Jessica Pashkow is recruiting Jewish high school seniors to attend USC, once a bastion of WASPs and anti-Semites
Ivor Davis / Los Angeles
It's a balmy late March weeknight in L.A., but Jewish community worker Jessica Pashkow is hard at work in the cafeteria of Beverly Hills High School -- trying to persuade Jewish seniors to enroll at the once defiantly WASPy, at times notoriously anti-Semitic, University of Southern California, on the other side of Los Angeles.
Pashkow's sales pitch at this college fair is low-key and discreet as she chats comfortably with Hilda and Sam Ben-Sadigh and their teenage son Brian, who is excited about the idea of going to USC's prestigious film school. Standing nearby, Guy Schulmann is checking out the brochure-filled booth for his daughter Veronika, who couldn't come because of exams. USC is competing for the applications of the nearly 400 graduating seniors with all the major universities, from Stanford on the West Coast to Harvard and MIT back East.
"It's important for Veronika to go to a school with a strong Jewish life," Schulmann tells Pashkow when his turn comes, adding that he is loath to let her study in Israel because of security problems. And Pashkow's message tonight is promising: Jewish life at USC, she tells her audience, is alive and well. While the school's 30,000 students come from a wide range of backgrounds, Pashkow, one of two dozen USC admission officers, places a particular emphasis on Jewish enrollment -- the only such college recruiter in the United States. It's the brief she was given when she was hired four years ago and it's paying off nicely: The most recent freshman class of 3,000 students is 11 percent Jewish, up from 7 percent; 10 percent of all undergraduates are Jews.
Rabbi Susan Laemmle, dean of religious life at USC, and the facilitator for all religious activity on campus, notes that the move to hire an admissions person to recruit Jews was not about affirmative action, but about the fact that Jewish students were sparse on the campus in a community that had the second largest Jewish population in the country. Today, says Laemmle, who has been at USC for eight years and is the former director of its Hillel, "Jewish life on campus is thriving. I have the sense that we have been getting more Jewish students, particularly from the Orthodox high schools."
Jewish students at USC were once rarer than a smog-free day in Los Angeles. The "Jewish" university in the city was traditionally UCLA, the prestigious West Los Angeles campus of the publicly funded University of California network. The private USC, UCLA's arch crosstown rival in sports but not in academic achievement, was until a decade ago considered the preserve of WASPs, fraternity boys and sorority girls whose wealthy parents paid their way. USC actually stood, the wisecrack went, for "University of Spoiled Children." USC students countered by calling UCLA, "JewCLA." (USC is still expensive, with annual tuition $ 40,000, as opposed to half that for UC schools. )
It didn't help Jewish recruitment that USC's history with the Jews was checkered, to say the least. Its president from l922 to l946, Rufus B. von Kleinsmid, who remained a strong presence on campus as chancellor until his death in l964, was rumored to be a Nazi sympathizer. His imperious, autocratic style and Germanic name only fanned the speculation. Frances Loman Feldman, USC's veteran historian of faculty, said von Kleinsmid, whom she found cordial, presided at a time when various deans on campus, including those of the medical and dental schools, rejected students simply because they were Jewish or members of other minority groups.
There was a cross-burning incident on the lawn of a Jewish fraternity house in 1946. In 1972, the Los Angeles Times described "an uproar in the dentistry school involving alumni accusations that a dean was pro-Jewish"; and in 1978 many local Jews were upset by news that USC planned to house a Middle East center at the urging of Saudi Arabia. After protests from the American Jewish Committee, the plan was scrapped.
The unusually large contingent of students from Arab countries, which made pro-Israel activity uncomfortable, also deterred some. As recently as 1986, members of a campus fraternity were suspended for chanting anti-Jewish remarks after losing a competition to a predominantly Jewish fraternity. Another strike against USC for college-bound Jews was that it was politically the most conservative campus in California -- one of only two campuses in the state where Richard Nixon got a majority in his run for the presidency in 1972, for instance.
