PROF. ROBERT Goldberg, director of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, pulled into the foreign terrain of Salt Lake City to teach history in 1980.
The move was so traumatic that the New York native still refers to Utah as one of the last exits in the Diaspora.
”When I first arrived here, it was an oy vey moment,” he says. ”Everyone was blond, every woman looked pregnant and you could not find a cup of coffee anywhere.”
Goldberg, 65, recalls a telling incident from his first week in Salt Lake City thats stuck with him for decades.
”I had to buy a car, so I went to a dealership,” he says. ”I found a car I liked, and the dealer said, ’Why don’t you drive it off the lot?'”
”I asked him, ’Don’t you need to check my financial credentials?’ His response was, ‘I have never met a Jew who didn’t pay his bills.’ And I said, ‘Then youve never lived east of the Mississippi River!'”
From that week forward, Goldberg sensed that Mormons (Church of Latter Day Saints, or LDS) felt an innate affinity toward the Jewish people in their midst.
“Now mind you. The Jews they really love are the ones in the Bible and the Jews of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof,” he qualifies. ”They would never understand radical Jews.”
Confronted by Utahs monolithically secure population, Goldberg researched the Jewish agricultural colony in Clarion, Utah (1911-1916) to bolster his own identity.
Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah and Their World was published in 1986.
The book reconnected the scholar to descendents of the colony and solidified his connection to Salt Lake Citys Jewish community, which dates back to 1854.
BOB GOLDBERG says that his Judaism is a very ethnic and historical Judaism. “I’ve never been deeply religious, but I feel an intense Jewish responsibility in terms of community.”
For 20 years he taught Jewish history and ethics to 8-12th-grade religious school students at Kol Ami, founded in 1972 after merging with the Reform B’nai Israel (established in 1891) and the Conservative Congregation Montefiori (established in 1899).
As director of the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center, Goldberg coordinates its various programs, concepts and projects promoting humanistic inquiry and exchanges on campus and in the surrounding region.
The Tanner Center funds fellowships for undergraduate, graduate and faculty endeavors in new humanities research; workshops and colloquia for university, primary and secondary school teachers and their students; and presents major conferences featuring global speakers.
The Middle East Center that brought professors from Israel, the Palestinian territories and India to the University of Utah is now defunct, which Goldberg regrets.
“It shored up our Middle East offerings by attracting visiting professors from Israel and Palestine,” he says. Due to internal dynamics, the program lost its research grant and funding.
Goldberg’s admiration for the Tanner Center, particularly the workshops designed for students, is palpable.
“It’s like throwing a rock into a pond,” he says of the their trickle-down impact on future generations.
HIS LATEST book, Enemies Within: Conspiracy Culture in Modern America, stems from the courses he teaches on 20th century US history and attendant writings on right-wing social movements and groups.
“I wrote the book because I was interested in why so many people believe in conspiracy theories and why they are so popular in this country,” he says. ”It’s a growth industry.”
While most people assume conspiracy theorists represent a fringe element in society, Goldberg’s brief survey of percentages indicates the opposite.
“When 80% of Americans believe that John F. Kennedy was killed in an assassination conspiracy; a third of Americans believe aliens landed in Roswell, NM, and 30 to 40% believe theres a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, this to me is not a fringe phenomenon,” he says.
”It’s a phenomenon of the mainstream.”
Asked why conspiracies are so prevalent, Goldberg traces the source to institutions in the US that actually promote conspiracy theories for their own ends.
:One is the federal government, which has constantly used conspiracy theories to mobilize public opinion in favor of certain policies,” he says with detached rationalism.
Hollywood films have added to the conspiracy genre. The blockbuster film ”Birth of a Nation,” a racist tribute to the Ku Klux Klan, captivated audiences in 1913.
“America’s distrust of centralized power preceded the Revolutionary War,” he says. ”Whether it’s Thomas Jefferson or Ronald Reagan or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, its the old fear of foreign power, which is now located in Washington, DC.
“Conspiracy theories are traditional, longstanding and will unfortunately continue. And they are detrimental to American democracy. It’s not just that theres disagreement; if you disagree you’re a traitor to the country.
“You’re disloyal, an enemy from within, which is not conducive to dialogue in our democracy.”
Goldberg wrote Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado in 1982 to chronicle the Klan’s pinnacle of political power in the 1920s.
“The topic was also personal. In my mind, the Klan in the 1920s was the largest anti-Semitic movement in American history.”
ROBERT ALAN Goldberg is the product of immigrants from the Old Country, a unique legacy that instilled his parents with a fierce desire to learn and ceaseless directives to their children to emulate their example.
