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From Minyan to Matriculation:

San Diego Jewry and Jewish Studies at San Diego State University*

Lawrence Baron

        The history of San Diego’s Jewish community has been relatively neglected because the city’s Jewish population remained small until it experienced a belated growth spurt after 1970.  Like other spots with natural harbors along the California coast, San Diego attracted its first Jewish settlers in 1850 with the dual promises of commercial opportunity generated by the Gold Rush and religious tolerance afforded by California statehood the same year.  In this period, San Diego’s Jewish immigration resembled that of other boom towns.  A core of Jewish settlers arrived in the town and founded the first Jewish Congregation in Southern California in 1861.  The opening of a direct link to the transcontinental railroad in 1885 expanded the city’s general population to 35,000 and Jewish community to 300 by 1887, providing sufficient membership to erect Beth Israel, the first synagogue in San Diego in 1889.  Unfortunately, the railway line to the East was washed out by a flashflood depriving San Diego of direct access to the transcontinental railroad.  The city’s population plunged to 16,000 by 1890, and the number of Jews declined even more steeply to an estimated 110 by 1905.

        The bursting of San Diego’s economic bubble in the 1880’s led to the cancellation of two attempts to establish a state college there towards the end of the decade.  Nevertheless, land developers and municipal leaders continued to pursue the goal of locating a normal school in San Diego to enhance the city’s allure to families seeking a hometown with an ample supply of professionally trained teachers staffing the local elementary schools.  In this regard, San Diego lagged behind San Jose, Los Angeles, and Chico which already had such normal schools.  In 1897 the California legislature and governor approved the charter and funding for the San Diego Normal School which started offering classes in temporary quarters in the Fall of the following year.  Paralleling the city’s economic recovery and population growth to nearly 40,000 inhabitants by 1910, the normal school’s enrollment jumped from 91 to 400 in the same period.

        In this period, Jewish women in California were more likely to seek a career before marrying than their female coreligionists in the larger Jewish population centers on the East Coast and in the Midwest.  Greatly outnumbered by Jewish bachelors who tended to delay getting engaged until they gained business contacts and expertise or a college degrees in bigger cities, local Jewish women often attended public and normal schools to support themselves financially as teachers before they got married.  During its first decade, 90 per cent of the students at San Diego Normal School were women.  Looking over the lists of the first graduates from San Diego Normal School, I am certain that the first Jewish graduate from the school was a woman.  One of the following co-eds probably holds this honor: Grace Baker of the Class of 1900, Lily Lesen of the Class of 1902, or Elsie Davidson of the Class of 1903.  Baker, Davidson and Lesen resided in or nearby San Diego.  An early but undated synagogue membership roster from Beth Israel includes families named Baker, Davidson, and Lesen. 

Henrietta Rose, daughter of  San Diego’s legendary Jewish developer Louis Rose, taught in the city’s public schools from 1895 to 1940 and enrolled in courses occasionally at the Normal School to upgrade her pedagogical skills.  She remained single, perhaps because she achieved financial independence as the sole heir to her father’s fortune in 1881 and learned early in her teaching career that the Board of Education routinely fired women teachers when they got married.  She also led an active civic life as a leader of the women’s auxiliary to the local Masonic Lodge.    

        While both increased between 1910 and 1940, the general and Jewish population of San Diego remained relatively small compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco in this period (See Table 1).  In 1921   

TABLE 1

Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco General and Jewish

 Population Growth between 1910-1940

the status of San Diego State Normal School was elevated to that of a state teacher’s college with a four year curriculum.  The enrollment at the school burgeoned from 203 in 1920 to 1,250 students by 1930.  This growth necessitated building a bigger campus on Montezuma Mesa where the university is still located.  Approximately 90 per cent of  the 1,220 students who attended the new campus in 1931 came from the San Diego metropolitan area and commuted to their classes.  Only 12 of them listed their religious affiliation as “Hebrew.”  This small Jewish enrollment reflected the size of San Diego’s Jewish community.  Jewish male students in California usually gravitated to more prestigious colleges and universities in Los Angeles and San Francisco which possessed larger Jewish communities on campus and in the surrounding metropolitan areas (See Table 2).

