David Biale, celebrated Jewish historian and cherished friend, dies at 75
By Sue Fishkoff | July 29, 2024
David Biale was a brilliant academic and a world-class historian of Jewish studies with 13 books and three National Jewish Book Awards to his credit. The topics of his scholarly inquiry ranged from Jewish secularism and Hasidism to sex and power in Jewish history.
But the longtime Berkeley resident was more than the sum of his academic achievements. He was one of those rare scholars beloved by other academics. He was known for his generosity of spirit, for mentoring younger scholars and for offering undergraduates a kind ear. He was a man people felt privileged to call their friend.
"He was my closest friend," said neighbor Martin Dodd, a Berkeley lawyer who met David when their oldest children were in kindergarten together at Tehiyah Day School in El Cerrito. "For someone who was as accomplished an intellectual as he was, he was the most down-to-earth person. He could talk about anything. He had an endless fascination with everybody and everything. He was genuinely interested in people, and that's why people loved to be around him. I was forever enriched by knowing him."
Biale, who retired two years ago as the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of History at UC Davis, died peacefully at home in his sleep on Sunday after battling metastatic prostate cancer. His two children and his wife of 51 years, Rachel, were at his side. He was 75.
"He's known as one of the great intellectual Jewish historians in the world," said Fred Rosenbaum, the founder of Lehrhaus Judaica and a close friend of Biale since their days as graduate students in Jewish studies at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s. "But more than that was David as a person. He influenced my life more than any other friend, just by the way he lived his life."
Biale was born in Los Angeles in 1949. His father, Jacob, a member of the Jewish youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, came from Poland in 1929 to study agriculture at UC Davis in preparation for moving to British Mandate Palestine. Instead, he became a professor at UCLA, where he met and married Evelyn, Biale's mother, in 1945.
Biale began college at Harvard in 1968, but friends at UC Berkeley regaled him with stories of their activism and the political fervor in Berkeley at the time. Biale asked his dean for a year off to attend Cal, and the dean agreed, saying "You'll be back. They all come back."
He didn't. At Cal, he was among the founders of the Radical Jewish Union, a student group that patterned itself after early 20th-century Labor Zionists, setting himself on a path of secular Zionist activism he maintained for the rest of his life.
"He was an unapologetic left-wing Zionist who was critical of many Israeli governments and their policies," his wife told J. "Berkeley was the place he was meant to be."
In the summer of 1970, Biale visited Israel, where he met 17-year-old Rachel on Kfar Ruppin, the kibbutz where she was born and raised. Introduced by a mutual friend, the two were immediately drawn together by their mutual love of Jewish history and philosophy, and they spent impassioned hours in intense conversation.
Biale returned to Berkeley in the fall, and the two continued their conversations in letters that, Rachel said, "pretty quickly became very intense." She began her military service in the Israel Defense Forces, and he began working on his master's degree at Cal. The letters continued for almost three years, more than 250 of them.
In 2022, the couple published them in a book, "Aerogrammes Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters."
They married in 1973 on her kibbutz and moved to Los Angeles where he began his Ph.D. work at UCLA.
"I was 20 and David was 23 when we married," said Rachel. "We really grew up together. The way we merged into each other's professional and intellectual work was incredible. We read everything the other wrote."
"Their marriage was exceptional," said Rosenbaum. "They were really destined for each other."
In 1977 David earned his Ph.D. and got a job offer from the State University of New York at Binghamton. The couple lived there for nine years and had two children along the way: Noam in 1982 and Tali in 1985.
In 1986, David was offered a job in Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Although the couple was eager to return to Berkeley, Rachel said that David was reluctant to work at GTU because it was a religious institution. "At his interview, he was asked, 'Which synagogue will you worship at?' And he said, 'None,'" she recalled.
He got the job.
David was the director of Jewish studies at GTU until 1999, when UC Davis recruited him with the offer of an endowed chair in Jewish studies, the position he held until his retirement in 2022.
"He really flourished there," said Rachel. "He loved teaching, he loved his students, especially those who were the first generation in their family to go to college. Lots of students would come talk to him about their personal struggles."
That concern for students was one of the things that Naomi Seidman most admired. Now a professor at the University of Toronto, Seidman replaced Biale at the helm of Jewish studies at GTU when he left.
Seidman said that up-and-coming academics often reach out to established figures for career advice and help. Usually, Seidman said, their pleas are ignored. Biale was an exception.
"David was always meeting them for coffee or going on walks with them. He was always excited about some young, fascinating person he'd just met, so interested in what the next generation is doing."
