The Western Jewish Studies Association, 1995-2013

When the founding conference of the Association for Jewish Studies met at Brandeis University in 1969, 64 percent of American Jews lived in the Northeast and only 13 percent lived in the West.¹ As Kristen Loveland has observed, “In the 1970s, however, the AJS more embodied a club of scholars located overwhelmingly on the East Coast, than a fully professional or national organization.”² Both the composition of the organization’s leadership and membership reflected the concentration of most Jewish Studies departments, programs, and institutions in the Northeast. Approximately two-thirds of the members of its first Board of Directors lived and taught on the East Coast.³ With the exception of 1972, when the conference convened at the University of Maryland, the AJS annual conferences were held only in Boston through 1998.⁴ After the first six conferences, the organization concluded a twenty-year contract with the Boston Copley Plaza to meet there every December in return for affordable room rates.⁵

Nevertheless, it was apparent early in its history that if the AJS aspired to be a truly national organization, it would need to develop outreach programs for its members who didn’t live and teach in the Northeast. By 1972 AJS President Baruch Levine announced a proposal “to fund a regional conference program in Judaica which would enable us [the AJS] to sponsor four colloquia in various parts of the country each year.”⁶ Securing a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and matching funds from several Jewish organizations, the Regional Conference Program commenced in 1973 and continued until the end of the decade.⁷ Acutely aware of the organization’s East Coast moorings, Arnold Band of UCLA, the AJS president between 1973 and 1975, declared, “One meeting a year is not enough, and not everyone can make a meeting on the eastern seaboard. A minimum of two regional conferences is plausible: one in the Midwest and one on the Pacific coast. Regional provincialism should not be one of the characteristics of our association.”⁸

Unfortunately, Band’s advice went unheeded. While the AJS remained committed to its annual Boston conference in December, the impetus for establishing regional Jewish Studies organizations shifted to individual scholars residing outside the Northeast. A group of Los Angeles-based Jewish Studies professors had been meeting at private homes since the 1960s, but a plan for joint sponsorship of it by the city’s branch of Hebrew Union College and the University of Judaism failed to materialize in the 1970s.⁹ In this issue of Shofar, Peter Haas recounts how and why the Midwest Jewish Studies Association was founded in 1989.¹⁰

The founding of the MJSA served as a precedent for the Western Jewish Studies Association. The westward and southward demographic migration of American Jews continued unabated with the percentage of American Jewry living in the Northeast dropping to 47.8 by 1995 when the percentage of Jews residing in the South had risen to 21.1 and 19.4 in the West. Corresponding to this shift, existing Jewish Studies programs in the West were expanded and new chairs and programs in Jewish Studies were established at other schools. For example, San Diego State had offered a minor in Jewish Studies since 1970, but received an endowment in 1985 to hire a director tasked with teaching modern Jewish history and a visiting Israeli professor in 1985. I was appointed the first permanent director three years later.¹¹ Living as far as one could be from Boston in the lower 48 states, I quickly realized how expensive, time consuming (two full days of travel), and inconvenient it was for Western-based scholars to attend the annual AJS conferences. As the organizer of a weekly Jewish Studies lecture series, I hosted many Jewish Studies professors primarily from schools in Arizona, California, and Oregon. From our conversations, I learned that most of them resented that the AJS did not rotate the site of its annual conference or sponsor regional affiliates like professional organizations in other disciplines.

This motivated me to attend the Midwest Jewish Studies Association Conference held...