Table 2

Jewish Student Percentage of Total Enrollment at California Universities and Colleges During the l930’s

        From 1928 on, the most visible Jewish presence at San Diego  State was professor Abraham P. Nasatir.  Not only did Nasatir distinguish himself as an outstanding teacher and prolific scholar of the history of South America and Spanish colonialism in North America, but also as an Orthodox Jew.  It may be that his traditional piety facilitated his acceptance by a student body, 75 per cent of whose members were affiliated with some religious denomination.  The Jewish students who attended the college in the 1930’s and 1940’s believe that the respect Nasatir enjoyed among his students and peers prevented any overt manifestations of anti-Semitism on the campus.  Starting in 1932, Nasatir opened his home for a daily minyan for male students who wanted to daven before they went to classes.  Bernard Lipinsky, who attended the college in the 1931-1932 school year, fondly recalls that Nasatir sometimes asked his students to purchase him a movie ticket for Saturday matinees because he observed the tradition of not carrying money on Shabbat.  Nasatir taught at San Diego State until 1974 and authored 18 books over the course of his career.  In 1985 the university established the Nasatir Professorship in Modern Jewish History.  A year later the Eastern wing of the old Humanities-Social Sciences Building was renamed Nasatir Hall.  When he died in 1991, the donations made in his memory were dedicated to funding an annual Nasatir Lecture on American Jewish History.

        The one form of anti-Semitic discrimination which existed at San Diego State in the 1930’s was the exclusion of Jews from fraternities and sororities.  This practice was widespread on American campuses  until the 1960’s.  Charlotte Fried-Schultz, class of 1941, remembers that when her sister pledged a sorority, she was told that the chapter could not accept any other Jews without special permission from its national headquarters.  Likewise, Sol Schultz, Class of 1941, believes that Bob Breitbard, a popular varsity football player, was blackballed from joining the fraternity of his choice by an individual member who disliked Jews. 

        If Jewish students at San Diego State wanted to socialize with Jews their own age, they had to join local Jewish organizations.  In 1931 Jewish males in their late teens and early twenties founded the Alpha Beta chapter of Aleph Phi Pi which described itself as an “off-campus social fraternity.”  It drew much of its leadership from former and current San Diego State students.  In 1938 Bernard Lipinsky served as its Chancellor and Bob Breitbard as its Vice Chancellor.  Another member was Lipinsky’s friend Sol Price, Class of 1934, the future owner of the wholesale chain of Price Club stores.  Lipinsky and Breitbard also acted as officers for B’nai B’rith’s youth organization Aleph Zadik Aleph.  Similarly, female Jewish teenagers formed a local chapter of the B’nai B’rith Junior Girls Auxillary in 1933 which hosted an annual Charity Ball starting in 1936.  In that year, Ida Friedman, Class of 1940, held the office of president of the group.

        The Forties proved to be a mixed blessing for San Diego State College and its Jewish student body.  On the one hand, enrollment dropped from a high of 2,077 students in 1940 to a low of 860 in 1943 as many students joined the Armed Forces.  This decrease prompted a reduction in faculty from 112 to 60.  On the other hand, the rapid expansion of war related industries and military and naval bases in and around San Diego sparked a population spurt enlarging San Diego’s general population to 334,387 and Jewish population to 6,000 by 1950.  Many new Jewish residents initially visited San Diego as marines, sailors, and soldiers on their way to the Pacific Front and moved to the city after 1945 to take advantage of the mild climate and the educational and employment opportunities resulting from the GI Bill and the Federal contracts with factories producing military equipment and arms.  Since their Social Security benefits and union pensions were portable, many senior citizens joined this sunbelt migration whose postwar impact was more pronounced in Los Angeles and Miami.  While it grew at a slower pace than those cities, San Diego was evolving into a metropolis too.  San Diego State’s enrollment swelled to over 4,000 by 1947 with the size of the Jewish student body reaching nearly 100.  A poll filled out by 64 Jewish students in 1947 indicated that 75% of the men and 55% of the entire group had served in the Armed Forces in some capacity during World War Two.

