[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.