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| Volume 7 Issue 1 | Fall 2000 |
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When the HUC-JIR gave Jacob Behrman an honorary degree a little over a year ago, the citation spoke of the many things he had contributed to American Jewish education during his decades of leadership of Behrman House Publishers. Now that Jacob has decided to move to Washington D.C. and live near his daughter Rachel's family (with its four quite special grandchildren), it is time to add to what was said when the doctoral hood was slipped over his head.
Jacob will be leaving behind him American Jewry's leading publisher of Jewish children's educational materials--and as he succeeded his father (who had founded the firm), now his son David is giving vigorous leadership to the family enterprise. Anyone who has tried to create a Jewish institution and keep it alive amid the shifting concerns of American Jewry will appreciate what an accomplishment it is to have built one still robustly alive half a century later.
But add to that the fact that Behrman House is not a communally funded institution, one that can count on the support of constituent organizations or the tzedakah of various foundations to make up its deficits. Behrman Publishers has always been a private enterprise, one on whose successful operation the Behrman family's livelihood depended. It took real genius to make this work through good times and bad during the last fifty years, and even more to do so by the uncommon business strategy of dedicating the "firm" to creating the best, the freshest, and the most useful educational materials Jewish ingenuity and imagination could devise.
Jacob's other exceptional accomplishment was--is--his extraordinary personality. In a day when we are accustomed to think of business leaders as masters of the balance sheet and the strategic business plan, Jacob ran Behrman House by what must be called poetic intuition. He has exquisite taste and, to a considerable extent, that is not only why Behrman House books were so tasteful but also why they set an esthetic standard other publishers had to meet. Jacob has soul, and one way that it manifests itself is by an inner sensor that warms him as he encounters good writing and makes it almost physically painful to him to have to read bad prose. Of course, there is a limit as to what one can do with some authors' writing but Jacob, long the editor, shipping room supervisor, comptroller, salesman, personnel manager and everything else, managed to run Behrman House in a quite inimitable personal way. And in the days when it was still common for people to stop in at a Jewish bookseller and shmuess with the proprietor about Jewish matters large and small, Jacob was a significant figure in the lives of many a rabbi, a scholar and of lay people who were making their way into Judaism.
Those warm, personal, now quaint days at 1261 Broadway are long since gone, but the Jacobean spirit that illuminated them lived on in recent years in West Orange and now remains a precious heritage in Springfield, New Jersey.
Jacob has more than earned his leisure years and we hope they will be as richly rewarding as he deserves. But, to be selfish about it, we will not be begrudged our regret that our so gifted, so uncommon friend is no longer nearby.
| --Eugene B. Borowitz |
Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz is the Sigmund L. Falk Distinguished Professor of Education and Jewish Religious Thought at Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion
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