One day circa 1992, my dad, who self-published over 40 books, brought me a brochure with books on Judaism and hundreds of the books were by Jacob Neusner. We couldn’t get over it. We’d never known anyone that productive.
One of my first rabbi friends was a Conservative rabbi with a great deal of secular education. He was tremendously kind to me. He taught me how to tie a tie. We bonded over our shared love of Dennis Prager. When I mentioned Jacob Neusner to him, he exploded. He said the man was evil, that he had threatened to destroy his career if he transferred away from the university where Neusner presided. I couldn’t believe that any professor could be so petty. When I later learned more about Neusner, I learned that my rabbi’s experience was not unique.
One of the first rabbis I learned about was Shlomo Carlebach. I was told he was this holy man. Then in 1994, I started dating a woman who used to field horny calls from the Holy Shlomo.
Early on in my journey to Judaism, I learned that Judaism loves the asking of questions, but then I quickly discovered that on a practical matter, only certain questions are wanted and others are regarded as heretical.
Shaul Magid writes for Tabletmag.com:
There are at least two ways to write a biography of an individual The New York Times called the most-published person in human history. In a little over half a century, Jacob Neusner published more than a thousand scholarly and popular books and countless essays, op-eds, and public and private letters, and was part of almost every significant American Jewish controversy since World War II. The first way to write the biography of such a person would be to write a multivolume 1,000-page tome plodding through each work, each period, each controversy, each accomplishment. The second would be a concise 300-page book that adeptly touches on the most important dimensions and contributions of this paradoxical intellectual figure (who remains the only person to be appointed to both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Council on the Humanities), and to simultaneously honestly engage with, but not get mired in, the many controversies that he compulsively generated. To write such a biography the author would need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how not to get seduced by the lure of tabloid scholarship. Thankfully, Aaron Hughes, the author of an extensive study of Neusner’s scholarly work on religion titled Jacob Neusner on Religion: The Example of Judaism, chose the second option in his Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press), which navigates through the often-turbulent waters of a complicated, colorful, and in many ways unappreciated, intellectual life.
The sad irony about Jacob Neusner is that he is arguably one of the most influential voices in American Jewish intellectual life in the past half-century—yet outside of the academy, and more specifically outside the academic study of Judaism, while many people know his name, few are actually familiar with his work. He is perhaps most widely known for his irascible, sometimes quite nasty, and often pugnacious personality, his famous excoriating reviews, sometimes book-length critiques, and his fallings-out with almost every institution he worked in, almost every teacher who taught him, many of his students—as well as the errors that scar his many translations and publications. He sued institutions he worked for and individuals who attacked his work. And yet, as Hughes shows, the importance of his contribution should not be underestimated.
There is a joke that in 200 years when scholars study Neusner they will think Neusner was a “school” and not a person. No one would imagine one individual could have produced that much work in such disparate areas, from late antique Judaism to the Holocaust, Zionism, Jewish-Christian relations, higher education, the humanities, and American politics (just to name a few). Hughes notes in his conclusion that Neusner may be “the most important American-born Jewish thinker this country has produced.” It is a huge claim, for sure, and therefore contestable, but upon reflection, it is actually quite reasonable.
Here are some highlights from this 2016 book:
* since the age of twelve, Neusner had wanted to be a rabbi.
* Whereas the traditional approach to Jewish texts took place in a vacuum and was largely mistrustful of secular learning, the young German scholars stressed context, sometimes even at the expense of the texts themselves. Scholarship was used in the service of inclusion.6 If Jews could be shown to have a history, people like Zunz reasoned, then surely they were worthy of political and legal emancipation. Even better: if Judaism could be shown to be the “midwife” of later monotheisms, both Christianity and Islam, then their own religion resided at the epicenter of the civilized world. This new type of scholarship had two objectives. One was to show non-Jews that Judaism was a religion in light of critics like Immanuel Kant who had argued that it was not; and the second
was to show Jews that their tradition was, when properly understood, a spiritually and aesthetically edifying religion, just as they imagined Protestant Christianity, their lodestar, to be.7 Their project proved untenable. The German academy, not surprisingly, was uninterested. When Zunz petitioned the state for a chair in Jewish history and literature at the University of Berlin, the disingenuous reply came back that neither the university nor the state was in the business of training clerics.8 To be a professor in a German university at this time meant that one had to be a Christian.
