Sonoma State University officially has a Jewish studies program — the only religious studies program on the Rohnert Park campus.
“For the first time, people can actually invest their personal Jewish life into their coursework,” said Michael Ezra, the director of the new program.
Its mission is twofold. Course offerings aim to provide high-quality education on Jews and Judaism and also promote interreligious tolerance.
Not only is the program, which began in the fall 2008 semester, the first of its kind at Sonoma State, but the program is also one of only three on the campus to be created through private funds.
Claude Ganz, a longtime Jewish community philanthropist, raised enough money and pledges to get the program off the ground and maintain it through 2011.
Ezra knew they were onto something when he arranged for three Jewish studies classes to be offered last semester. About 15 students signed up for Hebrew, 35 registered for the History of Anti-Semitism in America and 40 registered for Jewish Thought.
“It was remarkable so many signed up with hardly any publicity,” Ezra said. “It really surprised me, pleasantly.”
Ganz considers himself the “godfather” of the Jewish studies program. The 77-year-old, who lives in Glen Ellen, is a German Jew, Holocaust survivor, San Francisco investor and former appointee during the Clinton administration who aided the jump-start of the Bosnian economy.
Three years ago, he filed a claim with the Holocaust Restitution Board, which claimed it had insufficient files on his family, consequently offering him only $5,000.
It felt like tainted money, Ganz recalled.
“But I figured I’d accept it and give it away to something worthwhile — and that became the seed money for the Jewish studies program,” Ganz said.
There are about 600 Jewish students at Sonoma State, Ezra said, where the undergraduate population is about 6,700.
Nicole Recht, a sophomore, was one of the first students to declare Jewish studies as a minor, seeing it as a natural complement to her history major.
Recht, 20, grew up in San Diego. She attended a Jewish day school and started a Jewish student union in her public high school.
The Jewish studies minor is a way of “trying to figure out who I am as a person,” Recht said.
Eventually, Ezra hopes to raise enough money to create an endowed chair of Jewish studies, allowing the program to have a permanence on campus, and giving it a strong foundation from which to grow into a major, and eventually, a department of religious studies.
“I’m hoping the classes become as much as a meeting space and foundation for Jewish life as these other areas,” he said.
Ezra is not a professor of religion. In fact, he’s a scholar of African American history, and as such chairs the American multicultural studies department. He agreed to lead the new program because he feels Jewish studies and religious studies are crucial on campus, he said.
Because the program is in its infancy, all of the coursework this school year is interdisciplinary. This semester, students can select classes from the sociology department (Perspectives on the Holocaust and Genocide), the history department (Anti-Semitism in America), the political science department (International Relations of the Middle East) or the American multicultural studies department (Hebrew language).
In the fall, a full menu of courses will be available, including classes in Jewish studies, such as Jewish history, literature, film and comparative religion.
The multidisciplinary approach is intentional, Ezra said. “We want to know how Judaism fits into this world.”