JEWS AND HARVARD

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I am grateful to be informed by Mr. H. Epstein (Crimson, October 4th) that at least one of the followers of Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's new militant Jewish thrust at Harvard isn't really all that militant after all--or so he thinks. Mr. Epstein doesn't even consider religious behavior as part of a larger matrix of concerns called "ethnic." He is, of course, quite mistaken, though in his error is a measure of his low-profile approach to the new Jewish militancy--an approach with which I have sympathy. Yet Mr. Epstein remains somewhat in error. I have several comments on this:

First, I have no doubt whatever that Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold meant his sermon on September 14th as the inaugural event for a militant Jewish (ethnic) thrust within the Harvard community. He even extended this image of his sermon in a subsequent comment to The Crimson (September 27), remarking that he (and I might add other Jewish militants around the country) rejected the progressive doctrine on the Jewish question promulgated by the French Revolution--namely, "Everything to Jews as individuals...Nothing to Jews as people".

Secondly, Mr. Epstein shares Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's confusion about the limits of ethnic participation in a democratic society. The pluralist model for managing ethnic interactions permits both exclusivity and inclusivity in subcultural practices or endeavors, while simultaneously cultivating an open-ended universalism or cosmopolitanism as a style (value) for national institutions. At the extreme of exclusivism is the Amish model: total rejection of and isolation from modern society, cosmopolitanism and all. This is difficult to attain but if you work at it, as the great Amish people of my home state of Pennsylvania have, you can achieve much of it--including, of course, the many privations the Amish endure. On the other hand, inclusivism ranges, on one side, from open-ended cosmopolitanism to what might be called an unstable inter-ethnic coexistence, achieved by Harvard University today and many other leading national institutions such as governments, arts, sports, business, armed forces, voluntary associations like Veterans of Foreign Wars, trade unions, etc.

Thus one can be a good artist and be recognized as such by artists without surrendering ones particularism, be a good unionist without ceasing to be an Irish Catholic, or be a good member of the Harvard community without discarding one's blackness, Jewishness, Catholicness, femaleness, etc. The role of a given institution--a university, union, corporation--in facilitating this dialectically intricate pluralism does not require, however, total surrender of its native subcultural attributes, its particularistic tendency. It need only forgo the nativist phobia: the fear that pluralism (coexistence of values, forms, styles) necessarily destroys particularism.

I daresay it would be both presumptuous and callous of, say, Protestants at Notre Dame University, Methodists at Augustana College (Lutheran), Mormons at Furman University (Baptist), Gentiles at Brandeis University (Jewish), or Jews at Harvard to insist that securing these groups' presence in universities of different cultural origins and distinctiveness required the latter's extinction. Thus, in the model of American pluralism, as Notre Dame adjusted over time to this model its Catholic leadership is required only to surrender its nativist phobia--its fear that having Protestants, Jews, Muslims, etc. among us will destroy us, deny our cultural distinctiveness.

It is, then, within the framework of both the spirit and practice of this delicately calibrated model of American pluralism that I reject Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold's militant Jewish thrust in the Harvard community. And though I sympathize with Mr. Epstein's low-profile approach to Jewish militancy, I reject it equally.

No offense is either intended or done by Harvard's support of Memorial Church in the context of the universalistic-thrusted Harvard of today, any more than it is an offense by the Notre Dame of today to sustain Catholic edifices and forms. Nor is the acceptance of this by non-Christians (indeed even non-high status Protestants like Jehovah Witnesses, Baptists, Mormons) at Harvard a denial of the value of their particularlism or ethnicity. It is merely a facet of the forever ambiguous status of people called Americans. Mormons at Harvard dealt with this status ambiguity in a good American fashion: they raised funds and built a religious edifice, on Brattle Street at that. This Americanism--one I happen to cherish--is available to all of us. Martin Kilson   Professor of Government