* Fast-forward to West Hartford, Connecticut, and July 28, 1932, the birthplace and date of Jacob Neusner. America was not Germany. The case no longer needed to be made that Jews could be productive and loyal citizens.
* The one place where it was virtually impossible to study Jewish postbiblical texts was in the secular context of the university. It was most certainly impossible to do so in departments of religious studies, today the primary place to study Jews and Judaism in a secular setting. To study rabbinic texts, even academically, it was assumed that one would have to receive years of technical training at a yeshiva. One certainly would be neither a woman nor a non-Jew. Neusner was to change all of this.
* At the time of his entry [1950] into Harvard as an undergraduate, there was, for all intents and purposes, no such thing as Jewish studies within the American academy.
* Prior to the 1970s the major place in the United States where Judaica was taught from a nondenominational perspective was in departments of Semitics. The texts studied, however, were in the Old Testament, rarely if ever the Mishnah or the Talmud. Those who taught courses in such departments were often Jews funded by local Jewish communities. They were more like scholar-rabbis than scholars. They enjoyed the largesse of American Jews, many of whom perceived university recognition as the pathway to attain social and cultural inclusion.
* Jewish Messenger in 1874 hails appointment of a Jewish professor of Hebrew at Cornell: “again demonstrating that the Jew has higher ideas that mere moneymaking.”
* The towering figures of Jewish studies in the mid-twentieth century—for example, Gershom Scholem at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harry Austryn Wolfson at Harvard, Salo Wittmayer Baron at Columbia, and Alexander Altmann at Brandeis—were products of the Old World. None of them were particularly interested in the academic study of religion or the place of Judaism within this fledgling field. They instead represented a different ideological world, epitomized perhaps by the adjective “European,” in which Jews were discriminated against, and that meant that Jewish topics were insular and, for the most part, “ghettoized” in the non-Jewish academic world. The natural reaction was to engage in apologetics or to show, as Wolfson and Altmann did, the filiations between Hebraic and other Western inflected rationalisms.
* Many remember Jacob, even at a young age, as a stubborn child who never wanted to do what other kids were doing. Writing in 1981, when Richard Lyman, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, encouraged the younger Neusner to resign due to “irregular attendance,” Fred [brother of Jacob] remarked, “. . . you are a feisty, trouble-making rascal, and you have always been one since the time you were able to walk.”
* Among his fellow classmates—the class of 1954—a few stood out, such as the novelist John Updike, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship.
* Although he considered himself a Democrat, and went on to work on Edward Kennedy’s 1962 senatorial campaign, he eventually became disillusioned with what he considered to be the culture of entitlement of the Democrats and switched allegiances to the Republican Party, where he would remain for the rest of his life and for which he worked tirelessly.
* From Italy, Neusner made his way to Germany, to Frankfurt, to visit a friend whom he had met while at Harvard. Meeting his friend’s father for the first time, he was asked if he was a Protestant or a Catholic. Afraid to speak the truth, he said he was Protestant, reckoning that this rubric could include Reform Judaism. For the next ten days his friend’s family introduced him to the German upper-middle class, individuals who had worked for and supported Hitler. Although critical of Hitler’s “excesses” with the Jews, they nevertheless deplored them. One man told Neusner that the Jews “even took our names.”
As disturbing as the visit was, Neusner realized that Germans were not unlike Americans, the only difference lay in their anti-Semitism.
* ‘Theology is created in Germany, corrected in England, and corrupted in America.’
