Eli Katz, a noted Yiddish scholar, translator and professor whose refusal to answer questions about his political affiliations and beliefs led to his dismissal from the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1964 and ignited a fight over academic freedom, has died. He was 77.
Katz died July 22 at a Berkeley hospital from complications after his third stroke, his family said.
The Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrant union activists, Katz was an acting assistant professor of German at UC Berkeley in 1963-64 when his departmental colleagues recommended him for a permanent appointment.
Chancellor Edward W. Strong, however, declined to renew Katz's contract because of his alleged membership in the Communist Party and his refusal to answer questions about it.
In 1959, Katz reportedly had been identified by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as having been a member of the Communist Party two years earlier. Appearing before the committee, Katz invoked the 5th Amendment when asked if he had attended two party meetings in 1957.
While employed as a teaching assistant at UCLA in 1958, Katz had signed the loyalty oath required of all state employees stating that he had not belonged to any subversive organization within the previous five years.
Katz, whose 1963 doctoral dissertation for UCLA was on medieval Yiddish, signed another loyalty oath before joining the UC Berkeley faculty later that year.
Katz's dismissal from Berkeley, according to a UPI news account at the time, "set off a fight that brought faculty condemnation of Strong."
"It became an important case for faculty independence at the university," Katz's son, Dan, told The Times on Monday. "On the one hand, certainly it was one of the last examples of McCarthyite persecution -- it was happening well after the heyday of McCarthyism.
"It had to do with a whole other era, the free speech movement, and the right of the faculty to be independent in terms of their assessments of someone's qualifications and ability to teach or not to teach in their department and be free from administrative interference.
"I think his case was important to many people in the faculty who might not be particularly interested in the specifics of his own political position."
Katz said his father's dismissal from Berkeley "was very disappointing and difficult for him. He felt he was not being allowed to pursue his career based on his merits as a scholar and a teacher."