Sven-Erik Rose, director of Jewish studies at UC Davis, said that Biale was remarkable for the breadth of his intellect and scholarly interests.
"He was able to get into the weeds as well as write broad, compelling narratives of incredible sweep, which is rare in an age of increasing specialization," Rose said. "He was an incredible intellect."
Biale wasn't afraid to take on established notions in Jewish history and dismantle them, or at least scrutinize them carefully.
Rose points to Biale's analysis of an oft-repeated trope that modern Israel represents the first time since 70 CE that Jews have held political power - an idea that Biale took on in his 1986 book, "Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History."
Seidman said that another book, "Cultures of the Jews: A New History," a landmark study of 3,000 years of Jewish history edited by Biale and published in 2002 <https://jweekly.com/2003/01/10/historian-s-latest-effort-raises-lid-on-cultural-issues/>, "put Jewish cultural studies on the map."
"He was the first in so many things," she said.
Steven Zipperstein, Biale's friend for 50 years and the Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford, said that Biale's approach to his scholarly work was in line with what UCLA history professor Amos Funkenstein, their mutual teacher, "insisted were the prerequisites of a real Jewish historian, namely that one write about all aspects of the Jewish past. That's what David tried to do."
Zipperstein said that Biale was able to both insert himself into his writing and remain outside it, scrutinizing his own work in a dispassionate manner that served the material well.
"Although he held very distinct convictions of what was most important in Jewish culture, as in 'Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought,' he understood how certain aspects of Jewishness he personally might not take seriously in his own life were crucial to Jewish people in the past and present, as in the incredible volume 'Hasidism: A New History,'" Zipperstein told J.
"The fact that he did not enter into this as a career, but as someone intent on scrutinizing his own culture, is what gave his work its freshness, its provocativeness and its beauty," Zipperstein added
In addition to his scholarly work, Biale was deeply involved in Jewish issues that mattered to him.
He served on the regional board of the New Israel Fund in its early days and was board president of Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay for several years in the early 1990s.
More recently, in 2021 he and Rachel resurrected Lehrhaus Judaica <https://jweekly.com/2021/06/29/new-lehrhaus-will-rise-from-hamaqoms-ashes/>. The Jewish adult learning program, established in 1974 in Berkeley by Rosenbaum, had precipitously announced its closure in summer 2021, a mere three years after Rosenbaum's retirement.
Now known as New Lehrhaus <https://jweekly.com/2021/09/09/its-back-new-lehrhaus-to-kick-off-first-classes-next-month/>, the revived nonprofit, is flourishing, in large part because of the largely unpaid role played by the Biales.
Biale was also an avid bicyclist. For years he commuted by train from Berkeley to UC Davis <https://jweekly.com/2011/03/18/david-biale-wins-u-c-davis-teaching-award/>, riding his bike to and from the station, rain or shine.
Dodd recalled how, in 1999, Biale persuaded him to train with him for the 2000 California AIDS ride, a grueling trek from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money for AIDS research. They both bought Bianchi bikes, the "Eros" model, which was not coincidentally a playful reference to Biale's 1997 book on Jewish sexuality, "Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Antiquity to Contemporary America."
"We were Team Eros," Dodd said. "He was just a font of enthusiasm about everything, the places he went, the people he met."
The two kept up weekly rides until the cancer weakened Biale too much to continue.
Biale was also a lifelong avid bread baker, fond of sharing his sourdough starter with friends. A week before he died, he gave some to his friend James Gracer, who had served with him on the JFCS board.
"He aged but he never grew old," Zipperstein noted. "There was always that boyish excitement that he never lost."
When Biale received his cancer diagnosis four years ago, he and Rachel faced it head-on. He fought hard, undergoing experimental treatments and bringing his friends along on the journey he was taking toward the end of his life through regular email updates that went into great emotional and physical detail.
"He taught us a lot in the way he passed away," said Rosenbaum. "I was so in awe of the courage, grace and thoughtfulness with which he faced the end."
"He felt it was a journey he was on, and he wanted people to share it with him," said Dodd. "He was so unselfish in giving of himself. I felt privileged to be along for the ride."
Biale is survived by his wife, Rachel Biale; his daughter Tali Biale (Willie Adams) and son Noam Biale (Margaret Graham); and grandchildren Rosemary, Abraham and Milo. He was preceded in death by his granddaughter Anina Biale.
A memorial service is set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Magnes Museum in Berkeley, followed by burial at Gan Shalom in Briones. Shiva will take place Wednesday through Sunday at the Biale home in Berkeley. Donations are suggested to New Lehrhaus and the New Israel Fund.
Editor's note: Sue Fishkoff serves on the board of New Lehrhaus.