* In a review article of Neusner’s Talmud translation published shortly after Lieberman’s death in 1984, [Saul] Lieberman strongly criticized what he perceived to be Neusner’s lack of scholarship and ignorance of the canons of rabbinic scholarship. In a private letter to Neusner, Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum, president of JTS between 1966 and 1971, suggested that Lieberman had penned the nasty review as a way of getting back at Neusner because of a nasty footnote about Ginzberg and Finkelstein in an article that Neusner had published in the collection of Sam Friedland Lectures that were delivered at JTS. Neusner never forgot this review, and it seemed to haunt him throughout his career.
* The time he had spent in the elite institutions of Harvard and Oxford, combined with his love of academic learning, would make it virtually impossible for the young Neusner to become a modern rabbi, someone who is defined more by social work and counseling than anything resembling intellectual activity.
* Although Neusner seems to have spent six very productive years at JTS, his relationship with the Seminary and its leadership quickly soured as he prepared to graduate. There was little he could do as a young rabbinical student, but as his academic and journalistic career flourished, he became increasingly frustrated by what he regarded as its major shortcomings—and frequently criticized them both in private and in public. His disapproval seems to have stemmed from two major areas. First, he was critical of what he considered to be the noncritical and unsystematic nature of the JTS curriculum. This would only be exacerbated in the coming years. The JTS faculty—Lieberman, then David Weiss Halivni and Shaye Cohen—came to symbolize, for Neusner at any rate, the holdouts to full acceptance of his own critical method. Since he defined his own method against that of JTS, the latter and all those who worked there were thus guilty by association and had to be wrong on all counts. Second, he grew increasingly frustrated with the Conservative movement—epitomized by its poor treatment of people like Heschel and Kaplan—and its desire to try to situate itself as the definer of American Judaism. He seems also to have put himself in this category of creative minds alienated by the Seminary. JTS and the Conservative movement, then, became emblematic for Neusner of all that was wrong with American Jewry on intellectual and ideological grounds.
* When Neusner was invited, years later in 1979, to give the Samuel Friedland Lecture at JTS, virtually no faculty members attended. To get back at his perceived enemies at the Seminary, Neusner donated a copy of every single book that he published to their library. This meant that although the faculty there might ignore him, young graduate and rabbinical students researching rabbinics would most certainly come across his books and ideas, although he believes that, despite his efforts, the faculty and students at JTS still largely ignored his work.
* Of [Salo] Baron, Neusner complained that he “contributed nothing, being himself, intellectually vacuous. He made his books by paraphrasing sources he never troubled to criticize and by paraphrasing the opinions of other scholars he never fully understood.”
* Many of his [Neusner’s] works were read and celebrated in non-Jewish contexts, particularly in Europe, even as they were simultaneously often overlooked or criticized in more specifically Jewish contexts, such as in Israel or even at JTS.
* When Neusner put in a request with the 1960s version of Inter Library Loan—a truck that ran weekly to the well-stocked Madison library—to bring back twenty-five to fifty volumes a week, he was refused. The reason that the director gave was that Neusner could not possibly read so many books in a week.
* Neusner was a master of taking larger issues and framing them in simple terms for all to understand. These pieces also established Neusner as an important public intellectual in the national Jewish media. He would spend the rest of his life writing for newspapers and magazines because, having worked as a journalist since he was an adolescent, he realized how to get his points across, not just in the academy, but also among the general reading public.
* One could not be intellectually responsible, Neusner argued, by studying Jews as if they were a people apart, existing in isolation from non-Jews.
* Neusner refused to make the Jews special or chosen. To him they represented but one social group trying to make sense of their immediate situation in light of a host of ideas and textual strategies developed in relation to other social groups.
