interview with arthur goldberg side a q. this is tina isaacs interviewing dean arthur ... ·...
TRANSCRIPT
Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 15, 1976 By Tina Isaacs
Interview Tape 1 Side A
Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur Goldberg. 11 m in Dean
Page 1
Goldberg 1 s office and it is December 15th, 1976. Okay, this seems to be
working. Testing one, two, three, four. Okay.
A. 11 11 try to talk into the mike.
Q. Okay.
A. Alright, go ahead.
Q. Mr. Goldberg, could you please tell me where you were born and when, if
you 1 i ke . . . if it 1 s not personal .
A. I was born in the Bronx in New York City in 1933.
Q. Okay. And when your family ... were both your parents American?
A. Well, my mother was born in this country and my father was born in Russia;
arrived here about age eight or nine, I guess. They both grew up here.
Q. Do you know why he left Russia? (Laughter) That 1 s a silly question!
A. (Laughter) The Ukraines, the Cossacks were coming; the pogroms were
coming. The people decided it would be a good idea to leave.
Q. And did they settle into New York?
A. Oh, yes. They settled into New York and New Jersey, and New York again,
and moved on. If you 1 d 1 ike, I can give you a sort of biographical, auto-
biographical, rundown of myself, my family, and Judaism, which makes an
exercise in itself.
Q. Oh, fine! That 1 s much better than me asking silly questions.
A. Alright. Both my sets of grandparents were Orthodox Jews from Russia.
Russia ... Poland. Right in along that Russian Polish border. As I
said, my mother was born in this country, but she is the youngest child.
All of her sisters and brothers were born in Europe. Both sets of grand-
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 2
A. (Continued) parents were very active in their respective synagogues. My
mother's father was cantor of his synagogue and my father's parents were
very active leaders in their little synagogue, both of them very orthodox.
And my mother's ... my father's mother ran a sort of refugee center dur
ing the second World War and just before it, and brought a great many ortho
dox Jews over here, including rabbis, several of whom are today fairly big
wheels in New York City rabbinical.
Q. Excuse me if I interrupt you. Were these refugees mostly from Eastern
Europe or were they from Germany?
A. Mostly from Europe. Almost all of these people were Slavic Jews, Russian -
Polish Jews .. 11 licvacs11 (?) But during the war people weren't all that
fussy, and in fact, as you may know, the flow of Jews through Europe quickly
went from Poland to Germany and out. So there were some German Jews. But
mostly they were Slavic and mostly they were very orthodox. The rabbi whom
I remember and whom Rabbi Karp probably knows, is named Garelick. When I
first met Garelick, thought he was a very old man because he had a beard.
Garelick was probably thirty at the time. I was a very little boy at the
time. There is some interesting stories associated with that, which maybe
make sense in this context and that is the context of assimilation. A very
funny kind of problem that all of these people faced, in that they were
orthodox and strong about it, America .was a land of opportunity and it only
had a few requirements for making it economically in the city. And those
were: one, that you work on Saturday. That was really a very strong require
ment, particularly in those pre-union days. Second, was sort of that
uh, you not wear a yarmulke. If you wanted to, it depended on how strong
you were and how much pushing around you could take, nobody was going to kill
you.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 3
A. (Continued) And then the kosher food question: the upshot of all of that is
that ... all of my father's brothers ... they're all pharmacists, except
for my father. Big value on education, everybody supposed to get an education.
My dad didn't go to college because he was the oldest and he had to work to
help the others; nevertheless, he had a great respect for education. My
father's father was a building contractor and he didn't work Saturdays. His
father was a carpenter. He held to it, but his sons were never able to do
that and yet they remained involved with his synagogue for many, many, many
years, into their forties ... well, one of them is still involved. They
kept their businesses open on Saturday, they kept kosher home, they ate out
at non-kosher restaurants, they didn't flaunt it in their parents face .•
a standard practice. A very close-knit family. Everybody got together on
Sunday, High Holidays, everybody stayed, nobody rode, all this kind of stuff.
There was even a fairly rich kind of intellectual overlay in all of that.
There were real arguments about ethics and values as they spun off from
talmudic learning and the trade off on practice. Interesting enough, my
parents generation were quite ambivalent about which way it wanted to go in
this world. A very revealing exercise, which would embarrass my parents
today, I'm sure, is that when I was very young, I wanted to go to yeshiva in
New York. I wanted to go to yeshiva not because I was strictly orthodox, but
because my good handball playing buddy went to the yeshiva, and we had to
break up our handball game when he went to school. Little kids in New York
in those days played handball and not basketball. There were walls all over
the place and you played handball, that's all. My grandfather, my father's
father thought it was a lovely idea. My mother's father died when I was very
young and that's why he didn't enter into this. My father's father thought
that this would be a terrific idea. My father didn't nor did my mother. They
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 4
A. (Continued) were really afraid that I would grow up orthodox, pious, and all
the things that would be frightening to people. And so, somewhat sadly,
continued to go to pub] ic school and 1 ive in a very Jewish neighborhood. For
a large part of my life, I assumed there were only two kinds of people in
this world: Jews and Italians. The Italians were fine. My father thought
the Italians were just like Jews except they ate pasta. You walk into an
Italian house, you walk into the kitchen, the mama is there and the whole
thing. We then moved when was about ten to Connecticut.
Q. Are you an only child?
A. No. have a younger brother. When we moved to Connecticut, my parents
became fearful. We were moving to the land of the Gentiles. And that was
really funny because in Hartford, Connectibut, there 1 s an enormous Jewish
community. But coming out of the Bronx, where in the course of five blocks
you'd pass four 1 ittle synagogues, these were all shtitel, they were orthodox
predicated on the notion that no one could drive on the Sabbath, you had to
walk, so they were all within walking distance. They come up to Hartford,
Connecticut which is the place to which we went, it was really a radical
change. It is a smaller community and it's a much more assimilated com
munity, with a big, strong German-Jewish base and a big Reform Temple that
predates the second World War and that was a whole new land for us. At that
point, they became very worried about us, I think. With only a 1 ittle
prompting from the leadership of the local yeshiva, enrolled me in the
yeshiva there.
going to pub! ic
was about age, guess was maybe eleven. had been
) you know, three times a week, whatever.
Terrible exercise in New York City, just absolutely terrible. The only
good thing about it ... it was terrible educationally, in terms of what you
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 5
A. (Continued) learned from the book. It was very good in terms of human
). A lot of human access back and forth. Anger, love, but it
was very genuine. Nobody ever heard of (unintelligible) anything and people
put there souls on the 1 ine for whatever they were worth, good or bad, they
laid it right out. And you got used to doing business 1 ike that and that's
probably a good thing in itself; but ih terms of how much Hebrew and Talmud
I learned, very little: which put me at an enormous disadvantage in this
little yeshiva, which was a very 1 ittle yeshiva. It was just beginning. It
was maybe five, six years old when I entered it. It was a beat-up old house
in the downtown, dilapitated part of Hartford, Connecticut. It had maybe a
hundred students, I don't know. I doubt it. I admit, I was way out-of-wack,
because was a second-grade (unintelligible) student in that school. made
many good friends on the faculty who are friends of mine even now. Even
though I was their worst discipline case in years. I'm gonna jump the story
some because that yeshiva today is a multi-million dollar enterprise. My
father was the treasurer of that yeshiva. My mother was the chairman of the
whatever-it-is.
Q. Your parents still 1 ive in Hartford then?
A. They still live in Hartford; they live in West Hartford. They're very active
leaders in what is the orthodox ways, but it's a peculiar kind of orthodox.
Almost all of the money for that yeshiva comes from people who are not
) It's a funny, classical syndrome. The
school probably enrolls now five hundred or so students. It's a big operation.
There's a lot of transition and assimilation involved in the (unintell igiblev
being eleven and being forty-three, and here I am now.
Q. So, you were raised orthodox then, are you still?
A. Well, I was raised a "funny, compromise orthodox". I was raised orthodox in the
home and assimilated outside, and not ashamed of being Jewish and without a
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 6
A. (Continued) chip on my shoulder. A very funny kind of mix, but I think
very common for New York Jews. don't think I've ever seriously had an
anti-Seminic experience of any great consequence. I did have a couple of
experiences which were relative to my being Jewish which were enlightening.
One was when I was a college student and working in a (unintelligible) and
doing a Jot of physically back-breaking work. It was a wall-to-wall Gentile
(unintelligible), mostly Irish, I think. It wasn't a bit of a problem, except
that I was a bit of an outsider. But it was hard to separate out whether I
was an outsider because I was Jewish or Lf I was an outsider because I was an
). These people didn't know what the hell to make of me. Why would
a guy with a college education be mucking around (unintelligible). Still, I
was somewhat on the outside of that group, that wasn't really hostile, they
were clearly friends of both (unintelligible). But there was a little boy
who lived nearby who used to come around and watch me work, and always had
to watch out for him unless he'd get caught up in the machinery. He was
really a little boy, maybe seven years old. We got sort of friendly. guess
I was about eighteen then, twenty, something I ike that. He said to me one day,
sitting there, you know little kids speak out straight forward, he said, 11 Gee,
ya know, I don't know what I'd do if I was a Jew. 11 I said you'd probably
wouldn't be doing much, you'd probably be sitting there, playing or running
or something. It wouldn't make that much difference. And, we sort of Jet it
go. It became obvious to me that I was the cause of some comment from people
in the area. It was somewhat of a shock to me that this wo~ld puzzle a young
boy like that, that Jews were alien to his world and it clearly, for him, being
a Jew meant to carry some kind of a burden, and I understood all that and it
never came to anything very much. The next experience I had of that sort was
rather different, actually, it was when I went down South. And, you know
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 7
A. (Continued) I had two different experiences. This is 1957, maybe. Around
there, 1 56, '57. I got tired of Southeners telling me after awhile how proud
they were of their Jewish community. I never encountered a hostile comment
well, I was an officer in the army so you can account for some hostile com
ments. But, as soon as people knew you were Jewish, they would ta~e pains to
tell you how proud they were of their Jewish community, and what a nice
Jewish community they had. Now, it took me awhile to Hgure all that out.
And, as near as I can tell, in the South, that's the peculiar thing, the
South never (unintelligible). In some ways it was much more honest (unin
telligible). So, they were aware of their differences and they sort people
out and they 1 ike people to stay in their 1 ittle boxes. And, they do have an
up and down but it's not always necessarily (unintelligible). B.ut, I
never did. On the other side of that I had a most interesting experience in
the South, in Colombus, Georgia. Walked into an army navy store with a Jew
to possibly buy my uniforms there instead of the PX, I was wearing civies.
I hadn't noticed the name of the store, if I had it wouldn't have made any
difference, because I'm still thinking like a New Yorker. walked in and
talked to the fellow about the price of his uniforms and the quality, and they
were considerably better than the ones at the PX, and the price was only a
little higher. thought I wanted to buy it there, which actually I did, but
said, look, I have a problem, I have no money and I won't have any until payday.
Can you extend me credit? And he looked at me with a smile from ear to ear
and he said, "Sonny, for you there is credit in this store anytime you want. 11
(Uses a Yiddish accent) Now, I brought the accent in at that point because he'd
been speaking with that accent all along, I never thought one thing of it. I'm
obviously very Jewish looking. I never think anything about that. Where
grew up, you walk into the store and the guy gives you nothing for being
Jewish because everybody's Jewish. (Laughter) It doesn't mean anything!
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 8
A. (Continued) And it never occurred to me that it would. Clearly, the community
party situation is always such that for him the old notion of (unintelligible)
is real. And, I found that thr,oughout the South. The Jews are really much
more of a community of Jews and that as a Jew you can exercise claims that
I hadn 1 t seen done since the immigrants. The immigrants used to come and if
a) you were Jewish and, b) you were from ) then anyone within twenty
miles of ( who was Jewish in this country, owed you for at least a
night 1 s lodging. And, you could claim it. And, people would. I hadn 1 t seen
that in year 1 s, but it 1 s still true. At least it was twenty years ago.
don 1 t know how much of a picture that gives you of where l 1 m at, but (unintel-
1 igible) but I think not all that uncommon for New York Jews who weren 1 t knocked
.and beaten around, who feel pretty secure in being Jewish, not tense about it.
Q. Do you think this has something to do with being a second generation?
A. Yes, no question about it. My father fought his way through the streets of
New York. I never fought anybody, on the basis that I was Jewish. I fought
some people mostly they were Jews.
Q. Now your brother. What does your brother do?
A. My brother 1 s in Hartford because he works in my dad 1 s business, he 1 s a plant
controller. And, I can 1 t speak for his rel igous views; I really don• t know.
My own are funny.
straight emotion.
have a strong emotional bonding to orthodox Jews. lt 1 s
never heard a Reformed sermon that could bring tears to
my eyes. They 1 re all sociology lessons.; l 1 m not against sociology, there 1 s
a nice department here. But, ritual is something l 1 ve moved away from for
years and years and years.
