A Dean Campbell Caper, The Hasidic Rabbi Who Loved Punk and Jazz, and More!

A.J. Bosco writes: “After months of lockdown Zoom chats graciously organized by Tom Leder, it was great to finally be together in person with classmates. John DeNatale booked the trip for our 7 Carman group, and later that summer, Glenn Smith invited us to his house on Long Beach Island. In December, we got together at Frankie and Johnnie’s Steakhouse in Manhattan.”

Ed Kelly’s news: “I was recently ordained a permanent deacon in the Catholic Diocese of South Carolina. It was a long process: first, years ignoring the inner voice calling me to serve, then, six years of training and schooling (including philosophy — thanks, CC!).

“The timing was right, too (perhaps I should now say ‘Providential’), for, just as I was ready to be ordained, a new chief information officer came in at Wells Fargo who wanted his own team. The bank made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and since then I have loved my new role. Classmates remembering my dissolute youth might be surprised at my new position. However, I have always possessed strong faith, which has strengthened over time. While priests may not marry, the church allows married deacons with four children, like me.”

Ed, Jason Zweig ’82 and Nick Morrow ’82 all knew Ken Colbert well in college but lost touch with him afterward. They were saddened to learn, only recently, of his passing in 2001. Ken came from Xenia, Ohio, where his family had resided for several generations. After college Ken worked in the Washington, D.C., office of local congressman Clarence Brown Jr. (R-Ohio) and for Ford in Memphis. Jason remembers Ken as an ardent supporter of social justice who encouraged equal opportunities for people of color. Ken’s ideals live on in a scholarship started by his sister, Katharine Colbert Krack. It is awarded to a Black or multiracial senior at Xenia H.S. in Xenia, Ohio, who plans to pursue a college degree.

At Columbia, Ken was a quiet, laid-back guy with a keen sense of humor. Ken and Ed lived on 10 Livingston sophomore year. The 10th floors of Hartley, Livingston (now Wallach) and Furnald had only 16 rooms and were generally loosely supervised by the RA downstairs. Ed recalls, “The lack of supervision was to our advantage. On warm evenings, Ken and I would sometimes climb out onto the mansard roof and shoot bottle rockets into the open windows of Butler Library.”

Another of Ed’s stories illustrates Ken’s comedic skills. “One day, I got a letter from the residence hall dean, Roberta Campbell TC’69, stating that my African Grey Parrot was a health hazard and that it must be evicted. Ken advised me to confront the situation head-on and see the dean immediately. All puffed up with righteous indignation, I marched into her office and demanded to know why she wouldn’t let me keep my parrot. Dean Campbell was initially dumbfounded and then extremely amused. The letter was a fake! One of our mutual friends purloined stationery with the dean’s letterhead and falsified the eviction notice. Stifling laughter, Dean Campbell assured me the bird could stay. Fuming, I returned to Livingston and found Ken and the gang laughing uproariously: I had fallen for their brilliant ruse. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. Ken had been recruited to ensure I did not talk myself out of seeing Dean Campbell, and played his role perfectly.”

Nick adds a final Livingston prank: “We taught Merlin the parrot every curse word possible to offend Ed’s mother. And the parrot is alive and cursing today!”

Our class also lost Ira Berkowitz. He died on August 24, 2021, while on a Hasidic pilgrimage in Ukraine. Kenny Young remembers: “Ira and I bonded in summer 1979 at the Central Park Ramones concert. He was a wonderful, complicated, endlessly entertaining guy.

“I think his upbringing on Long Island could be described as secular Orthodox. He attended a high school yeshiva, but my impression was that while religion was important, it didn’t completely dominate the students’ lives. The kids were worldly and interested in the same cultural things as kids everywhere.

“In college, Ira seemed fascinated by nearly every subject: literature and art, zoology and astronomy, philosophy and morality. His musical taste was profoundly eclectic, from Prokofiev to Zappa, from punk/new wave to bebop.