* Neusner’s relationship to Isaac Twersky, [Harry] Wolfson’s successor at Harvard in the Littauer Chair, was not nearly as productive. Neusner recalled that when, after finishing his dissertation at Columbia, he asked Twersky what he should do next, Twersky’s main reply was that Neusner should begin studying Torah. He thought that Neusner, who was studying the Persian framework of the Bavli at the time, was wasting his time.8
* Neusner had first met [his future wife] Suzanne, who was eight years his junior, at Camp Ramah—then located in Connecticut before its move to Palmer, Massachusetts, in the mid-1960s. As a young rabbinical student at JTS, Neusner went to Camp Ramah in the summer of 1955 to improve his Hebrew, work as a librarian, and teach a class on the biblical book of Jeremiah. Suzanne decided to buck the trend among her camp mates and take a class with Neusner instead of a class on Amos that all her friends were taking, taught by a young Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, later a historian at Columbia.9
One of three students in Neusner’s class, Suzanne thought Neusner a wonderful teacher, especially when compared to those who had taught her at home in Paterson. Proclaiming him the first good teacher she had ever had… Neusner remarked that he was “enchanted” by the young student. Several years later, around 1960, “when the law no longer prohibited it” to use his words, they would spend time with one another. He was interested in getting married, but Suzanne at the time wanted to receive an education and continue with her art training. They went their separate ways, and after she received her education and traveled to Paris and Jerusalem,10 she returned to Paterson to teach art in a local school. At this point her father, having read something that Neusner had published in a Jewish newspaper, telephoned him to ask if he was married yet. He replied that he was not, so Max Richter gave him Suzanne’s phone number and said that she would very much like to hear from him.11 Neusner telephoned her that night. Two months later they were engaged, with their engagement announced in the Saturday, January 11, edition of the New York Times.”
* In a letter to Ithamar Gruenwald, Neusner explained his daily routine: “I get up around 4:30–5 a.m. and am at my desk a half hour later, I find the morning hours the best for composing new thoughts; later in the day I can read or write essays or whatever, but my most original and taxing & rigorous thought takes place before sunrise. I generally fall asleep by 9 p.m., without really trying; I just drift off, so getting up early is easy enough; if something is on my mind toward bedtime, if I’m thinking about some problem, it will occupy my sleep and by the hour before I wake up, I will be meditating on that; when I get up the paragraph or chapter is then pretty much written out and I have only to transcribe it.”
* As his former graduate students note, though, they could not call him except at a fixed time. He worked from five to eight o’clock in the morning, and he accepted calls at eight precisely, not seven forty-five or eight twenty, and would budget fifteen minutes for phone calls. He would teach only in the afternoons because that was when he was tired.
* Neusner took an interest in virtually all aspects of his students’ lives. This involved everything from how they dressed for class to giving them wake-up calls every morning so that he knew they were up and working. He, thus, became a father figure, for better or for worse, to his students.
* When he had left Brown, for example, he would often expatiate in these prefaces about how bad his working conditions were (even though in his prefaces from earlier publications he would say how good they were) and that his new conditions at South Florida were the best that he had ever enjoyed.
* “scholarship is always an act of choice, selection, and focus rather than an exercise in interpreting timeless meanings in texts or symbols that are assumed to exist in a vacuum.”
* Neusner would subsequently focus on the social construction of religion without making appeals to divine causation or some essence that various religious expressions are believed to manifest. In this respect, he was interested not in the origins of religion or even the origins of Judaism, but in how the chaotic social situation created by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE led to a series of conditions that ultimately produced a set of documents that tried to make sense of life in the absence of that Temple.
* Neusner…began to realize that the sources he had taken as reliable in his first books were anything but. Instead, he now regarded them as the product of later times and places, and, thus, as extremely problematic in terms of any type of accurate reconstruction. This stance not only reflected the repudiation of his earlier scholarly endeavors, but was tantamount to criticism of the entire discipline as practiced up until this point. His new approach to rabbinic sources now put him at odds with the dominant paradigm of scholarship at both JTS and in Israel.