Q. Are you affiliated with the temple here?
A. Yes, I am. l 1 m with the (unintelligible) Beth El. l 1m mainly affiliated with
(unintelligible) very complicated setting. I can 1 t really say l 1 m more (unin-
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 9
A. (Continued) -telligible) part of the concern about just supporting the tradi
tion, which I think it has. Very profound human values. I can't sort out
what part of those human values owe their existence to European shtitel and
all the persecution that surrounded that shtitel. In many ways the shtitel
had some of the values of the (unintelligible) Society. For one thing,
(unintelligible). Another thing, people pulled the wrong way. Those indi-
viduals were called ( ) and treated with some contempt but not thrown out.
It was just too dangerous to throw anybody out. The people understood about
working together, but there's a concept that comes out of all orthodox Jews,
and that appeals to me the most, it's a concept called ) . It
has to do with human dignity and it has to do with stiff-neck pride, it has to
do with the notion of humanity being in God's image and you don't desecrate
people or humiliate people, deface people ... you might (unintelligible)
... you wouldn't mutilate a corpse. A whole series of things I think tend
to make people treat other people with a certain amount of respect. It's one
(unintelligible) profound value. The other is ) ... the notion
of charity is really an actually antithesis of the (unintelligible) notion.
And the third is a respect for money. There are other values, but those
really central values and I can't really quite figure out to what extent they
owe there continuance to the conditions of the shtetil, to what extent they
come out of talmudic learning, to what extent the ritual has sustained them
over the years. In most cultures, my own guess is that in most cultures, the
intellectual rationality of behavion :of the culture is maybe rooted in some
thing like talmud or some oth~r theological base are not which sustain people
from day to day. They may be important to have there as a reference in the
dynamics of the society, but my guess is that what sustains people from day
to day is ritual.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page JO
Q. Now, do you think that American assimilation has ... well, put a damper
on these sorts of values today, or are they still there?
A. Oh, no. Well, American assimi Jation has put an enormous damper on the
ritual. That's clear. My grandfather used to say America ( ) . And yet he had great success in this country, he loved t~is country, but
he saw what was happening. He saw that the assimilation was pulling away
the children from the traditional modes of behavior. :lit didn't effect the
first generation very much in its committment to the ethical principle~
They understood about ) and all those things and believed
it, and felt it. I'm not sure if the assimilation brought the (unintell igi
ble), if the assimilation in the long term, if you really do it, the thing
is I don't you would do it. If the thing actually ran with no feedback and
with no (unintelligible), the thing ran in this extensive melting pot thing,
you'd get one homogeneous mess; it might even be a nice mess, but it would
certainly be homogeneous. And I think in the conflicts between, for example
the Jewish values ( and the Calvanists views for charity, the Cal-
vanists would win. Just given the nature of the country; we tossed every
body out if they were disallusioned. The Jewish culture doesn't do that.
It sorts people out very differently and it starts in the old shtetil from
a very interesting position. (Unintelligible) has written on this, and I
don't want to plagiarize his stuff, a lot of my insights come from (unintel-
1 igible) and then (unintelligible) also wrote (unintelligible). There's
another (unintelligible) aspect of Judaism. There's Yorn Kippur and there's
fasting but that's a little differenFthing, it's a symbolic self-denial
to remind one. In general, there's no big thing being placed on the (unin
telligible) pain and on debasing oneself. One is gluttony, drunkeness is one,
but good food, pleasant drink; these are not considered bad sins. That's one
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 11
A. (Continued) (unintelligible) It's not easy, it's not a bad thing if you
have (unintelligible) sex, okay. Check for one thing. In the old culture,
the perfect person, the (unintell i~ible), is one who obeys all 637 injunc-
tions. It's impossible to obey all 637 injunctions and get rich. There's
no time. mean, the amount of time you dedicate to studies makes it im-
possible to become rich that way. So you find a funny sort (unintelligible)
in the old shtetil. You found a talmud scholar (unintelligible) They were
almost all the poorest churchmen. They made their money tutoring children
and things I ike that, •bhe~ just barely existed, but people fed them (unin-
telligible). Very few communites had (unintelligible) you had to pay them.
(unintelligible) The problem with scholars was really a highly (unintelli-
gible) There's no macho treatment between the Jews. The really high
status people were the talmud (unintelligible). They had no money. There
were people in the community who had money. They were the merchants. The
butcher, the baker, the clothing merchant. They really had money. They had (
some status, not as much status as a talmudic scholar. Now the manifest
uh ... truth of this could be observed on the High Holidays when it came to
). Now, I never saw this in Europe, I'm not sure it was their
practice though I gather it was, as I said before here, the (unknown)
would be auctioned off for money. Now of course the money did not pay them
on High Holidays but (unintelligible) were made. These were I ittle congre-
gations, they were so nice and 1 ittle nobody had to write it down, and there
were no little slips. Of course, everybody knew everybody, and if Mr. Swartz
said "ten dollars", then that's ten dollars. Incidentally, youowed the money
whether you got the ... you know ... the bidding was funny. Whatever you
bid, you pay even if you didn't come out at the top. It was a way of con-
tributing money. Now, these auctions were always won by the richest people.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 12
A. (Continued) Of course, the money was used to pay up the mortgage, to pay
the coal bill, to pay everything. It was considered the height of gross
behavior to the people who won those Alleahs to take them for themselves.
I have never seen any one of those people except the Alleahs, and go up and
read from the Talmud. They actually do get called up to read from the
Talmud during the year .. free. But never would they take one of those
Alleahs for themselves. They 1 d give them away (unintelligible). That was
a very widespread factor~in orthodox congregations. And I think really
explains this trade-off, It's okay to get rich, but you must have done
something a little not right because you couldn 1 t posstbly be emphatic and
be all that rich. So, maybe you should do a little something to the Talmud
for that, and help those who really did lead a truly wonderful, pure 1 ife
and give them the (unintelligible). That ambivalence is clear, it 1 s a trade
off to see how much can I give him. The point is: there was no assumption
that because you were rich, God loved you, which is a Calvinist 1 s assumption.
Q. Although, I think a Calvinist might argue with you on that.
A. No. In pure Calvinist theology that 1 s nonsense. There 1 s a very interesting
study that I read a paper on. True Calvinists believe in preordination. It
doesn 1 t matter what your material situation is. It's absolutely irrelevant.
What 1 s done is done, right? Very interesting dynamics about what happens in
the human population having to live with and cope with the ideas of preordina
tion. How do you deal with a thing like that? And, really it's all done
before you start. I think in the preaches and the mores that developed under
Calvinism, you got the notion of the elect and the manifest evidence of
being among the elect, which I am sure is a corruption, you know, without any
question, but think the broad soct~l practice was the social practice of the
corruption.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 13
Q. Oh, I see. Well, I certainly agree with that. (Laughter)
A. (Laughter) I really ought to be careful between the theological Calvinism
and what happens in practice. Uh . what else?
Q. vell, anyway, one of the values that you stressed was the respect for learn
ing, and I'd like to go on that, just for awhile. Now, you obviously went
to co~Jege, where did you go?
Q. That's a whole interesting thing by itself, about learning. think a funny
happened to the Jews in regard to learning. And I' II tell you where went
in the course of this, in the next example. Uh ... people valued learning.
I'm not sure they completely understood why they valued learning, but they
most certainly did value learning. And, you could see it, I mean, again, if
you talk about the ritual the question (unintelligible) to the Talmudic
scholars were the status of people and a lot of the people couldn't have
their children become talmudic scholars because they needed them to work and
bring money in. In Europe there was always desire to get the children educa
ted which was very hard to do in Europe there was massive discrimination
against Jews. In this country it was possible, most particularly in New
York City. In New York City by the time I was a little child, and my parents
really missed that, you know, and my older cousins did not, when CCNY (unin
telligible). The only thing you had to be to go to CCNY was smart. And
smart, there was plenty of smart. Not only was there natural smart, but all
the smart was nurtured. That is that people saw it and they valued it. They
trained it in the same way that some coaches notice a youngster with terrific
reflexes and they nurture that, you know, and they become great ath1etes.
If they saw a kid that was smart, then they dedicated all kinds of stuff.
But what happened was with Jewish version of the Protestant ethic in a funny
way. Uh ... it's a matter of capital acquisition. They had momma-poppa
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 14
A. (Continued) stores, orthodox Jews. They would open up early in the morning
and close late at night .and on Sabbaths, they didn't work. And they didn't
spend money either. What, you'd get a lot of money 1 ike that after awhile.
What do you do with the money? Send the kid to college, that's what. So,
you have in one generation: we go from the momma-poppa candy :store to my
son the doctor, my son the neuro-surgeon, my daughter the concert violinist.
In one generation. And I could take you through the Bronx today and show
you they're no longer owned by Jews, but I could show you the candy stores
and the butcher shops, and the fruit markets from which there came in one
generation doctors, lawyers, not college professors, not then, later.
College professors didn't make any sense. They didn't know about them.
Nobody knew how to get there. All professions, almost none of these people
wanted their children to go into thelr business. They were back-breaking
(unintelligible), but they sacrificed, they saved all their money and they
sent their kids. And mostly their kids could carry them. Most of those
people, if they're still living, have nice condominiums in Miami. When it
gets cold in the winter, they go. They didn't all make it. Some of them
are still 1 iving in the Bronx, and they get mugged. The third generation
is the problem generation. The father whose the lawyer, lives in Long
Island, whose kids were born in Long Island, who never saw the store. If they
go to visit grandma in the condominium in Miami, doesn't understand what the
hell this is all about. They have no idea in the world. And maybe (unintel
ligible) They don't understand their father. They don't understand what's
eatin' him, and they never lived on top of the candy store and had to worry
whether there was mice. So, it's fast (unknown). But that generation out on
Long Island now, has a real problem. And it is that the father's temple, which
is conservatively reformed, doesn't seem to say anything to them, and they're
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 15
A. (Continued) looking for something. And some of those kids are studying
(unknown) and some of those kids are becoming orthodox Jews. And I don't
really understand that whole (unintelligible), but someplace along the line
we forgot what we were looking for with that education. Bill Green is the
guy who told me what we were looking for. Bill Green, right over here,
(unintelligible) He told me what all that scholarship was aboutLthat the
Talmud scholars were studying. And, we forgot what it was about. The
reason you study Talmud was to discover how to live a life such that God
would live in your house. It's 1 iterally true, and you gotta speak to Bill
about this, if you go back to early stages in the beginning, when the
temples stood, there's no evidence that Jews are .aoy:.:m0Ee:1people in book
than anyone else. The priests were the people who spoke with God. For
anybody else, you want to talk to God, you go up to the priest, the priest
talks to God, that was it. There wasn't even books. With the destruction
of temple, the rabbis came into the foreplay. They had the sort of the spin
off from the prophets. The prophets had argued the High Priests for some
time because priests had real power, and the prophets were sort of the critics,
the social critics. And the rabbis spun out of that, and the temples were
destroyed the second time. The rabbis really came to the fourth time. Said:
look, we believe that you can make the temple in your own home if, if you
perform the rituals properly. And there were no records of the rituals.
So, one has to think through what would God want you to do, if God is as we
be! ieve God to be. And that would establ~sh the ritual. Speak the value of
clean! iness, purity of mind, the various values that have generated.
(Unintelligible) wasn't really expected to be written down, studied, anal
ized, and that's what people would study: how to live a life, as an ethical
human being in relation to God and one's fellow, such that it would be a
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 16
A. (Continued) domicile for God to 1 ive in. It became in America this whole
knowledge was quite by accident, if the scholarship studies became a rode to
upward social mobility and income. I think in the first generation, there was
no big cleavage. My father took his social values from his childhood (unin
telligible) ... learning ..• uh ... useful point. These things came,
he didn't take them completely out of Talmud, they were just part of the
chicken soup (unintelligible). Which may well have had this at the base -
Talmud. But it wasn't so much his preoccupation with the stock out of which
the chicken soup was made (unintelligible). But I'm not sure by the time
I went off to college that those things were really so clear and anybody
could really say what it was he was studying to become, in fact what came to
be the case, was that if you weren't going to become a doctor or a lawyer or
some kind of professional, why were you going? There wasn't much money.
My parents were not poor, but they were not rich either. They're still not.
So, when I went off to college, I went off to have a profession. I didn't
want to be a doctor or a lawyer, or a dentist. So, what was I gonna do?
Well, Three of my uncles are pharmacists so I went to pharmacist school, where
I was bored out of my sku 11. I went to pharmacist schoo 1 at Fordam Uni ver-
s i ty.
END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A, INTERVIEW 1
Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 15, 1976
Page 17
By Tina Isaacs
Interview Tape 1 Side B
A. (Continued) The history of Fordam's Pharmacy School ... for must
have been forty years, maybe more .. very nice. Introduced me to Jesuits.
