to his old Columbia classmates that if they are “passing through this part of France, Sam will keep a light on for you.” In 1994, his wife translated a brief, and atypically non-autobiographical, novel Malaparte in Jassy (1989), and since then his books have appeared solely in French. Published by a respectable small press, they mostly mine Astrachan’s life and memories, as his debut novel did, and receive favorable notices in Paris; in 1996, Le Nouvel Observateur preferred Astrachan’s Hôtel Seville: Rockaway Beach 1947 to John Irving’s The Imaginary Girlfriend, while Le Monde praised Treife (2004). Few people in America recognize Astrachan’s name anymore—when the New Haven Review published a brief sketch of his in 2007, the editors referred to him as “an American master . . . now unknown in his native country”—and An End to Dying is never mentioned by scholars of American Jewish literature.

Astrachan’s story should serve as a reminder that it is nothing new when publishers push fledgling writers into print, accompanied by press releases celebrating the precocity of young genius—and that, best intentions notwithstanding, such headlong rushes in literary activity may be not only commercial missteps, but unfair exploitations of the ambitions of youth. In December of 1955, Astrachan mentioned to Straus that when he’d looked over his proofs, “It was actually the first time that I’ve read the book through. It is very uneven but if I had to rewrite it, I really don’t know how I would change it.”

Astrachan says, now, that he has no regrets about publishing so early. That he was able at that age to compose a novel as rich and complex as An End to Dying, a forceful tribute to his family history and to Trilling’s thought, is impressive enough. We’ll never know whether a longer road to publication—a year or two sweating through a rewrite, maybe—would have been the apprenticeship he needed to achieve something even greater.