The Manna Interview with Professor Marc Saperstein
Written by Barry Hyman Tuesday, 05 December 2006
BARRY HYMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH RABBI PROFESSOR MARC SAPERSTEIN – new Principal of Leo Baeck College gives his first full UK interview...
Q: The US Jewish community is large and successful. What brings you here?
A: I was quite content in my position in Washington DC, where my brother lives with his family. But after twenty-nine years in purely academic positions, the last twenty of which were teaching undergraduates, I was attracted by the opportunity to play a leadership role at LBC, to work with more mature and serious students, and through the College to have a significant impact on Jewish life in the UK.
Q: Most Jews in the UK are only second or third generation. Are you ‘All-American’ or from migrant stock?
A: No ancestors on the Mayflower, or members of the ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’. My father’s parents immigrated to the United States in the late 1890s. My mother’s parents were born in New York to immigrant parents.
Q: Was your family background a committed Jewish one?
A: Great-grandfathers on both sides of my family were Orthodox rabbis. My grandmother’s uncle was an early graduate of Hebrew Union College, my father’s uncle an early graduate of the Jewish Institute of Religion. My father was a congregational Reform rabbi, respected and beloved, in Lynbrook, Long Island from 1933 until his retirement in 1980. My brother David and I grew up in a home where Jewish observance seemed natural, though not especially strict. We looked forward to Friday night services. A strong commitment to Israel, World Jewry, and social justice was part of the air we breathed.
Q: Was being a rabbi a long held ambition?
A: While it always seemed to be an option, I did not make the decision until my final year of undergraduate studies. Sometimes, only half in jest, I have said that the decision my brother and I made to go to HUC-JIR was not an emulation of our father but a rebellion against our mother, who thought that one rabbi in a family was enough. Upon ordination as a rabbi, I decided to continue for a PhD, keeping open the possibility that I would be a congregational rabbi. I had a small half-time congregation in the Boston area for thirteen years. In a sense, in my new position, I am now returning to my rabbinical roots.
Q: Where did you study your Judaism?
A: In the religious school of the synagogue – I did not attend a Jewish Day School – a few elective courses at University, where the Hillel Rabbi Benzion Gold provided another, more traditionalist role model, the New York School of HUC-JIR, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem – MA in Jewish History and Hebrew Literature – Medieval Jewish Studies at Harvard (Ph.D.
Q: You’ve been in many academic posts in the US. Can you tell us about them?
A: I held the first regular appointment in Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, offering a range of courses to candidates for the Protestant ministry as well as others in BA and MA programmes. In 1986 I moved to a new Chair in Jewish History at Washington University in St. Louis. I was head of an interdisciplinary programme in which the Jewish Studies and the Islamic Studies faculty worked closely together, and all students were required to take at least one course in a tradition not their own. In 1997 I moved to a similar position at George Washington University in Washington DC, much closer to other members of my family.
Q: You’ve written several books and articles. What are your chosen topics?
A: After my first book, based on my doctoral dissertation, I have focused for the past twenty-five years on the history of Jewish preaching and the sermon as a source for Jewish history, literature, and thought. I have three large books on this topic, and a fourth on American and Anglo-Jewish Preaching in Times of War (1800–2001) to be published by the Littman Library next year.
Q: Have any family members come here with you?
A: I am divorced after a marriage of thirty years. My two daughters are grown and independent. My partner, Tamar De Vries Winter, a silversmith and enameller who is a maker of Judaica ritual objects, lives in Cambridge, which has made moving to London a lot less daunting than it might have been had I come here totally on my own.
Q: Are you familiar with the UK, not to mention its disputatious Jewish community?
A: I received a Fellowship to study at Pembroke College Cambridge in 1966-1967. I was the Rabbi Hugo Gryn Visiting Fellow in Religious Tolerance at the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge during the fall term of 2002, and have made many briefer visits during the past five years. I am currently receiving an Ulpan-type education about the ‘disputatious Jewish Community’, which is in some ways quite different from that in the US.
Q: What attracted you to LBC?
A: The privilege of leading an institution bearing the name of one of the greatest Jewish leaders of the twentieth century, itself one of the most important institutions of Jewish learning in Europe, and helping it meet the challenge of preparing a new generation of rabbis and Jewish educators for the twenty-first century.
Q: All newcomers bring new ideas. Is it too early to say if you have identified any areas where you hope to innovate?
A: I hope to build stronger relations with Jewish Studies professors and programmes at British Universities, to recruit more at Universities in order to attract the best possible pool of applicants, to publicize and attract more students into the BA and MA programmes, to help broaden the support for the College so that it will have the secure financial foundation necessary for it to maintain and expand its programmes.
Q: Does your profession leave time for hobbies?
A: I have brought with me my baby grand Steinway piano. Although my peak as a pianist was in 1962, I hope to have time to make more music together. I enjoy theatre, concerts, hiking through beautiful scenery, e.g. along the Cornwall coast.
Q: Do you have a favourite book/film/singer/piece of music?
A: Joyce’s Ulysses, subject of my undergraduate thesis/Casablanca/Chava Alberstein/Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian Symphony,’ Schubert’s F Minor Fantasy, the second section of the Brahms German Requiem.
BARRY HYMAN is Vice President of Radlett & Bushey Reform Synagogue and former PR consultant to RSGB (now the Movement for Reform Judaism).
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