        To meet the demand for more courses, the College hired 170 new faculty members in the immediate postwar years.  Three of these professors, Ernest Wolf, Harry Ruja, and Oscar Kaplan, were committed Jews.  Along with Abe Nasatir, they supported the Jewish students’ bid to gain the sponsorship of the San Diego Jewish Federation, the local B’nai B’rith lodge, and its Women’s Auxiliary for the establishment of a Hillel chapter.  Temple Beth Israel hosted the opening ceremonies for the Hillel chapter on Sept.30, 1947.  650 people from the campus and the community attended the occasion which featured a keynote address by the President of Brandeis University, Abraham Sachar.  He told the crowd “that understanding of our Jewish heritage gives a feeling of confidence and pride to our youth so that they no longer will accept defensive apologetics.” 

The first act of San Diego State’s Hillel was to petition the Registrar to reschedule registration for the Fall Semester so it did not coincide with the High Holy Days.  Yet this was still a time when the goal of mainstream American Jewish groups was building ecumenical coalitions rather than pursing a parochial Jewish agenda.  Accordingly, the Hillel chapter of San Diego State amended its charter to admit Gentile members with the proviso that they couldn’t serve as officers, established an interfaith scholarship fund, jointly celebrated Hanukah and Christmas with Christian student groups, and conducted an annual Interfaith Seder that included New Testament passages that referred to the observance of Passover by Jesus and his Apostles.   

        As the GI Bill diversified the student body at San Diego State, the restrictive admission policies of the school’s fraternities and sororities came under fire in 1948.  Moved by arguments that discrimination on racial or religious reasons could no longer be tolerated after Christian whites had fought alongside “Negroes” and  Jews during the war, the Council authorized a review of all student organizations to determine if they discriminated against minorities.  The fraternities and sororities lobbied vigorously against changing their membership criteria.  In the end, a student referendum approved the status quo by a vote of 1,225 to 721.

        In the same year, however, San Diego State’s students elected the first Jewish president of the Associated Student Council, Duane Kantor.  Rejecting numerous offers to join one of the college’s fraternities, Kantor stayed out of the fray over Greek membership policy to avoid polarizing the campus along religious lines.  For the same reason, he declined to endorse the founding of a Jewish fraternity that was being promoted by his classmates Bob Levy and Larry Solomon.  In the following year, their efforts led to the formation of a local fraternity named Beta Tau.  In 1951 it affiliated with the national Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau.  Abe Nasatir became its faculty advisor.  Two more Jewish fraternities subsequently chartered chapters at San Diego State, Alpha Epsilon Pi in 1970 and Sigma Alpha Mu in 1983.

        Jewish co-eds eventually sought their own sorority too.  In the early 1960’s, a local Jewish sorority named Alpha Epsilon recruited members and affiliated with the national Jewish sorority Alpha Epsilon Phi in 1963.  Harry Ruja acted as its faculty advisor.  Judy Gumbiner, Class of 1966, admits that she pledged Alpha Epsilon Phi as a way to meet other Jews and identify Jewishly.”  Yet she hardly segregated herself from the rest of campus life.  The Associated Student Council named her Woman of the Year three times in a row for her service on the Council.  A E Phi folded as part of a general decline of the Greek system in the 1970’s for several reasons: students wanted their own apartments; the state mandated the abolition of discriminatory policies by campus groups; and student radicals perceived the Greek system as outdated and racist.