* Neusner: “And what if, further, we no longer assume the inerrancy of the oral Torah’s writings? In Jerusalem they say we are required to accept as historical fact whatever the stories say, unless we have reason to reject it. In Tel Aviv they maintain that attributions are sacrosanct, arguing, “If it were not true, why should the sages have assigned a saying to a given authority?” In Ramat Gan, at Bar Ilan University, professors have been known to
argue with a perfectly straight face, “Do you really think our holy rabbis would lie?” So the proposed premise set forth in [my] rubric should be regarded as revolutionary, even though in all other fields of humanistic learning it has lost all novelty.”
* Neusner: “The scandal of the Jewish college student is that he is not perceptibly different from his gentile friends and colleagues. As Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg pointed out (in The Jewish Frontier), American Jewry has en masse decided that being Jewish will not be a very different experience for the Jew from what being a Methodist is for the Methodist. The result is that the Jewish student studies as little, drinks as much, and finds no easier the sexuality and personality adjustment required of him than his non-Jewish classmates.”
* Neusner: “It is, however, quite natural for Jewish community groups to look upon professors in the field of Jewish learning in general, and of the history of Judaism in particular, as allies in the “struggle.” They are widely expected to continue in the classroom the advocacy of Judaism which begins in the synagogue schools and continues in the pulpit. . . . However, neither such studies nor those responsible for pursuing them must be used for propagandist purposes of any kind. It is not the responsibility of the historian of Judaism, or of Hebrew, to interest himself in the state of the soul of his students, whether Jewish or gentile. It will render his true task impossible if he does so, except as he sees himself and his students as themselves constituting data for the study of the history of Judaism.”
The scholar of Judaism, Neusner maintained, is by definition a critic, a role that necessarily removed him or her from the community. Were this not the case, he warned throughout his life, Jewish studies would cease to be intellectually rigorous or responsible, and would be little more than the extension of local Jewish organizations.
* When pretty much every other person engaged in the study of Jewish texts was focused solely on their particular text or set of texts, Neusner was singular because he insisted on looking at the big picture of what it meant—intellectually, pedagogically, scientifically—to study Judaism.
* By the time he claimed early retirement in 1990, however, he was all but isolated at Brown, ostracized by former friends and colleagues, unwilling to train any more graduate students, and contemplating a life beyond the academy.
* Neusner: “Since 1990 I have taken up problems of a far more demanding and weighty character than I was able to consider in the twenty-one years prior in a less fortunate, because slothful and intellectually inert, academic setting [Brown].”
* He began his career, as so many professors do, writing out lectures and then standing awkwardly in front of a classroom and reading. Such a model may be designed to impress students with vast knowledge, but it often has the opposite effect of putting them to sleep.
* while he would threaten to sue departments that did not hire his non-Jewish students for Jewish studies positions, he was opposed when JTS, a Jewish seminary, was on the verge of offering a position to a non-Jew, Peter Schaefer.55 In like manner, he opposed intermarriage and refused to attend the wedding of his niece when she married a non-Jew. Unlike other scholars of Judaism, especially those he rebelled against at JTS, for Neusner the task of Jewish studies was not, as Saul Lieberman defined it, “to teach Torah to the children of Israel.”
* Neusner did not forbid his students from reading the work of his critics, but in fact actively encouraged it. He also made all of his students, whether Jewish or Gentile, attend an Orthodox Jewish service every week for at least a year to hear the entire Torah chanted. His reason for doing this was that if the student did not hear the Torah chanted, he or she would not be able to see the text as a living presence and, thus, would miss what it meant to be a scholar of the religion.
* Neusner also read critically every book his students wrote before it was printed. He did not want his students to be criticized for making silly mistakes, which would, in turn, reflect badly on him. Most importantly, though, he trained his students for careers in religious studies as opposed to Jewish studies. This meant that he provided them with the intellectual and conceptual wherewithal to talk to other scholars of religion. He provided them with a language that would make them employable in departments of religious studies. Rather than use the rabbinic
term sugya, for example, he would make them use the more familiar “pericope.” In so doing, Neusner trained a generation of scholars who were religionists. Without this model, religious studies becomes little more than a canopy, under which scholars of diverse religions cannot dialogue. Under Neusner’s model, however, a religious studies department would consist of numerous scholars working with different data who could nonetheless converse. In so doing, Neusner contributed to his lifelong goal of making the study of Judaism intellectually respectable, rather than an extension of the local community.