Had a lot of fun with Jesuits .. good arguments. Learned a 1 ot about
1 ife and relationships. In fact, learned about the neophytes. The neo-
phytes would grant you your premises, and they would finish right away. You
could see which ones would make it as Jesuits. (Laughter) A very interesting
group. At any rate, was bored out of my head, so I proceeded to leave
that program trying to leave with flying colors, which I did, I got all A's
and got out of there. So, my parents says, well they couldn't really hol-
Jar because got all A's, but people did raise their eyebrows, what's a mat-
ter with him? What's the matter with being a pharmacist? Your uncles are
making a nice living, etc. All of that. Well, I went to be an engineer.
People didn't think it was such a bad idea, they didn't really know what it
was, except for my father who had wanted to be a civil engineer, but he never
went to do it, because he couldn't, he just had to work. Well, I was no good
at engineering, but I went to the University of Connecticut and that's a whole
long story which would take a lot of tapes. But eventually I •d left engine-
ering at the University of Connecticut, stayed at that school, though, and
went back to become apolitical science major. By then, my family sort of
given me up for a lost sheep, although my dad, somewhat puzzled and bemused
said, well, look, I'll pay this much, I'll pay the rest ... finish. He got
a sense while I was doing the political science major that I was having a
really good time. Ny dad and I weren't all that close until later. And, in
fact it started about then. I was in an honor's program and I guess when I'd
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 18
A. {Continued) come home, which wasn 1 t all that often, I would talk with some
pleasure about ohe of my faculties, it was my honor 1 s supervisor. We were
coming up to commencement and my dad asked, well, before we went to commence
ment, my dad asked if he could meet this fellow named Max Fascher. And, I
said, yea, I guess so and I asked Max if he had some time to see my dad after
the ceremonies and he said sure. So, we met and we strolled around the cam
pus. Max was walking with my dad, and I was with my mother, my brother and
I don 1 t know who else was around, somethings. On the way back my dad asked
if I wanted to go to graduate school. I was then going to work in his store
for six months, and then I was going in the army. So, I said, well, 11 11
look, I don 1 t know, why don 1 t we, I don 1 t know. Let me ... I want to give
the store a good shot, you need the help, let 1 s put it aside. And we did,
and I did put it aside. worked in the store; I don 1 t think was very
good at it. went into the army. And when
I wanted to go back to graduate school. And
was in the army, I decided
did, I went back to Connect i-
cut, took a master 1 s there because that 1 s what you (unintelligible) under
graduates record. Did a pretty clean job with that master 1 s and went to
Yale graduate school. took a Ph.d and then I came up here. think my dad
is the only person in my family who really understands what I did. And when
I say what I did, I ... is what did as a scholar. He also understands
what I do as a dean. That 1 s Jess interesting to him. think his greatest
disappointment is that I never wrote a book. I got into the dean business for
my own interests and in some w~ys too soon. And, I have a few articles out,
and he likes articles, but he would have liked a book. From the old guy.
Q. Now, why did you come up to Rochester?
A. Now, that 1 s idiosyncratic. Well, no, it 1 s important. lt 1 s important I think
Jess in the perspective of Jews than the history of the university. was at
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 19
A. (Continued) Yale. The job market was moving. No baloney, I was one of
their better graduate students, and I knew that perfectly well. Still, I
had a wife, two children and $5,000 worth of debts and I was very concerned
a5out a job. didn't want to go out to the coast, because both sets of
grandparents live in Hartford, we had the two children, was very close with
tne children, my wife's an only child. The back and forth transportation to
the coast would have been brutal. Neither set of grandparents has a lot of
money, indeed, not much money at all on my wife's side. It would have been
actuaUy prohibitive for them to spend the money to fly to the coast even
once, let alone ... So, that, I had a··couple of opportunities at the coast
that were very attractive, Berkley being one of them, but, it really was not
a thing I wanted to do. In the East I was getting offers from places that
wanted to have a behaviorist course. I didn't want to be their pet behav
iorist, in those days that was the big thing in political science. (Unintel-
ligible comment) And, uh .. faculties like that weren't very attractive
to me. was in a bit of a quandary when I got a call from this guy Bill
Wrightman in Rochester, and I went to see my mentor at Yale, Bob Lane, and
said, where the hell is Rochester and what is that all about? He said, well,
I don't know what's with Rochester but I know Bill Wrightman, he's a bril-
1 iant guy, he's a (unintelligible), if you're going up to Rochester, try and
do some really terrific thing, I don't know if you'll suceed or not, but I
think you should look look at it. So, came up to look at it. Bill Wright-
man had only been here, at that point, a year. The department was planning.
Two people were close to retirement, clearly not of the new school, but
clearly very gracious gentlemen who were not (unintelligible) Glen Wilksy and
Bill Leets who were really interested in where political science was going.
And, uh ... there was not a great aura of resentment, then, you know .. ·
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 20
A. (Continued) here's the new people coming to throw out the old. I expected
to find that kind of thing. I did not find it. found a very (unintelli-
gible) Dick Fenno, Ted Blue and Peter Rettestry of the present faculty were
then also here, each of whom was an interesting person. And Bill seemed to
have some terrifically interesting ideas .. And, uh. I was really
learning, even sitting around shooting the breeze In his office. And the
fact is, (unintelligible) I understood all of their (unintelligible) and
not that I would think of everything that everyone of them thought of, but
had no (unknown) coming out of there. But they had a whole new (unknown)
(unintelligible) which made a lot of sense out of funny corners :in the kind
of modeling (unintelligible) sociological mode. It really seemed like an
attractive offer. But, again, who the hell knew if this thing was gonna fly
or not. And the school had no particular rep from where I came from. So,
again I spoke to Lane, and he said, look, think you oughta give it a try.
He said, given the restraints you've put on yourself on the west coast, he
says where the real problems are, go out there, keep your nose clean, and do
your work. And, if you don't 1 ike, I' 11 get you another job. And the market
in those days was such that you could really say that. I mean, it was not
foolish, and it was true, had five job offers in five years. I had job
offers before I published anything; it was an absolutely incredible market Ln
those days. (Unintelligible) I mean people did. (Unintelligible) the baby
boom, the Second World War was coming to school. Everybody get ready. So,
that's what that was. Well, I came up here and here and it was a ball. It was
a ball. Bill was coming to the department, in on the ground floor, all young
people. No big age gaps from youngest to oldest, with the exception of the
two people who were retiring and they were very nice and lively and I really
regretted when each of them retired, I mean they were really fun to be with
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 21
A. (Continued) they weren't hostile, they asked intelligent, sharp questions.
The distance from the chairman to me was very small. Bill's about 15 years
older than am, and is sort of like an older cousin, and there's no sort of
father and son business, no intimidation. We were gonna make the discipline
different. And we did. Political science is really different because of
what Bill Wrightman did here in ten years. And if you pick up the American
Political Science (unknown) and go through the journals, I could . Oh,
took them down and put them away to make room for something else
can look through his series ~h there, and for a five-year period, pull
them out randomly and every one of them will have something by a UR faculty
member or a UR graduate. Now, consider the program was. scarcely ten years
old in terms of the outflow, and it's a tiny program, so it was fun. I was
delighted to come here. I was delighted to stay here. Stayed here against
offers from other schools that were very attractive places (inLntel 1 igible)
Uh . because it was a tremendous learning experience, tremendous vitality
at the graduate student level, at the undergraduate level, at the faculty
level, brown-bag lunches in the department, everybody mixed together. Very
little formality. Very little gossip, all of it was really sort of business,
good business. Now, what I found was that that characterized this place in
general. Joe Wilson going back just before, well, one of the reasons that
they brought Bill Wrightman, that they brought Kenneth Clark and actual Jy
they brought people like myself, was because Joe Wi Ison persuaded the Board
of Trustees that this place should stop sitting on all its money and ios.tead
should become a national institution which wanranted have that kind of money.
That it should make a contribution to the nation and put together a faculty
and be open to students very broadly and produce graduate students and do
what you're supposed to do if you have those kind of resources. He persuaded
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 22
A. (Continued) the board to do that; he persuaded them in a way that very few
places suceeded in doing. He persuaded them without losing anyone. What you
say moves to the same thing, took the same route, significant friends of
the Board of Trustees said, well, that 1 s where you 1 re going? Good luck.
You go without me, that 1 s not my school. take my wallet, and my friends
and I go someplace else. My wife graduated from here, my cousin graduated
from there, because it 1 s not the kind of school I want. Joe Wilson, one of
the great miracles he did was to persuade a very conservative local Board
of Trustees, of very rich people, to continue to support financially and
emotionally to the extent that they even went and fought with their friends
and argued with their friends in the communities in the 1 60s that this was
a good place. And the fact is, it was a very different place from the place
that they grew up in when they were in school. And that had to do with Jews,
and everything else. As soon as you stop the 60% in Monroe County, and you
to downstate, that means that your gonna have an enormous influx in Jews.
And, whether anybody is worried about that or not, I don 1 t know, but the fact
is they didn 1 t let it stop them and there have been allegations made to me
at one time or another that this place is anti-semitic; lord knows at one time
or another everything was. But when I opened up my class roster the first day
I was here, I really gasped. Really. I thought could ... I couldn 1 t believe
i.t! Garfinkle, Goldstein, Finklestein, Anderson, any ... you know, there
was no end to it. I had not had the slightest sense of anti-semitism in any
corner of this university. And I 1 ve been in a lot of corners of this univer
sity. You know, departmental students, deans offices, before I was in the
dean 1 s office, central administratio~ Board of Trustees ... absolutely none.
I do believe that there are people in the university who 1 s early life exper
ience has ~ery little to do with Jews, and Jewish culture is something of a
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 23
A. (Continued) novelty to them and they're curious about it, and I think you
got to be paranoid if you think someone who asks you a question about how the
Jewish people feel about this and regard that as an anti-semitic posture.
They really don't know! Uh. and t~ey 1 d really like to know, and in many
cases they'd like to know so that they don't step heavily on people's sense
of (unintelligible). I've had some inquiries like that. I've had inquiries
like that from Bill Wrightman, who's a good friend of mine. And ... uh
who just didn 1 t know. I !m trying to recal I ... I guess the first Bar
Mitzvah he attended was one of Peter Rettestry's children, and he said to
me, well, what's the proper behavior . I don't know, I 1 ve never been to
one. don't regard that as anti-semitic. Ther~ are people who would. Uh,
So, why I came is sort of (unintelligible). Why I stayed here speaks for the
quality of the place. have never gotten used to the flat land, and I have
never gotten used to the gray weather. It snows and it's cold in New England
but the sun shines. It's chilly and it's beautiful. It's beautiful 30 miles
south of here, but right here, I don't regard it as one of the great beauty
spots. But, the intellectual climate of this place has held me here, there's
absolutely no question about it.
Q. Sure. Okay, well, I'd like to ask you some questions ..• um ... more
about Rochester itself and then when I come back, we' 11 spend all of our time
talking about the U ,of R. I think that would probably be the best path to take.
A. One thing let me slip into this thought. If you see in your example, there's
no Miriam Rock .
Q. She is being interviewed, yeah.
A. Okay, Miriam probably knows more about this than me, than anybody who's not
professionally involved.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 24
Q. Yeah. No, she's on thhs new 1 ist. She' 11 be interviewed in the middle of
January, I think.
A. Okay, that's fine.
Q. Um ... okay. Now, when you got ... when you first came here, where did
you move in? What neighborhood?
We moved into the 19th ward. And had no religous temple, synagogue, affilia
tion ... my heart is st i 11 very much with Hartford, and we drove home for
everything. Even when we couldn't afford it. We lived on Arnett Boulevard
and Rugby Avenue.
Q. Was that a Jewish neighborhood?
A. No. (Laughter) It was not a Jewish neighborhood; there was a neighborhood
at the end of the ghetto. It wasn't clear what all was gonna happen. The first
of the riots broke out while we were 1 iving in that neighborhood. It was one
mile from where we were to Bull's Head. We were worried.
Q. Could you just go into how you felt, you know, when the riots were happening?
A.
What you felt caused them, that sort of thing. What was your impression of
the riots?
