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Friday December 8, 2006

Cal, Stanford left off Reform guide

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

Students who attend U.C. Berkeley are told that they have matriculated to the world’s greatest public school. Students at Stanford are told they are attending the Harvard of the West. But students who read the Union for Reform Judaism Magazine’s list of “Top 60 Schools Jews Choose” won’t learn about either.

While eyebrows may be raised in households with a mezuzah on the door and a parchment from either school on the wall, officials at the Reform movement are quick to assert that they’re not making value judgments. The list is strictly a head count, cataloging the schools with the largest Jewish populations.

“It is important to recognize that the listing is a quantitative measure and not qualitative. Both Berkeley and Stanford are outstanding schools with exemplary Hillels,” wrote Jeff Rubin, Hillel’s executive vice president for communication, in an email to j.

“Jewish students will get a great education and enjoy a full and meaningful Jewish experience at these schools ... Hillel can recommend either school to Jewish students and their parents.”

Rubin added that Stanford has an estimated 680 Jewish undergraduates, and Berkeley has 2,000, which fall below the cutoff necessary to be in the magazine’s “Top 60” of 700 and 2,200, respectively, for private and public schools. These numerical cutoffs seem to have no relationship to the size of a school’s overall enrollment.

That explanation was still a bit mystifying for Gordon Gladstone. The assistant director of Berkeley Hillel was surprised when he thumbed through a copy of the college guide and didn’t find U.C. Berkeley — but did read extensive profiles of far smaller U.C. Davis and U.C. Santa Cruz.

Gladstone confirmed that Berkeley Hillel did estimate around 2,000 Jewish undergrads to Hillel International, but also estimated an additional 1,000 Jewish graduate students. What’s more, “nobody has really precise numbers because nobody is asking that question to the student body.”

Readers can see the full list of the Top 60 public and private schools at www.reformjudaismmag.org/06fall.

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