        Even though the majority of students at San Diego State were politically conservative like the San Diego electorate in general, the campus was not immune to the forces of student radicalism in California which culminated in the founding of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964.  In 1959 the University of California system had abolished mandatory faculty loyalty oaths and announced that it allow speakers representing a broad spectrum of political views to address campus audiences.  In 1960 a San Diego State chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a student organization, the Committee for Student Action, which dedicated itself to stimulating political debate on campus, were founded.  The Committee tested the limits of campus tolerance by inviting George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, to talk at the college’s Open Air Theater on March 8, 1962.  Drawing a crowd of over 2,000 persons, Rockwell launched into a diatribe against blacks and Jews, charging that the Holocaust had not occurred and that Jews were “loyal to Moscow or Israel” and promoted racial integration.  When a Jewish physical education major named Ed Cherry climbed on stage to refute these calumnies, Rockwell blocked his access to the microphone.  Cherry then punched Rockwell.  A melee ensued in which students pelted Rockwell with rocks and eggs and vandalized his car.  The incident garnered national publicity and resulted in disciplinary actions being taken against Cherry and two other students.  The leaders of Hillel sent a letter to the college newspaper “regretting that Rockwell was not allowed to speak without interruptions,” but expressing sympathy with “the actions of the student who was carried away by his emotions.”

During the 1960’s, San Diego State’s growth kept pace with that of the city.  The city’s population approached 700,000 with the Jewish community numbering 12,000 by 1970.  San Diego State College’s enrollment rose from 10,700 in 1960 to 25,500 ten years later with full-time faculty positions increasing from 475 to over 1,000.  The size of the Jewish student body was approximately 1,000 by 1968.  A poll conducted among faculty and students in that year revealed considerable support for offering a minor in Jewish Studies.

The Jewish pride generated by Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War of 1967 and student and faculty pressure to offer academic programs in African American, American Indian, Chicano,, and Women’s Studies in the late 1960’s benefited the movement to institute a Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State.  Rabbi Israel Weisfeld, the director of the San Diego Bureau of Jewish Education, taught courses in Hebrew and Judaism in the 1969-1970 school year for the nominal salary of one dollar to prove they could attract sufficient enrollments which they did.  A group of faculty members formed a Jewish issues forum called Yavne in 1969.   9 professors agreed to teach Jewish Studies courses in the formal application for the minor in 1970.  Following the approval of the minor that Spring, Irving Gefter was hired in a tenure position to teach Hebrew and the Jewish Heritage survey course.  The next year Ita Sheres joined the faculty to teach courses on the Bible and modern Jewish literature.

By 1972 the state legislature recognized that San Diego State College had in effect become a comprehensive university awarding Masters Degrees and joint Doctorates.  Brage Golding, the first president to take the helm of the university, was Jewish.  Golding detected no anti-Semitism directed towards him during his presidency which lasted until 1977.  This lack of animosity was all the more remarkable considering there were events like the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the 1974 United Nations resolution condemning Zionism as racism, and the related gasoline shortages and price increases caused by OPEC’s oil embargo, which could have fueled an anti-Semitic backlash on campus.

        The Seventies also marked a time when more Jewish students became concerned with issues of their ethnic and religious identity.   Zionist idealism prompted Ray Belser to start a Jewish commune in the college area and eventually to make aliyah to Israel in 1973 where he joined 50 other North American Jewish students to found Garin Hagolan, a kibbutz in the northern Golan Heights.  Chabad House opened near campus in 1970.  Its Friday night services left Lorie Geddis, Class of 1972, with warm memories of “traditional shabbat dinners with lots of kosher wine and stories of the Baal Shem Tov

late into the night.”  She was also deeply influenced by the university course “Pathways Through the Bible” taught by Rabbi Samuel Penner.  Hillel continued to be a focal point of Jewish student activity.  Donna Kanter, Class of 1974, reminisces that “Hillel became my social life, my daily volunteer work, and connected me to Judaism in a way that years of practice, religious school, and even B’nai B’rith Girls hadn’t.”  In January of 1976 Hillel moved into its present building and renamed itself the Jewish Campus Center because the San Diego Jewish Federation and not the national Hillel organization subsidized the rental and eventual purchase of its new quarters.  The Center hired Rabbi Jay Miller as its director in 1977.