Oh, my. Let me tell you one thing about that neighborhood. Uh the
neighborhood was a mix of Italian and Greek. There's not a big Greek in that
neighborhood some. And, I don 1 t know what all else. No black families
in that neighborhood when we moved there. The neighborhood ... we had a
(unintelligible) ... the neighborhood's own reaction was ambivalent. To
some extent was like my own. You couldn't blame the black people for being
(unintelligible). There was an arguement among neighbors between those who
really were bigoted and hostile towards blacks and some rationalized (unintel
ligible), and others who really felt guilty, who felt it was wrong, who didn't
want to take on all that neighborhood and didn't want to try to fight the
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 25
A. (Continued) whole world in order to make justice for black people, but
who felt, in fact, that black people got a bad deal. And there was a .
sort of low-level arguments among people in the neighborhood about that. On
the other hand there was great (unintelligible) in that neighborhood ..
that if black people came all in through that neighborhood, they would
have been shot. And that's not an uncommon pattern for tight ethnic neigh
borhoods ... Italians, Polish, Greek ... it almost doesn't matter. If
it's a tight ethnic neighborhood, where the people all know one another.
saw the same thing in Hartford; there's one neighborhood like that, when
went into Hartford. When the riots in Hartford happened, the men in that
neighborhood waited on the street corner. They just waited with baseball
bats. Nobody ever showed up, and yet the same arguments went on in that
neighborhood. (unintelligible) made up of Klu Klux Klan. They were divided
between those who really were bigoted against blacks and those who felt that
the blacks really had gotten a bad deal. But none of them were gonna stand
still if you get mad (unintelligible). And that was the general attitude
if not understood at that point. That the blacks were some kinda spastic
self-destructive (unintelligible). The thought really was blacks were gonna
come bursting out of the ghetto and try to burn down white society. Well,
that clearly didn't happen, and people sort of stood around in some puzzlement
trying to see what the hell really was going on. And why would you burn down
your own neighborhood. And I think to this day, not too many people understand
that, including a lot of blacks. Well, one reason you'd burn down your own
neighborhood, clearly it's not your neighborhood. You' reliving there, but
somebody else owns it. And, uh ... I was not at that time a party to what
must have been important discussions going on in Jewish communities. Alright,
because I was not living really in one. That was the beginning, however, of
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 26
A. (Continued) when it was I observed that they were Jewish stores that were
being burned and looted, and it was observed that there was intense feeling
against the Jewish merchants and landlords in the ghetto. The Jews began to
turn in on themselves and ask themselves what was going on. Jews saw them
selves until then as straight champions of black people. They would weep
sincerely when Martin Luther King came to speak at their temples, and they
thought themselves enlightened. They had been trodded upon and they didn't
wish to tread upon anyone else. And they referred to their ) . And they never, never understood that part. I don't think that generation
is ever gonna understand that part. Some of them more in some ways. All
these things are comp] icated. My mother and father wer,e very different in
their attitudes towards black welfare. It's surprising, my mother was the
hardest. My father, through all his 1 ife, he used to fight in the streets
with black people. When he was a boy, they were both on the short end of the
stick. Somehow he fought tough enough and long enough that he got to really
taking people one at a time. To him, somebody's a bum, he's not a bum. But,
it's got nothing to do with what they look like when they come in. Depends
who they are. And, uh . he's been able to sort pretty well. My mother's
pretty good at it too, but she gets so damned turned off because she's the one
who goes to make the bank deposit, well, they've moved now way out In the
suburbs. But when they were in the city, she would go down to the bank to
make the deposit and she would come up in line with the welfare check cashing
ladies, and it 1 s literally true that you'd ~ee people rolling up in taxicabs
or parking cadillacs out;in front. And it does offend people who are working
hard and, she knows perfectly well because, in fact, they have a fairly sub
stantial number of middleclass black people who are their customers in their
furniture store over the years. lbs a small n~mber, but its grown over the
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 27
A. (Continued) years and all of these people are people who have worked their
way up in one generation, and have the whole . . work hard, save the money,
educate the children syndrome. So, she can sort alright, but she gets irri
tated anyway. Well, look, the riots were the beginning of the reassessment.
Q. Do you think the riots themselves were anti-semitic, that is, do you think
that the black people were lashing out against Jews, or against whites, or
just against themselves?
A. Oh, my God. Look, I think the black people in the ghetto would have J~~b~d
dut'against anybody who owned their property. Pure and simple. I think
there 1 s no big, profound rationalization, I mean, there 1 s no big, pro~ound
rationale. True. However, the fact is that a Jot of that property was owned
by Jews, that 1 s almost an action into the historical mobility (unintelligible)
and .. uh . the fact that the Jews owned that property and the fact that
the Jews . the middle east are in a confrontation with another culture,
made it easy to work the black Moslem exercise. lt 1 s not clear to Europeans
that bought arms (unintelligible) I ight skin or dark skin, that 1 s really not
clear at all. And, it 1 s not hard to make that spinoff .. Uh . . I can
conceive of a whole nother scenario where you 1 d wind up with blacks hating
Arabs because of historical things having to do with the slave trade, and I
would guess if a bunch of Mos]ems had owned the ghetto properties, the ball
game would be the other way. But history didn 1 t work like that and the way
it works now, I think there 1 s a substantial cleavage that began there and has
~valved and will continue to be a point of some difficulty between militant
and revolutionary blacks and Jews. The militant and revolutionar}es are gonna
identify with Third Wor]~. And the Third World is going to include, somewhat
paradoxically, the Arab World, am I right? And, the black African countries
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 28
A. (Continued) are gonna be in a confrontation with the developed western world
thatrs Third World country. don't know where the oils gonna come out of,
as a matter of fact, but it's gonna be a very vital kind of thing. The other
thing that's a tremendous pain in the neck as an analogy, is that the south
Africans are in very much the same situation that the lsraelies are, in that,
they live surrounded by what they regard as a hostile environment with their
backs to the sea. They have absolutely no place to go. And, that's a very
uncomfortable thing for most Jews because it's an easy sympathy between the
lsraelies and the south Africans. Didn't used to be. Didn't used to be at
all. But as the Israel ies found themselves increasingly confronted with
Third World (unintelligible), they found themselves sitting really in the
same boat as south Africans. And, so they have mutual trade arrangements,
mutual weapons, munitions, all kinds of things come up like that. It would
be very embarrassing for American Jews who don't know what to do about it.
The fact is of the military (unintelligible) types around the world today
which probably would be the case, is that the two toughest armies ini-the
world today are the lsraelies and the Africans. And for the same reason,
can·1·t afford not to be ... you'd die (unintelligible). It's never been
clear that either one of them could win their wars in the last (unintelligible)
war. Their premise is in each case, that if you make that war look expensive
enough, the other guy won't fight it. And each one is absolutely committed
to making that war prohibitively expensive, incredibly expensive. That's
gonna put us in a very funny boat in this country. The other dimension
that's gonna put American Jews in a very funny boat is where this country
stands visavis the Arabs because of the oil. There's more to it than the oil,
though, and that's the thing I think most American Jews don't really under
stand and should. And it's that it's a tremendous dilema. The Israel is
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 29
A. (Continued) understand it perfectly well. And that is the U.S.S.R. and the
Arab block. The U.S.S.R. doesn't need the oil from the Arab block, it just
needs tb,command the territory. If the U.S.S.R. commands the eastern end of
the Mediterranean, well the southern and eastern end of the Mediterranean, the
Israel is are in a lot of trouble. (Laughter) If the U.S. doesn't keep the
Arab block from falling to the Soviets, then what will? And how would the
U.S. do that? That's a real dilema, because if the U.S. takes an absolutely
unmitigatedly hostile stand toward the Arabs, it's relatively easy then for
the Russians to subvert the area lying in the middle. And if they subvert
the area, the Israel is are in a Jot of trouble. On the other hand, if the
U.S. is a great buddy of the Arabs, then the Israelis are in a Jot of trou
ble. (Laughter)
Q. Have you yourself ever been to Israel?
A. No.
Q. Would you like to go?
A. No.
Q. Do you consider yourself a Zionist?
A. No. don't .consider myself a Zionist in the same way
an orthodox Jew. But ask me a different question: if
war, which war would I 1 ike to die in?
Q. Okay.
don't consider myself
were gonna die in a
A. That's the one. And I don't think the Jews have any more to that land than
anybody else. They just got no place to go, and it's a decent culture.
hope it stays that way. The dilema internally that the Israelis face is how
they gonna keep themselves from becoming south Africans. How they gonna keep
the culture that they brought to that land from being totally corroded by
the (unintelligible) of a fortress state. Whether they could still continue
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 30
A. (Continued) to regard Arabs as human beings, I mean the fact that Jews, that
young Jews in Israel conducted the equivalent of pogrom, is a horrible idea.
And it horrifies the Israelis. And I don't know if you know what happens
but, you know, when ther:e's an incident, the first thing the Israelis do is
send the pol ice in to keep the Jewish kids out of the Arab court. Because
they're gonna rip it up. I would, you know, if I'm gonna die in a war,
that's alright so I'd be willing to die in a war. There are no good wars;
that war has the single virtue that those people have no place to go; that
they have a really decent culture that doesn't get ruined and is probably
worth dying for. Not too many wars are worth dying for. Not dying. But
anyhow, but, they're not so clearly worth dying for. That's a gut response.
It's a thing that ... I had no interest in going to Israel, except to do
that. I think in the last ditch stand, it may be pure Walter Mitty fantasy,
but in the last ditch stand if ... particulary if my kids are grown and are
off .. I think that is the thing that I'd like to be involved in. But if
I had my druthers of where I'd go, 11 d go to Japan. (Laughter)
Q. You just mentioned your kids, are you giving them .•. how old are they,
first of all?
A. Well, my daughter's seventeen and my son is fourteen.
Q. Were they given a Hebr:ew education?
A. Well, yes, to varying degrees. My daughter went to ... well, they were both
educated in Talmud Torah after school hours, kind of an exercise before Sunday
school. Initially in Henrietta in a little synagogue out there which was just
then started. My daughter, for reasons I don't understand, turned off it
very early and dropped out. She was getting super tensed up so we let her
drop out. Never had a Bas Mitvah, didn't want that. Dropped out when she was
about eleven. She has a very mixed group of friends. She's very self-con-
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 31
A. (Continued) scious about the question of Jewish. I don 1 t think she feels
anything about Jewish, but she senses that that 1 s odd. I can 1 t quite figure
it out. My son fought Hebrew school all the way. He 1 s tremendously compe
tively oriented, doesn 1 t like the educational system. He 1 s an extraordinarily
able student. He 1 s an 11 A11 student in the pub! ic school system. He 1 s
turned off by the whole educational game in Hebrew educational process.
He 1 s ambivalent about these Jew, non-Jew things ... doesn 1 t I ike to see the
world sorted that way. Continued on after his Bar Mitzvah. When I said to
him, look, if you continue that 1 s your business. You 1 re welcome to it, but
I don 1 t want any more of this grouching around the house that anybody 1 s
bothering you, forcing you, making you ... it 1 s your business ... you go
... you get up, and 11 m not gonna live with you as a miserable human being
on the premise that you• re sacrificing .•. you• re sacrificing nothing.
Well, you do it because ~e gets credits for the regents of something else.
That's your business. He keeps going. don 1 t exactly know why he keeps
going. Some of it is friends there, some of it is learning, and some of it
is sort of he 1 s intrigued. gather he has a sense of:~bhere 1 s something in
there. He doesn 1 t know what it is. And, there are times, indeed, I think if
I weren 1 t in this position, I would almost certainly do it, but I would love
to have him sit in on some of Bill Green 1 s seminars and learn what the devil
is really about. But, I think, and l 1 ve heard several ser,ilous students of
this thing say it, that probably the great tribute that you can, one of the
great tributes that you can pay to the sanctity of the Jewish culture is that
it survived the Jewish educational system. And if these kids come back
anyhow, and I see it here, I see kids who come into this program after they• ve
become completely turned off by the experiences they 1 ve had, and now come back
because they want to learn something. And I don 1 t ... there 1 s apolitical
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 32
A. (Continued) dynamics there that explains part of it, I ebaldn 1 t understand
what the tremendous preoccupation with learning Hebrew was, strictly Bib-
i ical Hebrew, it seemed to me, one: that they ought to have taught the lan
guage, which is a fine idea, in as much of contemporary terms as they could.
Surely the Israelis school children had primaries that speak to the common
wealth, they don't speak to little boys who are tending sheep under trees.
I mean, it's got nothing to do with, you know, if you look at the primaries
they use in the Talmud Torahs, they're all Bible stories. Well, these kids
don't know from Bible to begin with, it's not like they come from a home like
mine. So, my argument was, look, why don't you teach them the Hebrew in
context they understand. You know, current Israelis newspapers. We know how
to do that, I mean, we do that over here. Teach them Bible stories in English.
And, when you teach them Bible stories, always we've needed some principle.
Some ethics. Some moral value. What is a story? This story, that story,
they remember the little boys name in the story. why? What they're really
interested in is what's there, what's right, what was wrong here, what was
judged. mean, that's what the Bible stories are about ... completely lost.
Nothing. Okay? Well, that's why the kids was really getting turned off. They
go through this whole thing and have no idea there's some moral understanding
to this exercise or anything else. And, I think, it's a disaster. But I
think you can sense now ... now he's in the highschool and they're getting
into things which sort of interest him. don't know how far he 1 11 run with
that, I'm just letting him go easy, I have this a~bivalence myself, I cherish
the ethical values, I can't believe there's any practical reason for.
there's a partial good ... I can't get myself to believe in, my God, that
there's any empty universal kid where (unintelligible). can't imagine any
of these holy words have ever had anything to do with any (unintelligible)
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 33
A. (Continued) I'm convinced more people have died in holy wars (unintelligible)
Yet, I ... I'm not convinced, at all, that the ritual is superfluous.
Q. Okay, I have one last question before we stop for today, and that is about
your daughter. Do you think she' 11 go to college?
A. She certainly will.
Q. Do you think it's ... do you have different feelings towards ... um ...
educating daughters than to educating sons?