USC's location has also not been a huge enticement to some students. Its campus and dorms are in the working-class, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood of South Central L.A., close to the scene of the Watts riots of the 60s and the violence that followed the acquittal of the white police officers charged with beating the black Rodney King in April 1992. Security is tight, but a student of either sex might still not choose to take a late-night stroll.
Now all that is changing. The L.A. City Council, like many downtown groups, has invested a great deal in sprucing up the neighborhood. "The fact is we are an urban campus, and once students come here they change their mind about the perceived dangers," notes Pashkow. "There are lots of students who ride bikes and are totally safe. They can stay within the confines of the campus and we have the largest privately owned security system in the city."
Pashkow well understands a school with recruiting demands, having received her BA from Ohio University, where there were also very few Jewish students. Raised as a Reform Jew, she spent a year in Israel after graduation and says she always had a strong Jewish identity. She earned a Master's degree in Jewish communal service from the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College, located two blocks from the northeast edge of the USC campus, and worked for Hadassah for six months before being hired by USC on the recommendation of a friend in the admissions office. He'd been employed to try and increase Jewish enrollment by the late dean of admissions, Joe Allen, who, Pashkow notes, "cared very much about under-represented students." In L.A., a city with 600,000 Jews, Pashkow says it seemed strange to Allen that there were so few at USC.
Some cynics note that the push to enroll Jews coincides with tough times in university fundraising around the country and may have been prompted by university administrators looking for Jewish financial support. Officials, however, vociferously deny any such motive, pointing to the school's long history of attracting heavy-hitting Jewish donors from among its alumni, who have endowed programs including the Walter Annenberg School of Communications, and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering, established with a $ 52 million gift from the founder of Qualcomm.
Pashkow, who lives with her businessman husband Matt and 2-year-old daughter Mirabelle on the heavily Jewish west side of L.A, believes that USC always had a reasonable number of Jewish students (one-third of the faculty is Jewish). But, she notes, "I don't think there was a way for Jewish students to identify themselves as such, with no official place on the application for students to indicate whether they are Jewish or not."
Today, when she appears at high schools across the city, especially heavily Jewish ones, Pashkow says she answers questions about "how active Hillel is, whether kosher food is available on campus, and how taking off Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur works." Indeed, since 1996, students can choose to move into "Shalom Housing," a small block of 10 apartments where the kitchens have been koshered and mezuzahs placed on the doors. And there's a good kosher meal plan for those living on campus.
Another big lure is the strong reciprocal relationship with nearby Hebrew Union College's Jewish Institute of Religion. Each year some 1,000 USC undergraduates take Hebrew and Judaic studies courses taught by HUC faculty, and they also have access to the college's 600,000-volume library. Even Chabad has become a growing presence on campus, opening a new house on Sorority Row earlier this year. Hillel has had its own building just off campus for over 10 years.
On the recruitment trail, Pashkow is careful about how she conveys what she is looking for. Speaking to students at non-Jewish schools she plays it cool: "I don't come right out and say if you're Jewish we'd like you. Instead I talk to them about some of the programs we have at USC, and subtly try to pique their interest." Or, she says, "I might mention personal things about myself so students will pick up that I'm Jewish."
A special brochure entitled "Jewish Life at USC" is an effective tool. At Beverly Hills High, for instance, "I made sure that every student who is Jewish, or I perceived to be Jewish, received the brochure," she notes. The pamphlet, co-written by Pashkow, assures candidates that they will be comfortable on campus in a Jewish environment: "Drawing upon more than l00 years of tradition, the USC Jewish community is strong and dynamic and caring. But most of all, USC -- an essential part of the Los Angeles Jewish community… is a place to be yourself."
Pashkow is aware of the irony in her position: The more students she recruits, the less necessary her job will become. "I came into this post," she says happily, "feeling that by being successful I would put myself out of a job."
With reporting by Sheli Teitelbaum