In the last seven years, the percentage of Harvard undergrads who are Jewish has plummeted 60%, from 1 in 4 students, to 1 in 10. Considering that Jews make up maybe 2% of the American population that’s still a significant overrepresentation but the drop should be concerning, particularly as surveys show that Jewish students and faculty have found college campuses to be increasingly intolerant of Jews and traditional Jewish values. Just to give one example, a variety of affinity organizations at the University of California Berkeley law school have deplatformed “Zionist” speakers. Considering that the traditional Jewish prayerbook makes dozens of references to Zion and the return of Jews to it, those organizations have effectively deplatformed any Jew that isn’t filled with craven self-hatred.
I suppose that on today’s campuses, Jews are accepted, just so long as they don’t get too, you know, Jewish.
Gentlemen’s Agreement was a 1947 film starring Gregory Peck as a gentile journalist who poses as a Jew to do a story about anti-semitism. Based on a novel of the same name by Laura Hobson, the movie was produced by Darryl Zanuck, apparently inspired by being rejected for membership at the Los Angeles Country Club because the club mistakenly thought he was Jewish.
The title was an allusion to the social compact under which American Jews had economic and academic opportunities, just so long as they knew their place and didn’t dominate institutions that had previously been redoubts of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant elites. They could go to medical school, in controlled numbers, but they’d have to start their own hospitals if they wanted to get staffing privileges. They could sell insurance, but they’d never get a manager’s position back at the Connecticut headquarters.
Institutions like Ivy League colleges implemented both formal and informal restrictions on Jewish success. When the ambition and drive of the children of immigrants led to large fractions of entering classes being Jewish in the 1920s, Harvard and other Ivy League schools started restricting the admission of Jews based on non-academic criteria like “collegiality”, similar to how elite universities today maneuver to reduce the percentage of Asian students. In some cases there were hard quotas on the number of Jews allowed admission to those colleges.
Much of that academic establishment’s prejudice against Jews faded in the post WWII era as colleges competed for both prestige and tuition dollars from military veterans using their educational benefits. Harvard and Yale decided that being known as the best and the brightest was more important than being finishing schools for the affluent. With the rise of standardized tests like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and MCAT, America’s elite academic institutions had influxes of Jews, Italians and eastern European ethnics to both the student bodies and faculties.
Half a century ago I warned my liberal Jewish friends, particularly women, that supporting “affirmative action” to increase the number of racial minorities and women admitted to higher education was necessarily going to negatively impact the one group most highly overrepresented in the academic world, Jewish men. They might kvell over their daughters getting into Yale Law, but it meant their sons would have fewer opportunities, it’s just simple arithmatic.
Maybe they thought that the alligators would eat them last, or maybe they thought that their own academic and economic success would insulate them and their offspring from the consequences of the policies they endorsed, but today we are seeing those particular chickens come home to roost, and they don’t seem like very kosher chickens.
IIRC the SAT was part of the plan to keep Jews out. Might be a myth but supposedly the creators believed one could not prepare for it. Somehow a guy named Kaplan (not sure which church he attended) figured out that it was possible to prepare. I wonder what became of him.
Interesting. Thank you.
A friend of mine graduated from Yale Law in the mid-'90s. We had a conversation about his enrollment process for Yale a couple of years ago. He was very bright but the first from his family to attend law school, let alone an Ivy League law school. While a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, his lineage wasn't WASP-y, but more hard-working agrarian roots. His academic achievements were strong, but he knew that Yale was a long shot. Needless to say, he succeeded. He felt fortunate to get into Yale and sensed that he was a bit of a diversity choice aided by a strong essay. He went on to achieve success in both the public and private sectors due to his tenacity and drive.
In comparison, I asked him about one of his infamous classmates who seemingly arrived solely due to his father's position in society. He rolled his eyes in disgust. He explained that the person rarely came to class. "When he did show up for class, he was either drunk or high...and wore sunglasses!"