A. None whatever. That's . . well I ... I tease the women's l i bbers about
the things I've said. Something I ran into yesterday was called (unintell i
gible) I said what the hell are you talking about! On the other hand, I
think that 1his culture that you' re fighting most of the time has surprised
themselves (unintelligible). As an educator, I see women in these roles
in Cunintelligible) in their applications and they're not (unintelligible)
theytre very bright. At least there's a lot of very bright women. And, it's
a dumb thing, particularly in our society, in that they really were earlier
societies. It's not so clear if you go to a frontier society which is
mostly manual of one sort or another. But there was all this much division
of labor and stuff. To be a homemaking frontier society was one hell of a
complicated demand. mean, it required intelligence, well, you could do it
all kind of ways, plus being sharp. But, sharp meant a lot of intelligence,
a lot of ingenuity, an enormous amount of strength, moral and physical and
moral, I mean, tough to withstand the pnemonia deaths of little children,
freezing cold, chopping wood, cooking that started at 5:00 o'clock in the
morning and the people worked like the devil and ate a lot and ... a
making a home was a profound exercise. It's a trivial exercise in its physi
cal components today. If you're gonna be a homemaker today, in fact, making
a home is a wholly emotional orchestration. That's some trick. I don't who
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 34
A. (Continued) exactly makes the home, it makes a lot of people much more comfy.
And it happened as an outfall from the old days when the common endeavor to
stay alive ... I mean the husbands didn 1 t go off with their little black
bags and come back to . nor the wife 1 s either, for that matter. You
worked the fields, everybody worked the fields at certain times during the
year. You had a little store, it was next door, everybody worked in the
store. People would leave when another one went upstairs to eat. So, family
wasn't a unit in a way that it is today.
Q. Well, do you think the Jewish family will suffer from the professionalization
of i. ts women?
A. No. Not at all. I have a thing, and I ca 11 it the metamorpt-os is of the Jewish
Princess to Empress. God help us all. I say that because I remember both of
my grandmothers. My father's mother was a spitting image of Golda Meir. When
I met Golda Meir, I couldn't believe it, and I really had to keep doing double
takes and she was exactly 1 ike her. She was brilliant, tough, driving woman,
who fought off muggers and chtldren, and landlords, rip-off artists, what
ever. Ran that family, raised those kids, watched the child ... broke
through. Then there was the generation of the Jewish American Princess.
Don't exactly understand what that was all about, really. And, I ... my
wife is Jewish and she's no Jewish American Princess. She skipped that thing.
But the idea that you musn't learn, and you musn 1 t do this or that ... I
don't know where they came. I saw, sort of, one half of the matriarchcal
thing, but lacking the rationale that made a matriarch a matriarch who could
really do something, well, the opening up of women 1 s rights and(_;opportunities
is just shy of that. And I watched the metamorphosis, I watched kids come in
to this school out of that background, and when they just shake it off, you
know, and I see their grandmother and you really gotta watch out, because the
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 35
A. (Continued) fact they are smart, and something, you know, some of what
enabled their grandmothers to carry three bags of groceries up hills and
three stories to the apartment, and to connive when they had to connive,
and to really argue when they had to argue and win arguments; all that's
buried there someplace in the genes and is coming up. So, as far as I'm
concerned, I can see nothing but good. Except, that Orthodox and Reformed
Judaism are gonna have to take another look at what their talking about
Biblically. That's all. Whether you're gonna have women in the rabbinate,
it's inevitable. The only question is, what do you want, five years, ten
years, fifteen years? I don't know and can't predict, but it's absolutely
inevitable and it is highly desirable,\
Q. Well, the Reformed Jews are doing it now.
A. What, they always lead the way and then the other people say, well, what do
tney know? They're really Episcopalians. (Laughter)
Q. (Laughter) Well, okay. Well, thank you.
END OF TAPE l, SIDE B, INTERVIEW 1
Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 16, 1976 By Tina Isaacs
Interview 11 Tape 11 Side A
A. Okay.
Page 36
Q. This is Tina Isaacs interviewing Dean Arthur Goldberg. l 1 m in Dean Goldberg 1 s
office, and it is the 16th of December.
A. Okay, you 1 re doing fine.
Q. Okay
A. lt 1 s a little early for this.
Q. Well, yesterday we left off speaking a little bit about your family. But
think we pretty much ended that out. We were talking about your daughter going
to college, if you recall, and women in the professions. So, l 1 d like to ask
you a few questions, first about the community in general, and then, um .
get to some questions about the University of Rochester and your role here.
A.. Okay.
Q. Do you belong to any community groups?
A. Yes .. uh ... I 1 ve been in and out of a small number of things and in and
out of politics a little bit, but the only current activity that l 1 ve been
involved with is Cboperative Extension Service. happen to be on the Board
of Directors of the Cooperative Extension Service, and that 1 s a little unusual.
§rowing up in the Bronx, you don 1 t normally .. I never knew what it was.
I got sort of lassooed into that by a friend of a friend. They were looking
for somebody who knew something about management problems that might give them
a different perspective, and I agreed, and met a very interesting group of
people, and l 1 ve been involved with them, and, it 1 s been very educational for
me. I haven 1 t been terribly active in any regular way in any other community
organizations. l 1 ve been involved mccassionally with one political group
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 37
A. (Continued) or another on a consulting ba~is. Some years ago I was very
active in a political campaign when Ed Muske was thinking about being presi-
dent. was active through this university at one point at the Kent State,
Cambodia time, and that got me into contact with the community. And because
I'm with the university, I do find myself on occasion doing things like
talking to the Chamber of Commerce or talking to the Legal Aid, voters,
and things like that. I haven't been involved with the Temple in any
regularized way. Occasionally I have arguments with one person or another.
And, I'm vaguely aware of what's going on or not going on. But, I'm not
deeply involved in the community beyond the university.
Q. So, do you belong to any Jewish community organizations? Or, are you
A. think, probably not. I suspect given the contribution I sent in to the
( ), I'm a member of something, but again, I wouldn't ... I'm just
not one of the active people.
to enough of these things that
know who some of them are, and I get invited
say hello to Neil Noyer at least twice a
year. And, you study the Jewish community ... currently in our system,
you haven't run into Neil Noyer, there's something wrong with your studying.
But, I'm not at all active in the sense, you say, Neil is or Bob Gantz is
(unintelligible) so, I'm not a good source of what's really going on in those
organizations.
Q. What is your, this is a somewhat vague question and if ... a ... it might
not be easy to answer: what is your perception of, say the Jewish community
and their organizations here in Rochester, even though you're not, I mean,
from the perspective of a non .
A. Weil,
Q. active participant.
A. The thing is, the social scientist is sent to look at things, and you know,
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 38
A. (Continued) can conjecture a lot, even though, maybe, you shouldn 1 t ...
This strikes me as a rather fluid community, an older and more assimilated
Jewish community than one to which l 1 m accustomed, at least a good part of it,
and I think that 1 s because the people who came out here before the Second
World War, and most of the leadership of the Jewish community have roots
here that go back two, sometimes three generations. They 1 re people who
essentially left the security of the Jewish ghettoes in New York, Baltimore,
whereever, to move out into a different environment, and they made their own
way. Saw the frontier types in their day. I gather tend to be a German
Jewish extraction because, in terms of the (unintelligible) that would have
made sense. That was the earlier flow of immigration. And, uh ... you
see some of that still. In fact, you have some remarkable communities here
dating back to very early immigration. lt 1 s a (unknown) community here,
which is very old, l 1 m told. If l 1 m not mistaken, it 1 s a (unknown) community
through and it 1 s a (unknown) synagogue, 1 ike the oldest synagogue in this
town. I 1 m not sure the buildings are that old, but the congregation, I
think, l 1 m not sure. Uh ... so, in terms of the sorts of things l 1 m used
to out of New York City and its environment, this is a somewhat more assimi
lated community, and it also senses itself more distinctively apart. I don't
think its really apart, but to one coming from New York out of a background
where you just assumed everybody you looked at was Jewish, if they weren't
that was their problem, here it 1 s just a tiny bit more like the south. You
know, the Jewish community tends all to know one another, at least if two
Jews in this town get together and talk long enough, they 1 ll find somebody
that they know in common. That 1 s not true in New York. And, because ...
that 1 s just too big an area. So, that's one characteristic. lt 1 s remarkably
affluent. In the Six Day War, I watched the fund raising exercises here,
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 39
A. (Continued) and its ties to Israel are remarkabl~ here. Uh . It does
not seem to me to be (unintelligible) as some that I've known. As between
the various sectors Reformed, Orthodox, Conservative, they've seemed to have
made a very viable set of accommodations whether . that may have hap-
pened all over the country, I really don't know, you know. Certainly there
was much deeper feeling when I was a kid than I find here, and as I said,
I can't (unintelligible) the temple or this locale. I also get the sense
that the Jewish community in this area feels more secure and more a part of
the community than has been felt in a long, long, long time. I'm not quite
sure why, but some of the things are obvious. There was a time when, we] 1,
when this town was really based on (unintelligible). When the Valley Club
really was closed, the country club of Rochester really was closed. I'm not
sure they were closed particularly to Jews against everybody else, thetwere
just closed (unintelligible). And that's backed off to some extent, and at the
same time the clubs haven't made all that much difference. The Jews did what
Jews did everywhere ... they bought their own clubs. The palace structure
in the community is just not as neatly tied to those clubs, it seems. The
economic power, political power . there's a lot to all of that, it's just
not as closely held as it once was. So, I think it's part of this in general
assimilation process is to a great extent a security, but there is also, at
this time, a resurgence of those self-conscious identity, particularly on the
part of the young people. And, I just don't know quite where all of that is
gonna go.
Q. You mentioned that the community you thought, percei~ed of itself as being
more distinctively apart, do you think that's positive?
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 40
A. Well, it depends on how you feel apart. Whether you think yourself up, down,
or sideways. Clearly, there was a time when Jews in this community felt that
no matter what they did, they really couldn 1 t get inside. I don 1 t think that's
true anymore. And, I think, probably right now the apartness is healthy.
think the apartness is by choice and not by somebody pushing it. The distinc-
tion is a funny one. put it this way: someone who was arguing with me one
day about this question said, you don 1 t understand. The discrimination is
discrimination in a pogrom. lt 1 s a very subtle form of discrimination and
it sorta goes like this, or went I ike this: if you took two wealthy families
in this community, oh fifty years ago, and you gotta go back more than
fifty years, well, no fifty years ought to be about right ... fifty, sixty
years ago; and if one of them was Jewish and one of them was gentile, and in
each family there was this stupid son, alright? The stupid son in the Jewish
family had no chance in the world of becoming a vice-president of one of the
local major corporations. The gentile son did. (Laughter) Alright? That
was an example. Now, what 1 s really a shame is that things have moved in such
a state that the stupid sons of nobody can become vice-president. (Laughter)
.. of major corporations.
Q. What do you think of intermarriages?
A. Uh . . oh boy, that 1 s a ..• I don 1 t have any particular problems with it.
I have Jess problems with intermarriage than I have with marriage itself. So,
that . uh, it 1 s a really very complicated question. Take two people who
are highly secular, don 1 t think there's much problem, except that their
families give them problems. If you take two people who regard themselves
as secular but with massive amounts of guilt in their guts, then they got
a problem. And of course, if you take two people each of whom is seriously
religious, and they finally choose to marry, I think there 1 s probably no
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 41
A. (Continued) problem. I think two people like that are very likely to address
this thing head on and come to some resolution that they've really thought
through carefully, that they can probably live with. I think it's that second
group that's in trouble. The people who will suggest that there really is no
problem, and that they ... in fact, they don't want to look at the problem
and they don't know where they each are at, feel kind of guilty, and I think
that that's the trouble.
Q. Isn't this the rough equivalent of three generations layout that you gave
yesterday, that is the second generation being the ambivalent one?
A. Yeah, it is. Yeah, except that they all happen to .11i;)Ok alike. Yes. Yes.
It's the same sort of problem. The substance is the same. Uh
intermarriage in a demographic sense poses a real problem. Uh
think
have
a very hard attitude toward the survival of almost any marriage. But most
particularly toward a religion whibh is rooted in it's appeal to intellect.
And, uh and the mind. And, intermarriage threatens Judaism (unintelli-
gible). That assumes that each intermarriage (unintelligible) don't see
why that should automatically be. If Judaism has something to say to peo
ple's needs then it keeps itself alive as against an ossified sort of ritual.
It speaks really to people's emotional and moral needs. It speaks in a lan
guage that people can understand, I don't see why it doesn't gain from inter-
marriage. If it fails, then it desearves to fail. See, I take .. then
that's where I really get hostile about people who go to spread religion by
the sword, or any other kind of coersion. My views ... if you got a set of
1 iving ideas, then fine, they' 11 grow, and if you let them die, then you ought
to bury them together. So, I don't really see intermarriage necessarily as a
single cause (unintelligible). It depends on whether Judaism itself is 1 iving
or morable. If it's morable, then it's probably gonna disappear and it's
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 42
A. (Continued) probably okay. So ... you know I would be sad, but in terms
of the larger societies' interests it 1 s probably a more (unintelligible)
Q. Okay, well, why don't we talk for awhile about the university and then if we
have time, we can get back to, you know ...
