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Scholar Drops Out.
When Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, one of the hottest scholars of Judaism in the Bay Area, submitted his resignation last year, he did so in typically controversial fashion. The 40-year-old Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz, director of San Francisco State University's Jewish studies program, gave his employer two weeks notice -- just as the fall semester was getting under way. Abandoning the Ivory Tower to write technical manuals for a computer software company, Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz left behind all traces of his academic career: hundreds of books, stacks of notes dating back to his graduate school days at Brown University, pages of correspondence, even a prestigious national award for his 1991 work, "The Savage in Judaism."
Though his 13 months at San Francisco State had been tumultuous, his resignation came as a shock to the faculty and administration. As the first director of the school's newly created Jewish studies program, Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz was hired with full tenure, a precautionary measure intended to insulate him from political pressure both on and off the campus.
And with good reason. Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz was soon under attack from the local Jewish community for his unwillingness to advocate on behalf of the university's beleaguered Jewish student body. But there is more to this story than mere campus politics. For Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz, his tour of duty at San Francisco State was another chapter in an evolving spiritual and intellectual journey that has led him further away from Judaism -- even as he attempted to draw himself nearer to it.
Like the recent quarrel at Queens College over the selection of a non-Jewish professor to lead the school's Jewish studies program, Mr. Eilberg-Schwartz's story raises thorny questions about...