        By the 1980s the Jewish enrollment at San Diego State soared to over 3,000.  The San Diego metropolitan area had over 30,000 Jewish residents.  Even though San Diego State continued to attract more students reaching a peak enrollment of almost 36,000 by 1987, state budget allocations decreased in the late 1970’s as a consequence of the passage of Proposition Thirteen which capped property tax rates.  Threats of drastic reductions in the funding of the California State University gradually crippled the Jewish Studies Program which had depended on faculty members from other departments which now hesitated to release professors to teach specialized Jewish Studies courses.  In the 1983-1984 school year, only 4 of the 14 courses which counted towards the Jewish Studies minor were offered.  Pressure for the university to solicit private donations to fund the Program emerged from the Jewish Campus Center, the Jewish Student Union, and Jewish faculty members.  The university’s development office started to approach potential contributors in 1983.  Concerned faculty drafted a letter in 1984 informing San Diego Jewry that the “potential is here for an academically strong and enriching program that will communicate the vibrancy of Jewish culture to students and the public at large.”

        In response the university hired Professor Jacob Goldberg of  Tel-Aviv University to be a fundraiser for the Jewish Studies Program.  Howard Kushner of the History Department assisted Goldberg on behalf of San Diego State’s faculty.  What galvanized prominent local Jews to help fund Jewish Studies was their consternation over the invitation of Louis Farrakhan to lecture at the university under the auspices of the Associated Students.  President Thomas Day attempted to appease both sides by defending Farrakhan’s right to appear on campus while convincing Jewish philanthropists that endowing the Jewish Studies Program would discredit his anti-Semitic tirades by educating people about Jews and Judaism.  Day won over Bernard and Dorris Lipinsky who announced a major donation in 1985 for endowing a permanent chair in modern Jewish History and an annual Visiting Israeli Professorship.  Thus, the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies opened in the Fall of 1985.

        The topography and climate of San Diego county resembled that of Israel and other Middle Eastern countries.  Like the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea, the county possessed a temperate coastal strip adjacent to a ridge of mountains and an interior desert with a saltwater lake and irrigated farming plots in its Eastern interior.    The creation of the Fred J. Hansen Institute for World Peace at the university, and the signing of the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in 1979 enabled the school to become directly involved in fostering peaceful cooperation between Israel and neighboring Arab countries.  Appointed the director of the Hansen Institute in 1979, retired Professor Robert Ontell sent letters to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat suggesting that Egypt and Israel meet with American agricultural specialists in San Diego to improve the efficiency of growing crops in arid conditions.  In 1982 the Institute received a 5 million dollar grant from the United States Agency for International Development to fund this plan.  Before there were diplomatic contacts between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, Ontell brought dovish Israeli and Palestinian politicians on campus to address private audiences of Arab and Jewish Americans about how to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  Under the sponsorship of the Hansen Institute in the 1990’s, representatives of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Tunisia, and Turkey have cooperated with each other on practical matters like desalinization of water, water conservation, and the genetic engineering of crops requiring less moisture.

        At the regional level, growing student enrollments and community attendance for the courses and public programs of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies reflected a westward shift in both Jewish settlement patterns and the academic institutionalization of Jewish Studies.  Between 1950 and 1990, the proportion of the American Jewish population residing in the Western states rose from 7 per cent to 24 per cent surpassing the Midwest as the second largest concentration of Jews outside of the Northeast.  The influx of Jews and the enrollment of many of their children in colleges and universities in the West has served as the catalyst for the creation of new Jewish Studies departments and programs and the expansion of existing ones.  Los Angeles blazed the trail in this process with the founding of the University of Judaism in the late 1940’s and the merger of a branch of the Hebrew Union College with the Jewish Institute of Religion in 1957.  Both schools have since achieved the status of Rabbinical Seminaries for their respective denominations.   Likewise, highly regarded Jewish Studies degree programs have emerged at the University of California campuses of Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and at private schools like the Claremont School of Theology, the Graduate Theological Union, and Stanford University.