A. The university in general or the university and Jews?
Q. Well, both.
A. Well, I told you a good deal about the university yesterday in terms of why
I stayed here.
Q. Yes. I would 1 ike to know why you went into the dean business as opposed
to the political science business.
A. My good God. That was just an odd thing. I can you it's a ... I never put
this on tape before and it's sort of personal, but I guess it's not terrible.
The day that Kenneth Clark offered me this position was in thirty minutes of
the time when he offered it to me, someone approached me and asked if I wanted
to be considered for the ~osltion of dean at (unintelligible) and I said, gee,
thanks but, no. Why would I want to be the dean of something? No, I don't
th ink so. Thank you anyhow and I wa 1 ked over ... just forgot a 11 about that.
And thirty minutes later Kenneth offered me this job, which I also didn 1 t re
spond to very positively. And after I thought about it for about three days,
and he and I had talked twice, I finally did accept it. And, I guess the
reasons that I accepted it were peculiar to that historical time. Having
accepted it now that I'm in it, I think, I do, in fact, have some ability at
this sort of thing. I rather wish the ballgame had been such that I could 1 ve
moved into it.two or three years later.
Q. When did you become a dean?
A. I became a dean now the 22nd, I guess, of July, 1970. The offer was probably
made back in March or April, I don't remember. So, the reasons I accepted it
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 43
A. (Continued) were ... were odd. I had been quietly minding my business for
several years in a good political scientist. Having a very good time with
that, I enjoyed that enormously. As I've come to perceive what I suspect is
some truths that political science has to offer, I came to the conclusion that
is. that is political science and not economics is truly a dismal science.
A lot of what political science has to say is bad news for people l'n Greece
and Tokyo. Political science is (unintelligible). of course, that's fun, but
from what I can tell, I think people are pursuing a lot of illusory goals,
things which just aren't there. Well, that's a whole nother speech. At any
rate, but even given that, I like it, anyhow. Maybe because I like paradox.
Uh ... I enjoyed working with undergraduates and graduate students and my
fellow faculty and I've no interest whatever in going to faculty meetings, much
less in being the dean. But, I was sort of moved out of my little nitch back
at the time of the Dallas sit-in. I guess the Dallas sit-in just got me incre
dibly angry. And it got me incredibly angry in that anybody would presume
that their moral values justify the physical interposition of themselves between
two people with violence on an university campus. For me, the university .
the university's most important role was to be an open forum. Uh ... the
natural bent of societies is to burn headaches. And, properly so, I ~uppose,
because societies are rooted in their own mores, predictable behavior on the
part of people, the security of society offers people as a society as against
being the jungle, that the people can predict what other people are going to
do. And, so, society is very protective of their mores and of their (unintel-
1 igible) and I understand all of that, and I suppose it's a functional neces
sity. However, societies also, because of that, run the risk of self-culture.
Just blinding themselves to what's the truth, blinding themselves to their own
faults and then perishing as a result. And, the university is the place that's
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 44
A. (Continued) committed to the open expression of ideas and from the point of
view of society in general, there's been a war between society and universities.
And, you can go back to British history and, the stories will be there. Marty
(unintelligible) got a whole book on the subject. The university's great
value is that if if it's a place where free and open dialogue, nobody
has to listen, nobody has to prove, people can talk. And, the idea that
(unintelligible) are just inferior to me, and I sort of watched, and I under
stood their problem and their complaint (unintelligible) is inferior to me
nonetheless. One of my good friends, not a good friend but a fairly good
friend, someone who acts really friendly, was leading one side of that argu
ment and he and I started out (unintelligible) My position was, well, okay,
now what if the young Americans are free to go around and get a bunch of
muscle and decide that your lecture is corrosive of the good values of our
society and they sit down in front of your door and say nobody's coming in to
hear your lecture unless you walk over us. That's what you're asking for.
But that got me started in a whole series of arguments that eventually got me
to be known as a hawk, I guess. think nobody who really knows me can
characterize me as much of a hawk, but mostly in a large theater people don't
really know you. And a university, to some extent, is a large theater. So,
I've been shooting my mouth off here and there, and occasionally shooting my
mouth off at faculty meetings, trying to head off various (unintelligible)
and self-rightous resolutions of one sort or another that I thought were
either designed to do some ridgible cleavage within the academic end, or
just thought it was wrong for the academic community as a community to take
a position on anything as tense as Viet Nam or anything else that had a major
ity, minority characteristic to it. If it were unanimous, that's all fine,
it's also an accident, but it's fine. But what's the minority supposed to
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 45
A. (Continued) say? Let 1 s just say it came out the majority of the faculty
supported the war? Then what 1 s the minority supposed to do, say we 1 ne not
part of this community, we ... you know ... Anyone could sign any paper
they wanted. You know, here or ... we the faculty abate the war, or a
local war or whatever. I couldn 1 t understand the meaning of that. He
said, we the faculty .. within which there was buried some minorities
who didn 1 t subscribe to that statement, we the faculty. On an issue like
this that had no internally ... you know, if you pass a regulation around
and argue (unintelligible) and that 1 s a necessity of function. There was
nothing that could happen internally, except to produce a cleavage, you know,
a very embarrassing, painful cleavage within the community. For what? So,
fought off those. I also fought off other things that it seemed to be
straightforward threats to academic freedom. I guess I must of shot my
mouth off enough on .those things that I carreto people 1 s attention. It most
surely wasn 1 t my intention to do that. never did ask Kenneth, really,
why he invited me, except that told him I couldn 1 t do any paper work, and
he said that 1 s not really what he wanted. Uh ... the other thing I had done
was to criticize the administration in various ways. These and central. So,
I walked around and I thought about this back and forth six different ways,
and I ... by that time I knew that Kenneth and I saw the college rather
similarly. We had decided on what we thought we ... the things that needed
immediation in one way or another and what we reasonably could change .
I decided that, well I had the following problem. Well, I wouldn 1 t walk
down the road five miles to take the position ... in those days, I wouldn 1 t
have walked down the road five miles to take the position of dean any place
else, much less associate dean. And, if I didn 1 t take this, couldn 1 t shoot
my mouth off any more. Because if I just started taking shots at people
{_unintelligible) what d f ? o you want rom me· I told you, you couJd•ve
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 46
A. (Continued) fixed it ... you didn't it. I think, as I recall, in the end
there, after the discussions with my wife and a couple of close friends, and
just lots and lots of walking around, that's what decided me. That if
really could not find any viable way to function if I said no, I think
deluded myself, at the time, about how much scholarly work I would be able
to do given my own personality, temperment, what not, and, be an administra-
tor. I think I rea 11 y did delude myself. don't have many regrets in
this world, but one of them is that one book that I started I didn't get
finished. I think that book had some useful things to say and I think it
really hasn't quite been said, although, Reicher (unintelligible) ...
it's just pitched a little higher. What was writing was not a profound
book. Some of my research might have been called really important in
breaking new ground. The book is breaking new ground, it's just that the
popularization is a lot of work. (Unintelligible) I think that would
never havecthe patience to start that book over, or to revise that mess.
If I went back to it I'd probably start from scratch. It's a very painful
business. However, in general, I didn't exactly give up political science
when I took the deanship, I just gradually lost my grip on it. I didn't
intend to give it up and it's sitting over there just behind me, there's a
big stack of political science stuff that (unintelligible) sent me to read.
But all the stuff (unintelligible) has to do with coalition maintenance.
And, uh . I may yet get a modest thing out of that. So, that's what
happened there and I guess I've always thought of it as worthwhile. This is
a good university. would not care to be an adminrstrator except in a
place where the y~eld on the scholarly end, warranted all that. Duplicating,
maneuvering, which one does to keep the system from . systems which
serve other pur,poses perfectly well, and I'm perfectly happy with somebody
else having to make those run, and I don't have my (unintelligible) But,
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 47
A. (Continued) this is a system, I think, uh ... from which I derived a lot
of gratification, just seeing the thing run well.
Q. How many Jewish people are administrators here, do you think?
A. I haven't the foggiest idea. You know,
think without blaming it well, as
know a couple, mainly me, and I
said, I think (unintelligible)
the parents of Jewish, I don't know what else comes in and out of being
Jewish. Uh . . I haven 1 t any idea.
Q. How about the faculty, do you have any idea?
A. haven't any idea there. Now, I'm really different, I never think about it.
can't tell you in my own department who's Jewish and who's not Jewish.
find out from time to time, you know, I mean (unintelligible) is obviously
Jewish.
Q. I guess I was curious because, although I also have no numbers, but, it seems
that a large number of the student population is Jewish, and I was ... and
I know in my department that a large part of the graduate student population
is Jewish, and I was wondering if that sort of thing translated into other
reaches of the university, you know, such as ..
A. Some of it is artifactual. Uh you open up the university 1 ike this,
it opens itself on different levels. Different geographic ... well, it
opens its various levels open in different geographical ways. The faculty is
drawn from an international pool. As are the graduate students to some
to some lesser extent. The student body is drawn much more through, at least
the undergraduates, are drawn much more from a regional pool. So when the
thing starts, when the university opened up and started to seek students on
a very broad base, it didn't go to the southwest, and the nearest large popu
lation then is New York City. I think if it had been populated wall to wall
with any group that had the upward educational aspirations that Jews have,
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 48
A. (Continued) that would be a significant factor ln some regards, to the
student body. And, so, the undergraduate student body by simply drawing
heavily on New York, Washington access, has a Jot of Jews. The faculty is
drawn on a, well, I wouldn't know the whole history on this, there's more to
know, but the faculty is in the time I've known it, (unintelligible) in a
national sample, I have never seen on a national basis, international in some
cases, I have never heard or seen intimated in any way shape or form, the
least concern with anyone's religion. I think we have a sub-
stantial number of Jewish faculty in various degrees of activism in their
identity. say substantial simply because I attend from time to time
an EJA lunch or I'm over to the Temple and I run into people ... well,
look, take Al Sheffren, in economics. Okay, Al Shreffen, I never thought
about it. Al Sheffren Jewish or not Jewish. I look (unintelligible)
I know what he does. And, then I met him in a Temple one day ... aha!
Now, Malcom (unknown) is quite accurate. And, I've come to know Malcom
as being Jewish. Bill Brawn in a ... Bill Brown in Fine Competitive
Literature is Orthodox, but . in fact, didn't know that until he
it was during the time he was chairman, he explained to me one day that on
Fridays he liked to go home early and (unintelligible). If you take some
body like Moshe Lugen, you know Lugen's Israeli, Jewish, and basically seen
as a damn smart scientist, I'm not sure anybody worries or thinks that's he's
got at any given time, there's always a couple of Israelis and a couple of
Arabs working in his lab. It is a peculiar place the ... this university.
Maybe think most universities. It really is an achievement in it's own
right. And if you can do the particular thing of your profession extraor
dinarily well, it doesn't make any difference if you' re green and have two
heads. Uh ... it has something to do witlil exaggeration. If you're suf-
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 49
A. (Continued) ficiently obnoxious as a human being, uh .
people for it, but there's a funny kind of trade-off.
. I forgive
mean, you'd really
have to be incredibly obnoxious (unintelligible). So, it's for me, never
been a very high-cued thing around here. I'm not sure you're gonna find
that that's a perspective that's shared by everyone. When I first arrived
here, I had somebody tell me all kin:lof speeches about how anti-semitic
this place is, and that person was a faculty member, not here now
seemed to me that he was a real paranoid, although it may be that some of
what he said was correct, he had been here, I had just arrived, he had been
here for quite a few years. Uh . and think, men may have a much
better sense of what the place is like in the last . in those days, when
she was young, she and her husband were both alumni of this school and have
known it fairly closely for many years, since she was a physician. Julie was
the .. kind of, the leading obstretician in this town for twenty years, and
was affiliated with the hospital, I believe, and was with the medical school,
etc. It was at one time a Baptist school, and the Baptist's have never been
very bashful about having the true religion, and everybody else better shape
up and understand (unintelligible). And, that had to not be too comforting a
set of thoughts for a . . . Jews or Cat ho 1 i cs or anybody e 1 se.
Q. Did anyone ever mention to you ... um ..• Rush Reeves' supposed anti
semitism?
A. Uh . . . I can't remember anybody mentioning it. I got the genera 1 sense
that if you go back as far as Rush Reeves, and George Eastman, and uh ..
the earlier group, they probably were anti ... I'd be curious as to the
full range of what they were anti. My problem is that when you say to me,
anti-semitic, I really look for persecution.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 50
Q. Oh, I see.
A. And, I come out of a background that knows about enough. And, uh . . .
anti-semitic carries that all the time; it doesn 1 t mean the same thing as
discrimination. It doesn 1 t quite mean, to me, the same thing as the fact
that the Irish and Italians hated one another and beat one another on the
head. Uh ... and that there 1 s still some over-tones to that in the third
generation. lt 1 s got a more profound meaning, and I just have never found
that more profoundly. But, I have found in this town, a very substantial
awareness of people 1 s backgrounds, religions, and ties. Coming in from the
big metropolitan area, everybody 1 s anonymous. It starts from scratch with
everybody you know. lt 1 s not really how things work in a town this size.