* Neusner’s Jewish Studies Program, unlike pretty much every other Jewish studies program or department in the country, was staffed primarily by non-Jews.
* Neusner had a rogue graduate student, Richard E. Cohen, at this time. Cohen had come to Brown from Harvard Divinity School to work with Neusner in the fall of 1985, at the height of the impasse between Neusner and Brown. Cohen was accepted, the first student since 1982, on the condition that he spend a year in Israel doing
preparatory language work. By 1987, Cohen and Neusner were at odds with one another. Cohen accused Neusner of taking his fellowship check out of his mailbox and withholding it, of inappropriate grading procedures, of blocking the publication of an article that he was preparing for one of Neusner’s books, and of engaging in a campaign of defamation. Neusner, who it is worth noting had never had such a negative relationship with a graduate student, replied that Cohen was unstable and that he was innocent of the accusations.
* Pg. 194: At the beginning of the session, Morton Smith, Neusner’s former teacher, walked stiffly and quickly to the first row immediately facing the lectern. Beside him was a large shopping bag with two boxes inside. He sat upright throughout Neusner’s comments and the two responses, and when comments and questions were invited from the floor, his hand shot up. Recognizing him, W. D. Davies of Texas Christian University, the chair of the session, pointed to Smith, who stood and proceeded to the lectern. After a few rambling comments about the inaccuracies
of Neusner’s translation—and not the books that were supposed to be under discussion—and the danger they posed to the future of the field, he proceeded to open the boxes in his shopping bag and hand out copies of Lieberman’s review to the audience. Davies pleaded with Smith to desist until the end of the session, but Smith ignored him and continued to pass out the reviews. Neusner, needless to say, was dumbfounded.
Davies then asked Neusner if he would like to respond. With Smith still passing out the reviews, Neusner went up to the lectern and said, “Things do not always turn out as planned. Professor Smith was my teacher, and I honor him. He has helped me in difficult times. I honor and respect his criticism, and I am always happy to hear it.” He then
sat down to subdued applause, while Smith finished handing out the Lieberman review. The session subsequently ended without any further discussion.68
This event was for Neusner, as he later confided to me, the lowest point in his academic career. It is unclear what precipitated these events in Chicago. According to Neusner, it resulted from a falling out between the two over their differing interpretations of the Pharisees. Smith at the point of the SBL fiasco was, according to Neusner, “a very bitter and angry man.” Neusner also believed that Smith was mad at him because he refused to endorse Smith’s reading of Jesus as found in the latter’s Jesus the Magician, which included the idea that Jesus engaged in
magical procedures of initiation that were sexual in nature. Others have suggested that the falling out occurred over Neusner being one of the principal accusers in the fraud charge against Morton Smith’s supposed discovery and publication of a letter he found in the Mar Saba monastery in Israel written by Clement of Alexandria, otherwise known as the Secret Gospel of Mark.
* If his approach was largely rejected in Jewish studies, it did find a ready hearing—as the SBL panel indicated—in the world of non-Jewish scholarship.
A Commencement Speech You Will Never Hear
By Jacob Neusner, May 17, 1981
WE THE FACULTY take no pride in our educational achievements with you. We have prepared you for a world that does not exist, indeed, that cannot exist. You have spent four years supposing that failure leaves no record. You have learned at Brown that when your work goes poorly, the painless solution is to drop out. But starting now, in the world to which you go, failure marks you. Confronting difficulty by quitting leaves you changed. Outside Brown, quitters are no heroes.
