By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif —Prof. Lawrence  Baron completed his tenure as the first full-time director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies at San Diego State University with a song on his lips.

To the tune of “525,600 Minutes” from Rent, Baron, sang to between 75 and 100 guests . on Sunday, Nov. 12, about the accomplishments during his18 years heading the program, recently renamed as SDSU’s “Jewish Studies Program.”

365 lectures I sponsored;

20 symposia for people to hear.

Thousands of students learning from courses;

Finding Israelis to bring here each year.

In speaking off-campus,

In shmoozing with patrons.

In meetings with colleagues

From far and from near.

9,460,800 minutes—

That’s how I spent my last 18 years!

“As the first director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies, I am stepping down with mixed emotions,” Baron said after friends recovered from the shock of hearing him sing.
 “This has been my professional baby; it has kept me up at nights, it has filled my days.  Like a child maturing, the Jewish Studies Program has grown up from being a minor to a major in 18 years.  Eighteen constitutes the numerical equivalents of the letters that form the Hebrew word chai, life. It usually marks the year when young adults leave their families and go to college.  To move to that next stage, to graduate so to speak, the Jewish Studies Program needs a new director, Risa Levitt Kohn.”

Baron noted that when he and his wife, Bonnie came to San Diego, SDSU was receiving 54 percent of its budget from the State of California, whereas “now we receive less than 30 percent.” Chief among private donors to the program were the late Dorris and the late Bernard Lipinsky, and the Lipinsky children,  Elaine and Jeff & Sheila. Baron said. 

“Donations by Elaine & Murray Galinson, Beverly & Joseph Glickman, Paula Siegel and Dorsha Wallman enabled the program to survive in its early years,” he added. “Recurring donations from the Nierman Foundation …the Jewish Community Foundation, and all the individuals who have endowed lectureships since I arrived—and there are quite a few—have allowed us to expand our outreach programming despite state budget cuts…

“My own life has been enhanced by knowing community and educational leaders like Joyce Axelrod, Bob Bohrer, Al & Norma Cooper, Judy Friedel, Judy Gumbiner, Debbie Horwitz, Cecile Jordan, Heather Maio, Leah Ollman, Alan Rusonik, Sandra Silverstein, Laurel & Stan Schwartz, Mark Stuzane, Jackie Tolley, Selma Wagner and Sidney Wexler.” 

Baron also recalled the names of numerous SDSU administrators and faculty members, living and dead, who helped shape the program over the years.

When Associate Prof. Risa Levitt Kohn, the new director of the program, was introduced, she quipped:  “I was aware that I had some rather large shoes to fill,  but I really had no idea about the singing!”

She added that her husband, Yariv Kohn, had been worried about her striking just the right note with her speech, and so put out for her three books on Jewish wisdom.  Flipping through one of them, she said a quotation from the Talmud caught her attention:  “Leadership shortens life.”

Turning serious, Kohn said she believes that the Jewish Studies Program has “a big job to do—particularly in the case of educating people about Israel.  Discourse on our campus, but not only on our campus, tends to be somewhat biased and ideologically driven and often distorts reality, and it is our job to academically approach the subject with reality—whatever that reality may be,” she said.

”It struck me too that we are the last generation, so to speak, of people who will have first-hand knowledge about the history of the 20^th century and in particular the Holocaust,” Kohn added. 

”It is our job… to transmit what was very tangible to us to a generation that will only read and hear about these events, and that is quite a big job as well,” the new director said.

“We also deal on an ongoing basis with continued assimilation and the secularization of our world, especially at the university,” she said.

Entertainment for the ceremony marking the transition in leadership was provided by Yale Strom, the klezmer musician and movie maker who is serving as an artist-in-residence at SDSU under auspices of the Jewish Studies Program.  He was joined by a friend who grew up with him in San Diego, Jeff Pekarek, in performing several Eastern European melodies that had the audience of faculty and frends of the Jewish Studies Program clapping with enthusiasm.

Among dignitaries introduced during the ceremony was Prof. Eliezer Tauber of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who is this year’s visiting Israeli professor at SDSU—another program conducted under the Jewish Studies Program’s auspices.

Besides her new duties, Kohn also is serving as curator for the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit to be held in the latter half of next year at the Natural History Museum.  Her specialty is Bible scholarship, whereas Baron, who will continue to teach in the history department, is widely known as a scholar of the Holocaust and how films have depicted it.

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