Particularly in a town this size and thfs stable for many, many years in
its population dates. So, that, in this town you have old money and new
money, and old families, and some old families still have old money, and some
old families don 1 t have money anymore, but they have friends who have new
money or ... the interesting thing to that is, they 1 re all aware of one
another and sort of know what the ties are and who owned what land fifty
years ago and a hundred years ago. And that automatically sorts out people
who are newcomers. In a similar vein in a a much smaller town, when
was doing a study a little bit like yours on ... they were, essentially,
a Connecticut affair calJed, 11 Town Boards of Finance11• ~nd trey really are
the powers in the little towns of Connecticut. Uh .. the Board of Finance,
the town counselors, the Board of Finance and the School Board . And, I
went out in one of the most beautiful regions l 1 ve ever seen: northwestern
Connecticut, right up near the (unintelligible) little town near Kent.
interviewed a chairman of that board, and I got to talking to him about some
of the values of the town, and he was an older man, you know, sixties .
Inter.view with Arthur Goldberg Page 51
A. (Continued) and, uh ... when I asked him about the values, and so far I
had asked him about the proceedings of the board and what not, he was fine.
But, when I asked him about the values, he said, well, I don't know.
you really ought to talk to my wife about that. I'm kind of a newcomer.
So, I was a little surprised about him being a newcomer since he was chair
man of the board and I said, oh really, how long have you lived here? Oh,
ever since I got married, about thirty-five years ago. (Laughter)
Q. (Laughter) Oh. Let me just turn over the tape.
END OF TAPE 11, SIDE A, INTERVIEW 11
Interview with ARTHUR GOLDBERG December 16, 1976 By Tina Isaacs
Interview 11 Tape 11 Side B
Page 52
Q. . .. and, I don't know quite how to put this, but are there any sort of
special problems with the Jewish kids on the campus, do you think, at all?
A. Sure. Uh . . . I don 1 t think ... with some Jewish kids, but I don 1 t see
that they're really big deal problems. Uh ... I think the question of
kosher is real. And, uh needs to be addressed. It 1 s nonsense to say
that's not a problem. don't see it shaking the foundations of anything
very much. think that I'm in a wrestling match about every third year
with students about Jewish students about the High Holidays and the
exams and c 1 asses and a 11 of that. I'm not terribly sympathetic to their
plight having come, fairly successfully, through the whole complex school
system discovering that if you're really smart, you make all those things
up, you made it anyhow. And, if you're really religious, the choice is no
problem at all. The problem is, these are upper-middle class semi-secular
Jewish kids who would prefer not to have the inconvenience and don't want to
feel guilty. They don't have to make a tough ... what's for them a tough
choice, for an Orthodox Jew it's not a tough choice at all . (unintelligi-
ble). So, that I regard as a fairly minor problem which comes up from time
to time. Although, it raises some interesting points in avhol~ secular way
about some of our facilities for making up laboratories. That's a genuine
problem, and I'd like to see that adjusted independent of the reason of ab-
sence. Uh . . that's a whole other thing. I don't see the Jewish students
on campus as a problem called, 11 the Jewish kids 11• justdon't. Uh
maybe it is. I don't see it. Uh ... I do see two groups of students who have
some problems, one of which I think is gradually working its way very nicely,
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 53
A. (Continued) and that's the black skins. The black skins are really a new
part of this community, and are very sensitive and hurting part of this com-
mun i ty. don't think that's all gone, but I think there's enormous problems
within the black community, w1thin this community, and between the black
community and the white. And, that's really come a long way. I think that
another set of students around here that get lost altogether, and that
troubles me sometimes, and that's the foreign students. The~e's really not
a good vehicle here, yet, and this is said with no disrespect for the foreign
student counselors, I think that they work very hard, but I think that there's
sort of an unaddressed need and, I've become a little more aware of this since
I've taken un-rlergraduate student responsibilities. But, in general, I think
none of us looks at the students on tHs campus in terms of ethnic or reli
gious or regional grouping. I think we tend to look at them much more in
terms of their intellectual interests. If you ask me, are the pre-meds a
problem, the answers yes. So, that, I don't think . typically that's
if you listen to discussions among the three deans in this office and between
us and Bob (unknown), talking about undergraduates, we talk about two kinds
of problems; one is this straight, scholarly, academic kind of question ..
how smart, what lines of development are the students pursuing, are we ade
quately staffed in those lines, what about the transition problems. The
other is the student mix and the value mix and whether students are getting
broadened or simply reinforced, you know, it's . not desirable to come
out of highschool and reenter the same highschool, except now you take
advanced calculus. Since we hope to be producing students who will play
some leadership roles the question of whether the mix of students adds to
the educational richness of the (unintelligible). So, one would 1 ike to
spread a recruiting base more into the midwest, more into the south. It's a
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 54
A. (Continued) little elusive when you talk about leaping out to the coast •
the cost . the sheer cost to people of placing students on an opposite
coast is somewhat prohibitive. But, I just never hear anyone say, less Jews;
more Jews; more Italians; less Italians. never, it just doesn 1t come up.
Maybe because l 1m Jewish, nobody 1s ever said it to me.
Q. 1 Yea, well, as I walk around campus, and especially see the library, there 1s
all sorts of anti-semitic graffiti around. Um
just taking off of that, if you think that
. and I was wondering,
suppose most of the under-
graduates perceive an anti-semitic ... that the Jewish undergraduates per
ceive their fellow undergraduates as being anti-semitic.
A. I haven 1t the foggiest idea. You see that 1s ... I ... l 1ve never had
any complaints about it.
Q. That 1 s ... that 1 s all.
A. Oh. The issue of graffiti is a funny one. You have to recognize that one
person with one stick of chalk can mark up about a hundred acres of walls if
you give him si.x months. And, in fact, the most offensive graffiti l 1ve seen
are anti-black. In fact, I washed one off the lavatory wall the other day.
lt 1s not really (unintelligible) but I did. It was sufficiently offensive,
and I don 1t normally bother, but that was sufficiently offensive that I
washed it off. And, I see some anti-semitic ones and some anti-black, I see
anti-gay, and I don 1t see anti-women lately. l 1m sure you 1ve women have won,
I 1m not sure to date ... when they 1 re really secure, that 1 11 come back.
It annoys me, but l 1m also just terribly aware that graffiti aren 1t repre
sentative of much. Since, as I say, you know, you can have a very small
number of people produce an enormous impression like that. think the
that the test of whether there 1s anti-semitism that characterizes the
community is whether Jewish students feel rebuffed by other people who are
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 55
A. (Continued) not Jewish. I don't think the real test is whether they.
they mix a lot with non-Jewish students. That's a test of a different
thing. That's a question of how much integration. But, a lot of Jews
mixing with Jews just has to do with their own preference. So, I don't
exactly take that sociometric as much of a mention. But, I take the
very straigf-t forward sense of whether you were rebuffed, whether you ran
for office and people put you down in the course of your interaction because
you were Jewish; whether you can't seem to talk to people who are in office
and it seems, to you at least, that (unintelligi1ble) can. Then, I guess,
that there really is something. But I haven't heard word one about that.
Q. Okay. Are there less blacks on campus now than there were five years ago?
Percentage wise.
A. I'm sure there are.
Q. Why?
A. The admissions cranked down. What happened . . we did a study of what was
happening. I was part of that group. We did a study of what was happening
to the students who were taking on a special admission. I ran that data my
self and analyzed it, and it was a pretty clear breaking point, and it appeared
as though we were admitting students for whom we really had no appropriate
educational vehicles. They were just getting their heads busted. And, it
wasn't good for their psyche, it wasn't good for the black students as a
whole, it wasn't good for black-white relations, and mostly it wasn't good for
those students themselves. You know, they were really getting chewed up by
this system. No way were they prepared to cope with this and in no way were
we prepared to help them cope with it. We didn't ... we did not know how
to do a thing like that. We have no. no effective vehicle for working
students whose board scores are below certain levels and who accurately reflect
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 56
A. (Continued) where those students are at in terms of the language skills.
There was a tendency to think that every black student who had a low boards
score was suffering from culture shock. Not true. In fact, my experience
of it was that there was some place between a fifty and a hundred point
(unintelligible) and yes, the testing undermeasured the black students'
ability. But only by about that much. And if you put, say seventy-five
points on, you sort of knew where the kid was. And, if you put seventy-
f ive points on and you're still one hundred and sixty away from four ..
that kid was really gonna get killed. Now, we just had overwhelming evi
dence of that attitude. Well, what ... I don't know what this is about
it's enough, you can't keep doing this anymore ... We have to go for stu~
dents that apply that cut (unknown). Now, the competition for students above
that cut (unintelligible) is just much keener. And, what we've done is to
say all right, we' 11 take the students that we can get, who seem to be qua!-
ified, and we' 11 provide them a proper an appropriate surround them of
supports in a variety of ways. Fred Jefferson spends a great deal of time
with the parents of students who are coming here, because if you read
a ... soul book, I have it somewhere; he describes his problems in going
on to school and while his parents had moved twice which enabled him to go to
better highschools, when he wanted to go off to college and therefore not
work and bring income to the family, it really began to open a breech be
tween him and his family. And, uh, and Fred Jefferson has worked on this and
there's much better relations between the black students and their families,
and the families and the university, so, I think we're running about five
percent. When one was eighty to ten percent, and we just can't seem to close
that gap. Now, it might be that we could close the gap if we offered more
scholarship money, but we've stretched out so thin now that the only way to
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 57
A. (Continued) do that would be to cut back on something else. To bring the
students in and not provide the appropriate support services seems unconstant.
So, I think we're gonna run between five to seven percent probably for the
next several years. It's hard to predict that. I don't quite see how we
can push it back to ten, but that's what happened and (unintelligible) worked
out reasonably well.
Q. Okay. Um ... this is a two-part question: how do you think the first,
Rochester Community in general, and then specifically, the Rochester Jewish
Community perceives of the University of Rochester?
~. We 1 I , . wow.
Q. A large one.
A. No, my problem simply is that I can't Ht the Rochester Community into a
piece. can tell you about pieces. Okay. I think from the river to ~cross
the river this school is still the man's toast, in that the archetypical
man's toast. think from people in Greece and Irondequoit and the surround-
ing suburbs, in general, except maybe for Brighton, Perington, we're some
kind of rich powerhouse school that they don't quite understand. We don't
seem to be community service oriented as they might like. We do, in fact,
make enormous contributions to the community in two ways that almost nobody
understands. One is simply that we're the third largest employer in the city.
And the other is, the hospital. The appreciation if any, that people have of
the university is not very much into the basic research end. So, you know,
in general they think our chemistry department should address itself to
cleaning up the air and catching rats or something. And that's not what our
chemistry department does. They're not against it, but it would be silly to
them to do that, plenty of people can do that or can't do it. The chemistry
department does, it figures out the basic structure of things so that maybe
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 58
A. (Continued) one synthesizes some day, or do whatever you want to do, and ..
Any (unknown) does research which eventually led to synthesizing very impor
tant joints in cancer, but his real interest tended to ... I mean, he used
that drug, of course he knew that there was a practical end interest in the
drug, but, think of a syn~sis question that he was interested in and there's
a much more broad question than simply that drug. Very few people understand
that about any of the universities. think we have no worse town john
relationships than Yale or Chicago or any other major university that's
located in a city today, in a city which believes itself to be in dire
difficulty and that this place would bail it out. Almost nothing that goes
on in a university, in some ways almost none of it, altered that application
in anything under twenty years. That's silly, it could be ten years. The
point of it is that for me the applicat1on; and you got research labs all
over the place. Kodak has labs that know all what's gonna happen in five
years. Well, that's one set of problems. The people in the community who
view themselves as deeply interested in so called high culture, or who view
themselves as intellectuals, I'm always nervous about people who view them
selves as intellectuals, I think have a happier attitude toward the university.
A Jot of that's due to the Eastman School or the Eastman Theater. But
increasingly, I think, in recent years we! I, just last night ... a good
case in point. Dick Fenno talked and they practically packed out. In as
much as .. so, in otherwords, the community, we've gotten increasingly
community focused. I think what's happening in the upper straighter of this
town, in terms of economics and intellectual interests, is that while before
the Second World War this school was sort of . theirs. And then it went
national in terms of what I mentioned yesterday. The (unintelligible).
Throughout the community, sort of, got a little put off about what was going
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 59
A. (Continued) on here. What are all these bigshots corning in and they don't
care about us. I think the last five years or so, has seen us addressed at
head on and invite the community, all of the community, to participate more
and more in the university concepts. It's impact's differentially on it.
