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THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE, M»y 16, 1975 — PAGE 16
Jewish Professors Less Observant
by BEN GALLOB
Jewish college professors are
likely to be less observant and less
committed — except about Israel
— than are Jews of equal intellec
tual attainment outside of
academia, according to a Jewish
scholar who has made a formal
study of his Jewish colleagues.
This is a situation, according to
Allan Mazur, associate professor
of social science and sociology at
Syracuse University, which is like
ly to have a profound impact on
the commitments of American
one way or another."
Jewish professors, he reported,
“tend to come from families that
are typical of the general Jewish
community. They are about as
likely to come from kosher homes,
to have bar mitzvahs, and.so on, as
Jews in other occupations.” He
also contended that the differences
did not stem from superior in
telligence, declaring that Jewish
doctors, lawyers, other
professionals and businessmen
“have comparable intelligence and
they are embedded in the
American News Report
Jewish youth, most of whom now
attend college. Prof. Mazur
reported his findings in Hakotz,
the Jewish studentpublication at
the university.
Prof. Mazur included in his
report a brief description of the
elitist character of the Jewish
scholars, reporting that while Jews
are only three percent of the
American population, “they ac
count for about nine percent of the
American professoriate and about
20 percent of the faculties of elite
universities.” They tend to be
“highly productive scholars, are
over-represented in the rank of full
professor, have disproportionately
high salaries and win an inordinate
number of Nobel prizes,” he
asserted.
He noted the general impression
that Jewish professors tend “to be
apart from the Jewish com
munity.” He said it was a fact that
relatively many Jewish professors
do not attend synagogues or keep
kosher and are “relatively more
likely to have gentile friends and a
gentile spouse.” He said it was
also "probaitly true" that Jewish
professors, as a group “have
thought more about where they are
religiously and ethnically and are
less likely to accept their
Jewishness as it was given to
them."
Prof. Mazur stressed that there
was "great individual variation"
among the scholars, citing Jewish
professors he knew to be atheists,
others who keep kosher, “one at
least who is a rabbi, and some who
are American-Jewish garden-
variety high holiday temple
attenders," as well as“agnostics,
deists, (heists, some who are con
fused and some who do not care
mainstream of Jewish community
life.”
A more accurate evaluation, he
said, was that professors of all
religions “tend to be less observant
than their co-religionists outside of
academia. They also tend to be
more liberal politically, better read
and more opinionated about world
events, and more interested in
literature and the arts.”
He said the academic communi
ty had “its own historical sub-
sulture and values — including
liberalism, intellectualism and dis
dain for formal religious tradition
— as in any other exclusive com
munity.” Jews and gentiles are ex
posed to this subculture as un
dergraduates, more so as graduate
students, and still more as faculty
members “and they are bound to
become increasingly assimilated
into it.”
He said the beginnings of this
assimilation can easily be observed
on most campuses. Many students
experience marked changes in
basic values in college. If they find
the academic subculture appeal
ing, “they will accept its values and
norms.” He noted that many
Jewish students do not accept these
new values, restricting their
friendships to “groups or campus
organizations that are effectively
Jewish enclaves, isolated from the
academic subculture."
But, he added, that isolation
usually fades for those who stay on
in graduate school. The student
“who has always eaten kosher
food now encounters respected
professors and student peers who
view all religious practices as
parochial superstitions. Proscrip
tions against intermarriage" are
considered “clannish." The
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Tope’s
elaborate bar mitzvas and
marriages “of an upwardly mobile
Jewish community are considered
conspicuous consumption.”
The process by which the Jewish
student accepts these perspectives
as his own does not involve “a
complete dissociation from
Jewishness,” Prof. Mazur
declared. "The academic com
munity puts great value on in
tellectuality and liberal social
ethics. Jewish professors, as a
group, positively attach to these
aspects of their Jewishness. They
often see their own liberalism as
linked to Talmudic ethical
traditions and many are
chauvinistically proud of the whole
stable of Jewish geniuses: Marx,
Freud, Einstein, etc.”
Like Jews generally, Jewish
professors "do indeed support
Israel, independent of their degree
of interest in and attachment to
other aspects of Judaism," he said.
“No other issue, excepting
perhaps the Holocaust, has such
broad-based consensus among vir
tually all Jews."
As to the future, Prof. Mazur
noted that most young Jews go to
college now and very many con
tinue into graduate school. He ex
pressed the view that, unless there
was “a marked change in the
values of the academic subculture,
the entire Jewish community — at
least the younger generation —
will be increasingly socialized into
positions we now associate only
with the Jewish professoriate.”
COPYRIGHT 75 - JTA
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