Day of the Jewish Trojan

In the University of Southern California admissions office, Jessica F. Pashkow works alongside colleagues who specialize in bringing Latino and black undergraduates to campus, a goal of many universities around the country.

Pashkow’s job is a rarer sort: She recruits Jews.

She urges co-workers -- only half jokingly -- to alert her to top prospects whose last names end, for example, in “berg,” “baum” or “bloom.” She makes the rounds of college fairs at high schools in Southern California’s Jewish neighborhoods. Wherever she goes, she strategically places “Jewish Life at USC” brochures on the edge of her display table.

If someone picks up a copy, Pashkow discreetly mentions her role in Jewish recruitment. Often, parents “pull back a little bit and say, ‘Really’?” said Pashkow, who is Jewish. “They want to make sure we’re doing it for a kosher reason.”

The school figures it has plenty. Among them are to heal old wounds and showcase USC’s academic assets to a community that, perhaps more than most, has seen the school as the University of Second Choice. Many people with USC ties privately say the university is trying to win over more Jewish donors too.

USC has a long and embarrassing history of offending Jews. Its past includes a longtime president who was rumored to be a Nazi sympathizer, a cross-burning incident on a Jewish fraternity house lawn and an uproar in the dentistry school involving alumni accusations that a dean was “pro-Jewish.”

At the same time, many top-notch Jewish students came to view USC’s undergraduate programs as academically inferior, opting instead for UCLA, UC Berkeley or the Ivy League. “It was not on the screen in the Jewish community,” said Rabbi Jonathan Klein, the 33-year-old director of the USC Hillel Jewish Center, who is a 1992 UCLA graduate.

With the 1991 arrival of President Steven B. Sample -- a white Episcopalian with an affinity for Jewish culture and a commitment to diversity -- the university acted swiftly to upgrade its academic standing. It has climbed in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of major national universities to 31st, tied with UC San Diego, the University of Wisconsin and Brandeis University.

One of its important initiatives was to court Jewish Los Angeles, a community known for its success in education, not to mention the arts, sciences, professions and business.

“There was this very explicit, studied, intentional effort to dramatically improve the academic strength of the undergraduate student body, and that meant going out and getting the best students, wherever they may be -- and some of those are Jews,” Sample said in a recent interview.

They weren’t hard to locate.

“We went as far as the 405,” said USC Board of Trustees Chairman Stanley Gold, laughing. The freeway runs past Jewish neighborhoods less than 10 miles west of campus. “It’s a natural here.”

In fact, USC sits amid the second largest Jewish population in the nation -- Jews number about 600,000 in Southern California.

Sample had an assessment done of USC’s Jewish resources, and found they were surprisingly vast: One-third of the faculty was Jewish, as were one-third of the deans and up to 2,000 of the campus’ more than 27,000 students, although many were in graduate or professional schools.

USC officials knew, too, that a good portion of the university’s major donors through its 122 years have been Jewish. And although USC leaders say their outreach isn’t intended as a fund-raising ploy, they acknowledge that Jews are giving more money to the university than ever.

Sample also determined that USC had an unheralded asset in Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which is next to USC and offers courses in Jewish studies that USC students can take for credit.

Armed with that information, he went out on the synagogue speaking circuit. By May 1994, Sample was honored by the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles for his commitment “to the principles of building bridges between the university and the community.”

To mark the honor, he was given a shofar -- a ram’s horn blown repeatedly during the Rosh Hashana High Holy Day services, producing a piercing sound.

Sample, relying on his background as both a musician and engineer, put the tip of the horn between his lips and belted out a blast.

“They were amazed I could do it,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m one of the few Episcopalians you’ll ever meet who can actually blow a shofar.”

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Today, a Jewish touch is evident all over campus.

USC’s dean of religious life, Susan Laemmle, is a reform rabbi. A cooler in the student center is stocked with kosher food. The campus is home to the 4-year-old Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, which organizes academic lectures and conferences, as well as public forums on issues affecting the local Jewish community.

Efforts like Pashkow’s have paid off. USC officials point to an apparent spurt in Jewish freshmen enrollment. According to the university’s informal polling, the percentage of Jews in this year’s freshman class is 8.2%, up from 4.6% a decade ago. That’s still far below the 20%-plus level estimated for some Ivy League schools, but comparable with UCLA, where the latest available survey showed that 7% of freshmen were Jews.

Jews also have become more influential in the leadership of USC. A symbolic breakthrough came in September, when businessman Gold became chairman of the board of trustees. (A Jewish newspaper, Forward, headlined the story: “Once-WASPy USC Names First Jew as Board Chair.”)

History has taken quite a turn since the long reign of Rufus B. von KleinSmid, who ran USC as its president from 1922 to 1946, and then remained a presence on campus as chancellor until his death in 1964.

While Von KleinSmid’s defenders say his supposed antipathy toward Jews was nothing more than rumor, others over the years said they suspected him of being a Nazi sympathizer. His imperious, autocratic style and Germanic name fanned the negative speculation.

Frances Lomas Feldman, the 90-year-old historian of USC’s faculty senate and an emeritus professor of social work, said she had cordial conversations with Von KleinSmid dating back to the 1930s, when she was a student at USC. She doubts that he harbored anti-Semitic hostilities.

