Holocaust for Dummies: Univ of Waterloo, Ontario, to launch Jewish studies major

[Holocaust
Industry latest]

University of Waterloo* to launch Jewish studies major

by Jeannie Marshall

In 1978, a TV movie called Holocaust raised interest in the plight of the Jewish people in the Second
World War, and spurred much of the scholarship on the Holocaust that endures today.

Now the movie that keeps Holocaust studies alive is
Schindler’s
List. In 1995, two years after the film’s release, Brian Hendley, who was then dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Waterloo, saw
Schindler’s List and decided to act on the feelings the film evoked.

“He was so moved by it, he called me,” says Paul Socken, a professor and chair of the department of French Studies at the University of Waterloo, who is also a former president of the synagogue in
Kitchener. “He said it got him to thinking that there were a number of Christian colleges on the campus . . . but there’s nothing Jewish.”

Hendley asked
Socken to set up a Jewish studies
program, but he couldn’t give him any
money to do it. In five years, Socken
has raised $1.7-million toward a $2-
million endowment. He also headed an
international search for someone to
take the chair of the new Jewish
program, and found the appropriate
person practically next door in
Toronto: Professor James
Diamond, a former lawyer with a PhD
in philosophy.

“St. Jerome’s College [at the
University of Waterloo] has a course on the concept of evil. [Diamond]
taught a class on the Jewish concept of evil and he was outstanding,” says Socken.
“We felt he was the man for the job.”

The Jewish studies program, which will launch in the fall, will not yet be a degree program. For now it will be a minor program that will give students in the school’s prestigious math and computer sciences programs the chance to study
Jewish history and philosophy.

The program will offer an exchange between the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, and will work with another
Israeli university that offers courses on the Internet. Socken is also working on a series of guest lectures that will bring distinguished academics in the area of
Jewish studies to Waterloo.

The Jewish Students Association at the
University of Waterloo has 300 members, but Socken believes there are likely twice as many Jewish students at the school.
“But I think it’s just as important that these courses be of interest to non-Jewish students, too,” says Socken, pointing out that the former dean who started it all is not Jewish.

* Website note:
University of Waterloo, Ontario, is the
home of the spurious “Professor of
Architecture” Robert Jan Van Pelt,
who confessed in the High Court that he
had never qualified as an
architect.