With us you could argue about why your errors were not errors, why mediocre work really was excellent, why you could take pride in routine and slipshod presentation. Most of you, after all, can look back on honor grades for most of what you have done. So, here grades can have meant little in distinguishing the excellent from the ordinary. But tomorrow, in the world to which you go, you had best not defend errors but learn from them. You will be ill-advised to demand praise for what does not deserve it, and abuse those who do not give it.
For four years we created an altogether forgiving world, in which whatever slight effort you gave was all that was demanded. When you did not keep appointments, we made new ones. When your work came in beyond the deadline, we pretended not to care.
Worse still, when you were boring, we acted as if you were saying something important. When you were garrulous and talked to hear yourself talk, we listened as if it mattered. When you tossed on our desks writing upon which you had not labored, we read it and even responded, as though you earned a response. When you were dull, we pretended you were smart. When you were predictable, unimaginative, and routine, we listened as if to new and wonderful things. When you demanded free lunch, we served it. And all this why?
Despite your fantasies, it was not even that we wanted to be liked by you. It was that we did not want to be bothered, and the easy way out was pretense: smiles and easy Bs.
It is conventional to quote in addresses such as these. Let me quote someone you’re never heard of, Prof. Carter A. Daniel, Rutgers University (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 1979):
“College has spoiled you by reading papers that don’t deserve to be read, listening to comments that don’t deserve a hearing, paying attention even to the lazy, ill-informed and rude. We had to do it, for the sake of education. But nobody will ever do it again. College has deprived you of adequate preparation for the next 50 years. It has failed you by being easy, free, forgiving, attentive, comfortable, interesting, unchallenging fun. Good luck tomorrow.”
That is why, on this commencement day, we have nothing in which to take much pride.
Oh yes, there is one more thing. Try not to act toward your co-workers and bosses as you have acted toward us. I mean, when they do not give you what you want but have not earned, don’t abuse them, insult them, or act out with them your parlous relationships with your parents. This too we have tolerated. It was, as I said, not to be liked. Few professors actually care whether or not they are liked by peer-paralyzed adolescents, fools so shallow as to imagine professors care not about education but about popularity. It was, again, to be rid of you. So go, unlearn the lies we taught you. To Life!
R. Joshua Hammerman wrote for the Forward:
My final paper offered a creative analysis of a federation campaign as an example of American Jewish civil religion. Neusner loved it so much that he wrote a letter to my father in Boston:
Dear Cantor Hammerman, I expected Joshua to do good work in my course, but I did not expect that he would produce the most brilliant final, which he did. His paper is simply exceptional, beginning in a completely original conception, worked out through disciplined and restrained modes of thought and expression; for any Brown student it is no less extraordinary. You should be very, very proud of Joshua, both as a student and as a person. I hope my children develop as he has. Sincerely, J. Neusner
Because the school was on winter break, my father received this before I had any knowledge of my grade or of Neusner’s reaction. To add to the surreal nature of all this, I had spent that week of intersession visiting friends in Philadelphia. When I stopped off in New York on my way home, my aunt was the first to show me the letter, which my dad had mailed to every relative east of the Rockies. I reveled in the glory without reflecting on how inappropriate it was for my professor to communicate directly with my parents before talking to me. And my dad, a central figure among Boston Jews, even submitted the letter to The Jewish Advocate, where it was hailed in print. Before this prodigal son could find his way home, half of Greater Boston, it seemed, had already anointed me as Neusner’s chosen one.
And I made the mistake of believing it.
Hughes writes in his new biography: “Neusner took an interest in virtually all aspects of his students’ lives. This involved everything from how they dressed for class to giving them wake-up calls every morning so that he knew they were up and working. He, thus, became a father figure, for better or for worse, to his students.”
That’s precisely what happened to me. I returned to school and immediately signed up for another class with Neusner, on the ideological roots of Zionism. I visited him often during office hours, and he advised me on topics ranging from my faraway girlfriend (“Distance relationships aren’t good, dump her”) to my summer plans to work at Camp Ramah (“Good, you’ll improve your Hebrew”). I was invited for Sabbath dinner, where his children performed for us and he explained his preference for avocado spread on his challah.