“He was extremely funny, but more than that, he was a student of comedy. I am sure he considered doing stand-up. And he was a talented writer, too.” Years later, Ira wrote A Wolf in the Soul, probably the world’s only novel about a Jewish werewolf. Kenny says: “Ira was always interested in wolves. He thought they were generally misunderstood.”

Ira combined his sense of humor and love of rock ’n’ roll in two college bands. He and Kenny appeared at a Plimpton cabaret (produced by Brian Gygi) as a genre-bending duo, The Nice Pistols. They played a folk medley of Ramones songs, followed by a punk version of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Teach Your Children.”

And then there were the Grubbles. In our time, a “grub” was an epithet reserved for someone who studied obsessively. The Grubbles dressed in nerdy clothing and sang parodies with geeky lyrics, including “Happiness is a 4.0” (based on The Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”); “Smith-Corona” (based on the 1979 hit “My Sharona” ... post ’80s grads: Smith-Coronas were typewriters); and most spectacularly, “God Save the Dean” (based on the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”). Ira (band name: “P Chem”) sang lead on the last, wearing a leather jacket over his dweeby attire, and doing his best nerd-meets-Johnny-Rotten impression. Other Grubbles included Ed Harstead SEAS’80, SEAS’87 (“Diff EQ”); Rich Balekdjian ’80, BUS’85 (“Orgo”); and David Hudson Irvine SEAS’80.

“God Save the Dean” lyrics are available online; for more info, see THE 300, at the end of the column.

Historical gloss: The big campus topic in 1980 was whether the College would go coeducational on its own or merge with Barnard. The “dean” in the song is Barnard president Jacquelyn Mattfeld, who was dismissed by Barnard’s Board of Trustees later that year. (Reportedly, the parody had no influence on their decision.) Rich notes that the song’s prognostications about Barnard were way off, as it is now America’s most selective all-women’s college.

Decades later, Ira became a rabbi, moved to Israel with his family and joined a Hasidic religious community. Kenny reports, “Ira still loved hearing from his old friends, and his sense of humor remained the same. He even kept up with the latest news about The Eggplants (Kenny Young’s band, which played at our 25th reunion; they continue to perform). When cool stuff happens for the band, I still want to share it with Ira and Eric Hansen ’84, but all I can do is look up into the cosmos and hope that somehow they know.”

Wherever Ken and Ira are, they left us too soon, and we miss them.

See this issue’s “Obituaries” for more on Ira.

THE 300: Online Exclusives

We learned about the fascinating Breslov religious community from researching Ira Berkowitz’s life. We hope to discover more by viewing Paul Mazursky’s only documentary: Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy (2006).

At deadline, we found an interview with Ira discussing A Wolf in the Soul. His second novel, All Our Sins and Struggles, a bildungsroman set in 1920s west Texas, was in progress at the time of his death.

Finally, a brief word from Kevin about Lou Antonelli, whose obituary appeared in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue.

Lou, David Edelstein ’79, Jay Marcus ’80 and I were all College senators. We recalled Lou’s great, wacky, sense of humor. Jay remembers: “While Lou often wanted to make a point about his belief in conservativism, he also reminded us of the basic humanity that guides those who are sincere about their politics, whatever their ideology. It always struck me that he cared not only passionately about his policies, but also passionately about other people.” David adds, “Can anyone imagine a world today where liberals and conservatives generally like, admire and respect one another?” We hope, someday, we will get there again. Until next time ...

Listen to a live recording of “God Save the Dean.”

God Save the Dean, by Diff EQ and P Chem

God save the dean

The Mattfeld regime

And if there’s no merger

Barnard’s got no future

God save the dean

She ain’t no human being

And there’s no future

In Barnard’s dreaming

You charge two thousand for a room in Jay

Change your mind every other day

There’s no future

No future for you

God save the dean

Because students mean money

And your figurehead

She ain’t what she seems

You say you want a women’s college

But all you want to do is keep your job

There’s no future no future

No future for you