The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17th, 1997: Saving the Core

Early this afternoon – just when I was about to take that rueful look in the rearview mirror promised in the title of this column – Jerry called my attention to something on the Internet that surprised me a whole lot. “Stunned” would be nearer the mark.

Jerry had put on the Internet this question: “What is Abigail L Rosenthal known for?” On a number of sites, the answers (quoting people I greatly respect) were positive and overwhelmingly so – in their seriousness, contentful density, absence of hype or padding, and credibility. 

Was I surprised? Yeah. I was pretty much knocked flat, open-mouthed, speechless and not-at-all-geared-for-this.

Mind, when I was a New Yorker, the urban skill that I prized most was my ability to walk the crowded city streets and not be seen! Only one woman I knew was superior in this regard: a Muslim student of mine to whom I was very close, who told me that – if she were raped – her brothers would make her marry the rapist! Okay, so she was better than I was at the Craft of Invisibility. But I was pretty good at it – maybe second best. So now, to find myself portrayed as intellectually accomplished and influential was – let me assure you – no part of my self-image.

To see more clearly the context in which so inconvenient a truth comes to my attention, consider my most recent life review. I’d been calling to mind “my brilliant career” (publications and public talks aside) on three of its former fronts:

1. Brooklyn College from which, some years back, I had retired as Professor Emerita;
2. My local Reform temple, from which I had also withdrawn, save for Saturday morning Torah Study;
3. Manhattan, where I had lived – in the same upper east side neighborhood – almost continuously since shortly after I was born.

In Brooklyn College (1), I had had a string of improbable victories. First – after being fired repeatedly, I mean for seven consecutive years, following my vote for the losing candidate in an election for Head of the Philosophy Department – finally and improbably, I won reinstatement with tenure. 

Next I, together with two colleagues in the History Department, successfully defended the college’s much-praised, wide-ranging core curriculum. We defeated the attempt, by the college’s new president, to replace it with “Brooklyn Connections,” a curriculum he wanted to introduce that was narrowly centered on the borough of Brooklyn. 

The story of our fight – and eventual win – made the front pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education (see above) and The Jewish Daily Forward, as well as a full-page favorable editorial in the New York Post. 

At the time of that fight, I was advised to contact Jerry Martin who headed an organization in D.C. that defended excellence in higher education. Since he gave us important guidance, I called him frequently and we talked at length. (A year later, as New York papers also reported, our conversations got more private and personal and we got married!)

So far, all I’ve recounted about Brooklyn College are some of my fights and the victories at their finales. However, when presently I look back at the college I loved, one defeat looms, and it was not a small one. Having heard, from a source we all respected, that Jewish students and faculty at the College were starting to suffer from an unprecedented upsurge of anti-semitism, I met with my two closest allies from the “Brooklyn Connections” fight. What I hoped was that, together, the three of us might figure out what could be done to roll back this strange new tide of bigotry.

Much to my surprise, my two non-Jewish colleagues responded to my concern with – ridicule! The following day, each woman sent emails crafted to be personally and professionally respectful, but not touching the reason I’d met with them. Though we did not quarrel – what for? – I never wanted to see them again.

Moving on now, what do I remember about (2) my local Reform temple – from the days when I was a much more active member than I am now? The present Board and new rabbinic leadership looks to me fine and dedicated. But in former times the relations that I had with my temple were closer. I pass over the struggles – there was one after another – with regard to early signs of the new anti-semitism. By now – after the atrocities of October 7 and 8 of 2023 – and the celebration of them by universities and other respectable types worldwide, the days of trying-not-to-notice are finally over. But then, all degrees and types of eye-avertings were deemed normal. I fought that. 

My present distance from the temple has to do with a different issue – the ousting of a predator. He was not a temple member, therefore had no business to be ubiquitous in our environs, but had managed to win over the most influential member of the temple leadership. He was behaving “inappropriately,” as they say, with the women, even including female Board members, and was, as I saw it, a bad guy as well as a public scandal waiting to happen.

Eventually, the predator was kicked out, and the leader who’d defended him ousted. But not before the whistle-blower (that’s me) had first to refute false accusations and anti-social rudeness – at the leader’s behest but with the acquiescence of the Board.

Since nobody who played any part in all that ever apologized, and most of those directly involved have since left the temple, the wound it left in me remains uncured. 

Of course, in the real world, not every wound gets cured. In this case, it might be that my pain keeps the record. After all, Jewish memory has the task – the historical assignment – of preserving the record!

And then there is (3) Manhattan. What part did my old neighborhood – once my home town – play in my recent life review? What I cherished in the neighborhood was not only the museums, the cafes and the well-known streets. It felt easier to face my philosophic frontiers, whatever they were, just because the streets retained their ever-welcoming familiarity. 

So, did something change? Yes, something did. Someone connected to me by ties of family – whose effort to bring me under her control I had resisted successfully – then took the extraordinary step of meeting with collegial friends of mine and inherited family friends to spread credible-sounding defamatory fictions about me. 

Was she believed? Why yes! In her astutely-targeted effort at vengeance, she was almost entirely successful! Regarding the interesting question of how to fight defamatory lies when they are believed by former close friends, I did not – and do not – know the answer. It’s best to have many friends who will believe you. My mother might have known. She had more friends and was tougher than I was. But my structure is permeable and there’s not much I can do about that.

So, my defeat would have had no obvious remedy – had I not just then happened to fall in love with Jerry and had we not then decided, as a couple, to leave our previous environs, his in Washington and mine in Manhattan, to move to our new home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

So, what’s the moral of these three “defeats”? Well, there was one thing I did keep intact:

 personal integrity.

And it might be that – without fanfare – that is life’s essential victory.

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Related Content: Press Coverage of Victory at Brooklyn College