At one point, Neusner suggested that I join his graduate seminar. I was wary. I knew how obsessively he controlled the lives of his graduates, who gave their souls to him 24/7. I also feared the increased workload — this was still my freshman year — and so I asked him if it would be okay for me to sit in without completing all the readings. He said that would be fine.
It was not fine. We were assigned a very lengthy book and given just a couple of days to read it. At the very first session, I made the mistake of saying that I had, um, skimmed it. He was not happy. “Then you don’t exist for the rest of this class,” he snapped, after which he proceeded to snipe at my nonexistent self for the rest of the hour. Lesson learned. I quit the class…
The class was enthralling, but somewhere along the way, I fell from Neusner Heaven.
Each student had to present an in-class paper that would account for a large percentage of the final grade. I examined how the rabbis confronted their essential powerlessness both within and beyond the Jewish community of Babylonia, by creating a hagiography of miracle-working wonder rabbis.
Before I was to present the paper, Neusner required that I make several revisions. He seemed more concerned with my writing style than with my ideas. But fine. I would do what he wished.
But when I actually stood to present the paper, what transpired in that class was a full-scale verbal assault on my character. In a tirade that stretched for what seemed like hours, far eclipsing any other dress down that had occurred for any other student, Neusner lashed out, calling me a “high school baby” whose “writing is sh-t.” He alleged that I had slandered two classmates (who were sitting right there) and had insulted him personally. He would not let me read my paper, and dismissed the class abruptly.
Spring break followed, which allowed me time to cobble together a letter expressing my shock at the humiliating way he had treated me. “The atmosphere of personal antagonism is not the atmosphere of education,” I wrote, adding, “I would like to continue, if not enhance, the working relationship we’ve had in the past, and see no reason we can’t continue to interrelate in mutual respect.”
When I returned to school, his reply was waiting in my mailbox:
“You humiliated yourself by having no paper to read. What did you expect, a big mazal tov? You behaved contemptuously and were treated exactly the same way. When you take pride in your work and yourself, no one will give you anguish. You should be ashamed of yourself for your performance in R.S. 164. I don’t owe you any apologies. J Neusner 3/31/77
If his goal was to isolate me from my friends — and he routinely pitted one student against another — it didn’t work. One of the graduate students showed my paper to a different religious studies professor, who praised it. A classmate with close ties to the department mentioned that on the day of the fateful class, Neusner had gotten a damning letter from an academic rival in Jerusalem, tearing apart his work and character. So evidently he had taken out his anger on me.
When I entered the room for the first session after the break, he looked over at me, almost paternally, and asked, “You okay?” I nodded, not knowing what to make of this nearly empathetic gesture. Classmates told me that he had looked visibly concerned beforehand and asked whether I would be showing up.
He then broke the tension with an uncharacteristic moment of pathos, saying, “My dog died last night.”
Then, reverting to form, he added: “It’s all right. It’s not as if it was a canary or something.”
…For my final paper, I used rabbinic methodology to create a Jewish holiday, a plausible celebration that could have existed in an alternate rabbinic universe. It earned me an A for the course, a University Prize and a “Get out of jail free” card. and, presumably, a return trip to Neusner Heaven.
But I decided it was time to get off this roller coaster and unlink myself from what had become a very unhealthy relationship. When senior year rolled around, I did not ask him for a recommendation to rabbinical school.
A few years later, my first major article was published in the Baltimore Jewish Times. A week later, I saw that my old mentor had attacked me personally with a snarky letter to the editor. It crushed me to think that I might never escape the long reach of this teacher whom I had once revered.
But I moved on, and he did, too. He never commented publicly again on my work, taking out his rage on others: academic rivals, unsuspecting students and public purveyors of political correctness.