The average person who is a blue collar worker and bowler, would rather spend
an evening bowling than listening to Dick Fenno. Now, that's may not
be accurate if that person really knew what listening to Dick Fenno meant,
maybe he'd like to listen to Dick Fenno. The communication network, the
signaling, and all of that is such that it's just not likely to occur to that
person. The common (unintelligible) that's all. But I think our ties with
the community are significantly improved. Incidentally, one of the things
that turned out to be a great plus for us occurred during the Kent State
and Cambodia. Students went out with . . on a petition jogging. It cost
fifty cents or a quarter ... a quarter, guess the (unintelligible).
And they were raising funds and the funds were to be used to support the anti
war candidates for congress. And they went all over this county. And they
went right up into Greece, Chili, Gates, supposedly tough country. The kids
who went out on that were all straight kids, by kids standards, okay, and the
one's who weren't all that straight made themselves look straight. The really
spaced out types were literally spaced out. They were laying on the grass
here listening to acid rock and thinking odd thoughts and doing their bit for
the cause that that was their bit ... they were laying there. The kids who
went out to petition, and got themselves haircuts, and all kind of clean,
whatever ... and, the feedback I got out of that was just unbelievable.
People of the community really liked the students. They weren't obnoxious.
They weren't funny. The kids knew what they felt, and they talked to people.
They respected other people's views. And, the feedback I got through such
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 60
A. (Continued) places as the Chamber of Commerce, all right, people I knew who
lived up in Kodak Park area were all to the effect that it was terrific meeting
the kids. That they were nice kids, and good kids and all of that. I think
that was a very propitious moment for us to ... to surface in the conscience
of people in this community as something positive. So even if ... altRough
the community wasn't particularly anti-war, the fact is that those students
raised something like $40,000 in quarters in this community. Now, that wasn't
lost on people like Barber Conable and Frank Horton. You can't raise that
kind of money in democratic quarters. There aren't that many democratic
quarters. (Laughter) There's a lot of republican quarters in there. Well,
that was one thing and then things have just evolved. It's a slow process,
there will be more of it, I think it's going reasonably well. On the Jewish
side, the situation is really much more clean-cut. And, I will say for the
record, any place you want to go, if anyone desearves credit for improving the
relations between the community, the Jewish Community and this university, and
that's Miriam (unknown). And, then you have to go beyond that to give good
credit where it belongs and that includes (unknown) Goldberg, Abe Karp and
Alan Wallace. I don't think people would lead to the notion of Alan
Wallace. Okay? But when he was in Rochester, he said let's get Golda Meir
and Alan said, why not? And did. (Laughter) Alright? Uh ... Now, the
community here has The Jewish Community in this town have really not
seen this university as their place. That I knew from when I came here.
People heard I was here, Jewish people in this community, heard I was here
and they would ask me: what's it 1 ike7 That's a funny thing for people to
ask in a small town like this, where everybody knows everybody else. What
do you mean, what's it like? Why don't they know what it's like, I don't
know what it's like yet, I just got here.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 61
Q. (Laughter)
A. Clearly, I didn't feel that it ... if they had much to do with any of this.
And, it may well date back to the hard Baptist days or whatever. I don't know.
In fact, I'm given to understand that in the old days of Rush Reeves or
somebody (unintelligible) give a speech. 'This school is up by Baptists, for
Baptists, and whoever is here that's not a Baptist, better pray hard for their
mandatory chapel', and all of that. Well, that's a long time ago. What sur
prised me was that here I had an obviously substaitially Jewish.student body:
thirty, forty percent, really, and the local Jewish Community didn't seem to
know anything about that. (Unintelligible) Uh ... they just didn't feel
anything towards the place particularly. Okay. Nevertheless, we had some
limited set of time and we got going on well, one early thing was recruiting
Abe Karp which was not known as a gesture in any sense, but rather a need that
we had for certain offerings and a clear interest on his part. He's a histor
ian. Hes a ... he became a rabbi but he is a historian, in fact. A
and, a ... it was very clear that he wanted to do history that he was just
right for a career realignment and things fit together. And, that surprised
people. It surprised them much more than it surprised us. Then the ques-
tion of the Be-rntein Chaitycame up with ways of ... including. . You
gotta get Kenneth Clark to remind you of this. Kenneth is really a joy at
sensing these things and leading the way and, uh ... The discussions began
and it was a remarkable exercise. The discussions ranged from 'gee, would
that really happen given the distance that the Jewish Community felt for the
place' to other people saying 'well, I think people are just waiting to be
invited' and still other people were saying 'well, it depends on what you're
talking about'. Now, the only complicated problem, first of all getting
Phillip Bernstein to endorse this required that he wouldn't be embarrassed
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 62
A. (Continued) either by what you may do or how you may do it. On the other
hand, Phil has been a friend of this place for years. It required a very
astute sort of sensings of feedbacks, that people were nervous. It
was beautifully done. And, then, the Golda Meir thing absolutely counted.
I have not seen anything like that, in terms of the bhe warmth of an audience
in all the years I've been here, no matter what the audience was. And I
think that this straight open the door to this place to the Jewish Community
who never felt a part of this university. And, it's hard to explain it.
It just sort of did, that's all. They don't think this is the yeshiva
university. That's really not the point here. But, I do think the com
munity feels welcome, and comfortable, and they still may be a 1 ittle puz
zled but, it's all right. So, I think that we made a major transition in
that regard and think that it's very much to the benefit of the university.
Because, that's a very vital part of this community and to not have been able
to draw upon it as a sustaining force, is a mistake. think we crossed that
threshhold rather well. And, I think as a problem, it is behind us. That's
not to say that there won't be a complex set of demands that might spin up
someday in one way or another for something that we won't want to do. Could
happen. Happens with lots of our constituencies, not just the Jewish commu
nity, happens with trustees who call up from time to time to say they'd like
this or that. And, we have to explain why this or that isn't such a bright
idea. Or they don't 1 ike something that we did. would imagine that if
(unknown) were invited to speak on this campus that if we say we were a
Jewish Community here which would be absolutely offended and they would find
me defending (unknown) right to speak on this community, uh .. on this
campus. So, that's just the normal part of the ballgame. And, uh. we
have had that with any group of self intensity. But, I think that we're really
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 63
A. (Continued) ~n rather good shape in that regard.
Q. Is any substantial part of your endowment from Jewish sources?
A. Well, it is now. (Laughter)
Q. Is this from the past two years, really?
A. Well, now you' re really .. you really have to ask other people (unintelli-
gible) myself about the endowments and Roger Latham is the guy. don't know
all the details on the endowments, no question about it. That the Bernstein
(unintelligible) heavily subscribe to what is Jewish Community. And, that's
three quarters of a million dollars. That's recent. It's not by any means
exclusive to Jewish Communities; as a matter of fact, one of the leading
prelates in this area has made a personal contribution of a very large amount
of money to that charity. Now, there certainly has been a donation to this
university by Jews in a larger amoun~ prior to that, Maney Goldberg is on the
Board of T~ustees; he's himself not destitute and certainly has given money.
We have gotten money from several foundations that I know about over the
years the names of which are very Jewish or sound Jewish, I don't know that
they really are Jewish, because never asked. We certainly got Jots of money
... I don't know if the Sloan Foundation, for example, is Jewish or not.
It sounds it. We've gotten a variety of monies (unintelligible) money from
the Sloan Foundation. The Foreman Family, there' re old families in this
town and Jewish families that have money and which have been supportive of
us in a variety of ways.prior to the Be111>tein Charity. I really couldn't say,
tnough, what fraction and most especially since that the biggest fraction of
our endowment is clearly a major corporate gift. Xerox. Kodak. So, it's
really difficult to say who's private ... offsets that.
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 64
Q. How ... how did ... um ... or, how has, and I 1 m sure he 1 s still doing
it, Phil Bernstein contributed to this university? don 1 t mean financially,
I mean just in general. And, what are your impressions of him?
A. Well, you know, I have only gotten to know Phil Bernstein since the charity
began. was not in his congregation. I was enormously impressed by the
man, as got to know him. (Unintelligible) knows the answer to your question
thoroughly, and I really don 1 t. The thing I know that he 1 s done for a variety
of ways ... the simple thing he gave us was the paper, l 1 m sure. But,
that 1 s recent. think that what Phil has done for this university has
probably been to be among the people encouraging the opening of the dorm
for many years without self-interest in money. I think that 1 s one of Phil 1 s
roles in this world has been opening doors. Not just this door. And some-
times when you have the door open, it .. it 1 s hard to get people to walk
through, and I think actually the door is opened to more people walking
through (unintelligible). think Phil is far less 1 ikely to, to many people
in fact it 1 s almost alien to Phil 1 s thinking to postulate a we versus they
kind of looking at things. But that really is all I know about the guy.
(Unknown) knows the stories.
Q. Can you think of um ... anything I might have neglected to ask, or anything
you 1 d want to add to a study of this sort?
A. There 1 s something I want to ask you. I don 1 t exactly understand why this,
you know, become Associate Dean (unintelligible) ... (Laughter)
Q. Oh, just really interested.
A. Okay.
Q. We 1 ve been asking people about not only their straight relationships with the
community, but, you know, how ... what their jobs entail and, you know,.
A. Yea. I can 1 t think of anything in particular that I wanted to give you a
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 65
A. (Continued) particular speech on at this point in regard to the university.
I think a thing I eluded to earlier is very relevant for the Jewish religion
and from that, of course, I think the Jewish ethnicity, and that is: tnat
either the religion is going to deal with a set of ideals which is .
in which it faces a tremendous (unintelligible) or it will subsequently pass
from the scene. I think that 1 s true, not only in Judaism, I think the great
challenge is to all of western religions. In the current science oriented .
science oriented if ... the findings of science make it increasingly dif
ficult to give credibility to the notion of (unknown) conception of the
Diety sitting there watching you (unintelligible). lt 1 s just very hard to
do that, whatever the ethical spinoffs may be under those other religion
based in that. If they hope their legitimacy to that conception in the
Diety, they 1 re in big trouble. Tt may not be an insuperable difficulty,
but it 1 s certainly a problem. The eastern religions aren 1 t, on the other
hand, by eastern I mean Japanese, Chinese, have a whole different notion of
what they 1 re talking about. They do not have the equivalent of God. lt 1 s
not an (unknown) culture, (unintelligible) they 1 re not God. Uh and
what' they talk about is coming into harmony with nature and with the universe.
In fact, that 1 s nbt at all (unknown) or at odds with anything science dis
covers. Une of things science discovered is if you mess around with Mother
Nature, 9he hits you. And, I think that the western religions, in general,
will be regarded as silliness, unless they can take their whole set of moral
values and establish a base for them that goes beyond the question of whether
there 1 s an (unknown) God. And Jews have that problem as much as anyone, and
maybe more. Maybe more because the nature of the religion is so much more
straightforwardly intellectual. The Catholic religion, for example, is never
argued. In fact, quite subconsciously argues the other way. lt 1 s never
Interview with Arthur Goldberg Page 66
A. (Continued) argued in that it seeks to provide an intellectual vehicle for
the masses. It (unintelligible) the intellectual exercises of a leadership
group for the intellectual exercises of the masses and provides them a proper
guidance by its lights. But it doesn't say that it provides them the base
for their own intellectual growth. But • that's not what Judaism is.
Judaism, the rabbinate is simply stirring the pot, really. And, it is in
many ways a populous religion that anyone could sit down, who wishes to take
the time to be a Talmudic Scholar. Well, then they you know, one has
to change what has been a preoccupation with rituals for the sake of atten
tion of our identity. To ritual rooted, it's some ethical, moral base that's
credible. Now, the one base that's not gonna work, and that's the basic
problem of the older generation of Jews. And, Bill Green (unintelligible).
It's just not gonna work. have been just of an age when I can understand
why it doesn't work, and yet it troubles me, and yet it's inevitabl·e. The
one thing the kid's don't believe and that's just through luck. Because,
if they did, they'd hate, and we don't need it. That was just an abomina
tion of the . it's just not gonna work. And it ought not to work. If
you want to see that kind of thing and how it works, you want to take a look
at the way the Armenians view the Turks. If you think that's a viable basis
for morality, then go that route. That doesn't breed anything, except to
sustains hate. So, I think it's better that the kids don't really know.
Because that's not the issue. In fact, the whole. . one of the weaknesses
I think are the Jewish culture (unintelligible) was that Judaism has to do
with suffering. Well being a Jew may have had to do with suffering, but the
moral premise; of Judaism don't have to do with suffering. (Unintelligible)
There's a beautiful book by two authors whose names I could never remember,
called Life is With People. And if you' re interested in the culture of the
Interview with Arthur Gotdberg Page 67
A. (~ontinued) shtetil, it's certainly a book worth reading. And if you ask
Abe, he' 11 tell you the authors. And the title is incredibly accurate.
Judaism is a very life forming (unintelligible) ~hilosophy. And, to the
extent that it got itself ossified (unintelligible) when the religion was
being let go, that was a very dangerous act. Very dangerous. And, I think
there's a healthiness now (unintelligible) whatever shakings up it may do,
is good. That's all.
Q. Okay, well thank you very much.
A. You're welcome.
END OF TAPE 11, SIDE B, INTERVIEW 11