His grandfather Goldenberger arrived in America before 1910 and shortened his name to Goldberg at Ellis Island. His mother immigrated to the US from Romania in 1923.
”I was a terrible student in elementary school,” Goldberg laughs as he explains his attraction to history. “My mom was constantly trying to interest me in something.
“She would go to the library and bring home 10 books, which I usually let sit unopened on my desk.
“In my house, you needed to know something or you were doomed.”
One day he picked up a book on the Normandy invasion in WW II. His father, a combat medic, was initiated into the war on D-Day plus 1 in France.
”We always heard stories from my father. But in order to participate, you had to know more than the people around you. That became my niche.”
When Goldberg was 15, the family left Manhattan and moved to Scottsdale, Ariz. We really liked the desert and the Southwest.
He earned his undergraduate degree at Arizona State University and was tapped for a history fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Goldberg also attended Uppsala University in Sweden as a Fulbright Scholar.
”My brother is a physician. I was supposed to become an attorney. But history was such a draw for me.”
The fellowship at the University of Wisconsin sealed the deal.
After receiving his doctorate, Goldberg taught at the University of Texas in San Antonio, 1977-1980. Then he moved to Salt Lake City and the University of Utah.
Married to a social worker, Goldberg has two adult children. One son works with the US State Department in Washington, DC, and another son who served in the IDF is about to head the history department at a Jewish day school in Kansas City.
”I guess something rubbed off,” he laughs.
The Goldbergs have three grandchildren.
He describes Salt Lake Citys Jewish community as small but strong. It has all the positives and negatives that exist in Jewish communities around the country.
As for the dominance of the LDS culture, Goldberg says it has undergone a significant transformation since he first came on the scene.
”Salt Lake City has grown up very much,” he says. ”I think the 2002 Winter Olympics had a lot to do with this maturation. But there’s also been a major influx of people from California and other states. Utah is much more modern.
“Even the University of Utah has changed. The overwhelming majority of professors are from the East or outside the state. It’s a decidedly Utah institution, but not an LDS institution.
“Mormons are philo-semitic as opposed to anti-Semitic,” Goldberg says. ”They are very strong Zionists. Salt Lake City is a very easy place for Jews to live.”
GOLDBERG, WHO has devoted his life to education, academic research, statistics and societal movements, inhabits an uncertain realm when discussing the future of Judaism.
The quote that spurs Goldberg’s examination of murkier waters is attributed to the philosopher and poet George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“You know, I want to believe that Jews have the ability to reflect and acknowledge that the past has an impact on us, but Ive become less and less hopeful about this as I look at our most recent generations,” he says.
Goldberg is referring to his teaching emphasis at Kol Ami, which demonstrated the symbiotic relationship between Jewish history and Jewish ethics. “The students showed a great deal of interest in nostalgia and facts — isolated facts. But they are missing the rhythm of change over time: the patterns of the past and the patterns of history.
“Whereas my generation was very focused on our parents experiences during the Depression, WW II and even the Holocaust, I’m worried that present and future generations are almost hypnotized by technology.
“The past is not that important to them.”
While Goldberg does not fault their Jewish learning, either at home or in the synagogue, he questions their perceptual framework.
“They miss not only the facts of the past but how the past changes over time and how it influences the present and the future.”
Asked whether a solution exists, Goldberg waivers.
“I’m an educator,” he says. “That means I have to be an absolute optimist in regard to the power of education. And I believe that’s possible.
“But here’s what I think. We constantly stay in our life patterns without taking a break. We live life as a habit. The only things that jar us are major upheavals such as economic depressions, war and climate change.
“I hate to believe that we need something so terrible to wake us up. But this might be the case. Without those events, we stay forever hypnotized.”
Goldberg is convinced that the Kol Ami students under his tutelage love their faith, their temple and their families. “’Im fairly confident they have a tight relationship with Judaism,” he says.
But he’s noticed a diminishing sentiment toward the Holocaust and Israel, essential Jewish touchstones in his generation.
“The students were unable to find the drawstrings to their identity that would bring a closer understanding of Judaism.
”We are losing people in our community,” he says. “And I don’t have a solution.”
At last count, 6,000 Jews called Utah home. Approximately one-fourth of them reside in Salt Lake City. But nothing is permanent in this highly mobile society.
Bob Goldberg lives in Salt Lake City. He’s quite content there.
His passion and commitment as an educator shine an eternal light on the Diasporas last exit — and that alone deserves a second look.
Andrea Jacobs may be reached at [email protected].
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