In 1994, Lipinsky Institute director Lawrence Baron created the Western Jewish Studies Association, emulating the Midwestern Jewish Studies Association, an organization founded in the 1980s partly as a protest against the Association for Jewish Studies’ decision to hold its annual conference in Boston.   Many interpreted the AJS policy as a refusal to acknowledge the proliferation of Jewish Studies Programs outside the Northeast.  When the AJS leadership rebuffed his proposal to alternate conference sites to make attendance more accessible and affordable for Jewish Studies scholars in the Midwest and West, Baron convened the first meeting of the Western Jewish Studies Association in San Diego in 1995.  Subsequent conferences have been held in Colorado Springs, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Tucson.  Responding to requests from both the Western and Midwestern Jewish Studies Associations, the AJS held its 1999 conference in Chicago and is scheduled to meet in Los Angeles in 2002.

        The symbiosis between San Diego’s Jewish community and the Lipinsky Institute culminated in the Fall of 2000.  Commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Jewish settlement in San Diego, the 30^th anniversary of the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State, and the 20^th anniversary of the Jewish Historical Society of San Diego, the Lipinsky Institute and Jewish Historical Society honored people who had made important contributions to San Diego and San Diego State Jewish history.  The ceremony was preceded and followed by tours of the Jewish Historical Society of San Diego Archives housed in the Lipinsky Institute’s Snyder Judaic Studies Reading Room.

        Town-Gown relations are often characterized by antagonism between partying students, controversial academics, and staid communities whose tranquility and values are threatened by both.  The relationship between what Jewish Studies programs teach and the political and religious priorities of the local Jewish population have suffered from similar tensions.  Yet this generally has not been the case at San Diego State.  In older Jewish communities on the East Coast or in the Midwest, Jewish settlement and the creation of Jewish educational institutions like day schools, community centers, and yeshivot usually preceded the introduction of secular Jewish Studies Programs at private and public universities.  In San Diego the pattern was different.  The period of most rapid Jewish population growth occurred between 1970 and 2000 when it skyrocketed from 12,000 to 80,000.  While the San Diego Jewish community busily erected a new community center, additional synagogues, and day schools, the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State had the opportunity to fill the niche for adult education.  The Lipinsky Institute’s weekly New Perspectives in Judaic Studies Lectures, annual Glickman-Galinson Symposium on Modern Israel, and outreach lectures to community groups by the Visiting Israeli and Nasatir Professors and other Jewish Studies faculty have thrust San Diego State to the center rather than the margins of Jewish communal education in the city.

*The author thanks Donald Harrison, Bernard Lipinsky, Stan and Laurel Schwartz, Raymond Starr, and Jackie Tolley for sharing their knowledge about San Diego Jewry and San Diego State University.

DIRECTORY TO SOURCES:

Archives of the Jewish Historical Society of San Diego and the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies, Judaic Studies Reading Room, 363 Love Library, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182.

Gerson, Ronald.  Jewish Religious Life in San Diego, California, 1851-

1918. Thesis. Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1974.

Marcus, Jacob Rader.  To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data.  Lanham: University Press of America, 1990.

Moore, Deborah Dash.  To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.  New York: The Free Press, 1994.

Old Town, New Town: An Enjoyment of San Diego Jewish History, Eds.

William M. Kramer, Stanley and Laurel Schwartz.  Los Angeles and San Diego: Western States Jewish Historical Association, 1994.

Pourade, Richard.  The History of San Diego.  7 Vols.  San Diego: Union-Tribune Publishing Company and Copley Books.  1964-1977.

Starr, Raymond.  San Diego State University: A History in Word and Image.  San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1995.

Lawrence Baron is the Director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies and the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University.  He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association.

Lawrence Baron is the Director of the Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies and the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University.  He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association.