A lecture series of top American and Israeli personalities is generating national attention and an unexpected financial bonanza. The university’s continuing education arm is launching new programs and drawing close to 10,000 participants. Enrollment in the university’s young rabbinical school is running higher than anticipated.
Granted, the fiscal health of the institution is worrisome. Undergraduate enrollment remains low. And some critics charge that the university has forsaken its responsibility as the flagship of Conservative Judaism on the West Coast.
The evolution of the University of Judaism and of its 50-year-old president are closely intertwined.
The university was founded in 1947, several years before Wexler was born.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Near Eastern studies at UCLA and being ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Wexler joined the school in 1978 as assistant to the dean of students. In 1992, he became president.
The institution Wexler took over was co-founded by the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education and the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The university’s guiding philosophy, however, was formulated by Mordecai Kaplan, the Conservative rabbi who founded Reconstructionism.
“Kaplan viewed the role of the Jewish university as a multi-centered institution, in which the teaching of the liberal and fine arts was of equal importance to the training of rabbis,” Wexler says.
The founding lay leaders of the school came from the film industry and shared the view that the university should give equal emphasis to culture and religion.
Wexler interprets the university’s educational mission and eclectic approach broadly enough to accommodate a lecture series featuring former President Clinton, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, political strategist James Carville and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Not everybody is cheering for the lecture series, however. Wexler says he has received about 20 messages objecting to the liberal orientation of the speakers.
Wexler credits the lecture series with reinvigorating and expanding the school’s outreach and extension program. Close to 10,000 people participate annually in a diversified program of lectures and events.
The university also launched Yesod, a two-year biblical and Jewish studies program, in partnership with area Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist synagogues.
Now in the works is a videoconferencing program linking the school’s faculty with adult students in Palm Springs and San Jose.
Innovative projects also are underway in other parts of the campus. At the Whizin Center for the Jewish Future, Director Ron Wolfson is working toward forming a Jewish Teacher Service Corps.
The university’s performing arts program is hosting the world premiere of the full-scale musical “Haven.” Wexler also is looking toward “edgier” projects such as staging translated Israeli plays and readings by younger Jewish writers.
On the construction front, the current project is the Auerbach Student Center, which will serve as a combination fitness and student union center, with an adjoining Olympic-length swimming pool, soccer field and basketball court.
Given all this activity, it may come as a surprise to learn that only 223 undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled full time.
The one branch of the academic program that is exceeding enrollment projections and is on the soundest financial footing is the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, with 64 future rabbis enrolled in the five-year program.
However, some members of Conservative synagogues criticize the school and Wexler on philosophical and practical grounds.
“I used to think of the U.J. as the center of the Conservative movement on the West Coast, but now the only thing Conservative about it consists of the Ziegler rabbinical school, Camp Ramah and the introduction to Judaism classes,” charges Michael Waterman, vice president at Valley Beth Shalom, one of Los Angeles’ premier Conservative synagogues.
As it stands now, “the U.J. has marooned the Conservative movement and left it without a focal point,” Waterman says.
The university has never aimed to be the flagship of Conservative Judaism or the interpreter of Conservative doctrine, Wexler argues.
“Our rabbinical school is Conservative,” he says. “The rest of the university is basically nondenominational. All our programs are directed toward one goal, and that is to make a real impact on the shape and direction of American Judaism. We are very much a California institution, which means that we will always be innovative, that we will always look forward.”