Yet Feldman, who is Jewish, said Von KleinSmid presided at a time when various deans on campus, including some at the medical and dental schools, rejected students simply because they were Jewish or members of other minority groups. Admissions practices, she said, “really depended on the dean of the school. I don’t think Von KleinSmid cared one way or another.”

Some of the ill will from those years and beyond was connected to the university’s strong fraternity and sorority culture. Jews for a long time were unwelcome in many of the Greek groups. The Jewish fraternities and sororities that arose in response occasionally became targets of ugly incidents.

One of the worst was a cross-burning on the lawn of a Jewish fraternity house in 1946, presumably by fellow students. But some anti-Semitism obviously lingered even 40 years later, when a fraternity and sorority that lost a Greek Week competition to a predominantly Jewish fraternity were suspended by USC officials after they chanted anti-Jewish remarks and painted “Jew Week” on the sidewalk outside the winners’ house.

In the 1970s, two other controversies drew wide attention and dismayed Jews. A non-Jewish dean of the dentistry school was investigated in 1972 by a university committee after alumni complained that he, among other things, was “pro-Jewish” in his hiring decisions.

Six years later, many Jews in Los Angeles were angered by USC’s plan to house a Middle East Center that, at the urging of Saudi Arabian officials, was to be funded by American corporations doing billions of dollars of business with the Saudis. The American Jewish Committee charged that the unusual deal threatened the academic integrity of the university, and later the faculty senate and a USC advisory council both condemned the idea. USC ultimately backed away from the deal.

Although USC’s relations with Los Angeles Jews have vastly improved -- especially after an effort to hire more Jewish professors and deans beginning in the 1960s -- old perceptions die hard.

Morton Owen Schapiro, who was dean of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences until becoming president of Williams College in Massachusetts two years ago, said that when he was named to the USC deanship in 1994, “It was shocking how many people would say, ‘I can’t believe, at Letters, Arts and Sciences, a Jewish dean!’ ”

As Schapiro delights in pointing out, he actually was the fifth consecutive Jewish dean of that college.

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Many top universities are trying to make their campuses more inviting for Jews by, say, adding or expanding Jewish studies programs. But by assigning someone to recruit strong Jewish students five years ago, USC took an unusual step in the competitive world of college admissions.

Perhaps the only school to rival USC in this respect has been Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Vanderbilt hired a rabbi two years ago as an assistant to the provost to reach out to Jewish organizations around the country, and it is adding three endowed chairs in Jewish studies over the next four years.

At USC, some of the parents Pashkow meets worry that universities may be typecasting Jewish students as high achievers and pursuing them in hopes of raising their institutions’ average SAT scores. (Last year, American students identifying themselves as Jewish averaged 1161 on their SATs, 141 points above the national average of 1020.) But Pashkow, a 31-year-old with a relaxed charm, said that once she explains USC’s intent, “they’re very happy to know that we’re doing this.”

The USC application doesn’t ask students to specify their religious affiliation, and Pashkow is the only person among the two dozen admissions officers to focus on Jewish recruitment. So she encourages her co-workers to help ensure that all Jewish prospects receive “Jewish Life at USC” brochures and answers to any questions.

As a lighthearted reminder, Pashkow circulates around the admissions office a three-page memo called “Jews Clues.”

The first piece of advice is to spot names ending in “baum,” “berg,” “burg,” “bloom,” “man,” “stein,” “thal,” “vitz” or “witz.” Another dead giveaway mentioned in the memo: If applicants mention that they have had a bar or bat mitzvah.

Her co-workers “think it’s cute, they laugh at it,” Pashkow said. But the memo also prompts her colleagues to put a “JWSH” coding on applications from Jewish students.

The university has gained plaudits, and avoided controversy, by including its outreach to Jewish students and the Los Angeles Jewish community in a broader effort to achieve diversity on campus. USC is well known for its outreach to blacks, Latinos and other minorities, and has more foreign students than any other university in the country. And leaders of various faiths on campus say they do not feel slighted.

Jewish students are responding to the university’s interest. Rivka Katz, a modern Orthodox Jewish student from Hancock Park, said that until meeting Pashkow at a convention, she never thought of going to USC.

“When you thought of USC, you didn’t think Jewish, and now that’s changing,” said Katz, a 19-year-old sophomore who attends religious services with other observant students at the new Chabad house.

Recently, Pashkow gave a talk at the girls’ campus of Valley Torah High School, an Orthodox school in the east San Fernando Valley. She mentioned that residential students who want access to kosher kitchen facilities can live in “SChalom Housing,” a floor for observant Jewish students in a university apartment building. (Muslim students live nearby, in a separate wing on the same floor.)

The message left a favorable impression. “That they’ve created a kosher floor is really beneficial, and it shows that they really care.” said Lauren Pietruszka, a Valley Torah senior from Tarzana who said she plans to apply to USC.

That’s just the sort of idea that Pashkow tries to convey in her effort to change USC’s image. If all goes well, Pashkow says, perhaps five to 10 years from now, her job will become obsolete.

“At some point soon, Jewish students should just automatically think of USC as an option,” she said.