What do a young Latter-day Saint scholar, a New York rabbi and a black Baptist from New Jersey have in common?
Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But for the three men involved, the common experience was study at Oxford University in England. And the common thread that they wove into lasting friendships was a shared fascination with Jewish history.
The LDS scholar, Michael T. Benson, now is president of Snow College. The rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has a New York radio talk show focused on political and social issues, and Cory Booker is an up-and-coming politician, having recently lost a mayoral race in Newark, N.J., by only 4 percentage points. Time Magazine has named Booker one of the 100 most promising young politicians in the country.
Though life has taken them in different directions, the friendships built as members of Oxford's L'Chaim Society have held true, Benson said. All three were officers in the Jewish club at the same time. It was Oxford's second-largest extra-academic program, said Boteach.
"At Oxford, we became friends, and Mike remains one of my best friends," Boteach said in a telephone interview.
In Benson's case, the fascination with Jewish history has evolved into a unique objective for the small Utah college located in the state's agricultural midsection. One of several commitments he made when he was installed as president of Snow was the pursuit of a Jewish studies program. Last week, Benson met with Howard Jonas, chairman of the board of IDT Corp. and got a preliminary commitment for help in creating the program, although no specific amount was named.
Benson believes it will take about $500,000 to establish the project, money that would help in hiring a faculty member with expertise in Jewish history and Middle East affairs and meeting other costs of building the program. He hopes that the money will be committed by the end of May.
Boteach has been helpful in directing the Snow College president to potential donors, Benson said.
"Since 9/11, there has been a lot of interest among our students. They want to know more about the background of Arabs and Jews," Benson said. And the war in Iraq and its aftermath "is God's way of teaching Americans geography. . . . No problem of the present is so firmly rooted in the past," he said.
His plans are ambitious. He hopes to attract such notable Jewish spokespeople as Elie Wiesel to the Ephraim campus for presentations. Wiesel's writings (more than 38 works on Judaism, the Holocaust and the critical need for an end to racism throughout the world) earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. His work titled "Night" is considered the literary essence of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were sacrificed to Hitler's mania for "ethnic cleansing."
If he is able to bring Wiesel to Utah, it will "probably be the first visit of a Nobel Prize winner to Sanpete County," Benson said.
Rabbi Boteach has faith in Benson's ability to develop a quality Jewish-studies program at Snow and believes that continued focus on the history is essential to an understanding of today's world. "History and understanding the past is what helps us to believe in the future," he said. "It gives us values and a sense of our destiny."
Like many Jews, he is frustrated that the creation of Israel has led to ongoing conflict with the Arab nations that share the Middle East. "Arabs have not accepted Israel. They still feel that the time of the Jews is past," he said. "Instead of using that strong Arab tenacity for such things as improving women's lives, they have used it for hate. They should reach out to the Jews as brothers."
Boteach has lectured at Snow several times since Benson became president and has visited Utah "seven times since the Olympics." Last year, his family spent two weeks camping in Utah. "I have become a friend and admirer of the LDS Church," he said.
During visits to the Beehive State, he has met LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley and members of the Quorum of Twelve, and he has had conversations on his syndicated radio show with Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. (Benson is a grandson of late LDS president Ezra Taft Benson.)
Boteach said he was impressed with "the profound humility and deep-seated faith" of the LDS leaders he has come to know.
Benson was a student at Brigham Young University in 1989 when he first became conscious of the long and troubled history of the Jews.
He heard then-BYU president Jeffrey Holland describe Israel as "a sliver of land over which more blood has been spilled and more fortunes won and lost than any in the world," he recalled. Intrigued, young Benson sold his car so he could spend six months in the BYU Jerusalem Center.
"The first time I was in the Old City, I fell in love with the sights, sounds, smells. I decided I would major in Middle Eastern studies." After graduating from BYU in 1990, he was accepted for a master's program at Oxford's St. Antony College.
When it was time for a doctoral thesis, Benson had the ambitious idea of exploring the religious backgrounds of America's presidents. But, he admits, wiser heads prevailed. He was advised by his review committee to narrow his focus to just two presidents. He did, choosing presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
In Truman, he found an important conjunction between his two major interests — religious leanings of presidents and the Jews. Truman's religious training and careful study of the Bible as a youth had a profound impact when it came to the president's decisions regarding the nascent state of Israel in the late 1940s, Benson learned. Despite opposition from almost all the leading advisers in his government, including Secretary of State George Marshall, and from U.S. representatives to the United Nations, Truman declared recognition for Israel within hours of its founding. His sympathies for the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust and displaced by World War II, coupled with his belief in Old Testament prophecies that the Jews would return to their homeland, were the impetus for the president's declaration, Benson said.
Benson put his extensive research on the issues into a heavily referenced book, "Harry S Truman and the Founding of Israel," published in 1997.
With no end in sight to the historic battles for the Middle East, Ephraim, Utah, is a somewhat unlikely location for highlighting the issues. But while Benson is Snow's president, that will be the objective.
E-MAIL: tvanleer@desnews.com