T

he words poured over the crowd 
gathered on the Diag like a warm 
blanket, 
our 
collective 
voices 
growing in volume and conviction: 
Bless those in need of healing with re’fuah 
shlemah 
the renewal of body,
the renewal of spirit
and let us say, amen.
The Mi Sheberach — a Jewish prayer — 
pleads for complete physical and spiritual 
healing. It is sung to help those we know and 

those we don’t. It is sung for Jews and non-
Jews. My aunt sings it every time she sees an 
ambulance speed by. It’s a hymn of immense 
pain and effortless beauty, and in that 
moment on the Diag, as hundreds gathered to 
mourn an event that had shaken many of us 
to our core, it fully embodied both.
One day prior, on Oct. 27, 2018, Robert 
Bowers, a white supremacist, walked into 
the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and 
opened fire, killing 11 people and wounding 
six others. After he was apprehended, Bowers 

reportedly told officers “that he wanted 
all Jews to die” and that “(Jews) were 
committing genocide to his people.” 
“Screw the optics,” Bowers wrote on Gab, 
a social media platform popular among white 
supremacists, hours before the attack. “I’m 
going in.” 
I was born over 50 years after the end of 
World War II, when the height of fascism in 
Europe led to the systematic extermination 
of six million Jews in the Holocaust. In the 
time immediately following the war, anti-
Semitic attacks dissipated. For many in 
my generation, anti-Semitism was more 
theoretical than reality; we heard about it, 
read about it, knew it existed but rarely saw 
it in our day to day lives.
We are taught from an early age, in books 
and history courses, that learning about 
our collective past informs the present 
and predicts the future. It’s a truism in our 
culture. But perhaps we cannot understand 
the value of this currency until we’ve lived 
it. The turbulent history of Judaism follows 
a through line of oppression and bigotry. To 
count the groups that have sought to exclude 
or remove us would be a tireless task.
I knew this history. I attended Jewish day 
school for nine years, participated in Jewish 
youth groups throughout high school, joined 
a Jewish fraternity upon arriving at the 
University of Michigan and held Judaism 
central to my identity along the way.
The Pittsburgh shooting was a glass-
shattering moment for me — an abrupt 
confrontation with the lively threat of Jewish 
hatred. Nationally, it was an awakening to 
the rise of modern anti-Semitism in the U.S., 
much of which is subtle, some of which is not. 
According to the Anti-Defamation League, 
the jump in anti-Semitic attacks from 2016 
to 2017 was the largest increase in American 
history, from 1,267 anti-Semitic “incidents” 
to 1,986 “incidents.” That number has largely 
leveled off in the years since, establishing 
a startling norm. The incidents ranged 
from swastikas painted in public spaces to 
shootings at Jewish centers. Bowers’s attack 
was the most extreme, but it was not an 
outlier.
The best way to remedy this pain is 
through community, a central aspect of 
Jewish culture. That was how I found myself 
on the Diag that day, holding up my phone 
flashlight in the cold, dreary drizzle. I looked 
around and saw dozens of my friends. We 
hugged. Some cried. It was brief, but healing. 
As such, I knew why I was on the Diag 
mourning the loss of people I did not know, 
alongside our shared community. Though 
unofficial, the University of Michigan Hillel 
website estimates there are approximately 

6,500 Jewish students at U-M, accounting 
for roughly 14 percent of the student body. 
In the United States as a whole, Jews make 
up just 1.9 percent of the population.
What I did not know was how: How, 
exactly, did the primary state school in 
Michigan, which has the 23rd-highest 
percentage of Jews in the nation, become a 
hub for Jews all over the country? How did 
this random Midwestern school find itself on 
lists of top Jewish schools? 
What I came to understand through 
researching this central question in books, 
articles, interviews and documents was that 
simply learning that history was too narrow. 
We all must confront a more uncomfortable 
question, 
one 
that 
extends 
beyond 
understanding where we come from.
Why should we care?
N

early 100 years ago, Harvard 
University 
President 
Abbott 
Lawrence Lowell sat in an office 
somewhere in Cambridge, Mass., and 
pondered a solution to his “Jewish Problem” 
— a phrase with deep historic origins. 
“The essence of the ‘Jewish Problem’ was 
how to control the influx of Jews into areas 
of social activity that were predominantly 
Protestant,” wrote Stephen Steinberg in 
Commentary Magazine.
Higher education, to that point, was one of 
those spaces.
By 1922, Jews made up over one-fifth of 
Harvard’s freshman class, with some reports 
indicating that number reached as high 
as 27 percent by the mid-1920s. There were 
just over three million Jews in the U.S. at the 
time, accounting for less than 3 percent of the 
population. Families who fled from pogroms 
and anti-Semitic violence across the globe 
in the late-1800s and early-1900s had begun 
to place a foothold in the system of higher 
education. 
That influx led to an unease within 
the 
education 
system. 
Leaders 
like 
Lowell worried about the disruption a 
disproportionate Jewish population at elite 
universities might cause.
“We learned that it was numbers that 
mattered; bad or good, too many Jews were 
not liked,” Harry Starr, an undergraduate at 
Harvard at the time, recalled to the Jewish 
Virtual Library. “Rich or poor, brilliant or 
dull, polished or crude — (the problem was) 
too many Jews.”
What ensued was an informal but 
systematic 
quota 
system 
created 
to 
quell Jewish enrollment at Harvard and 
other Ivy League schools. According to a 
2005 profile from Malcolm Gladwell titled 
“Getting In,” the Harvard admissions 
office poured through its student records 
in the 1920s to assign its students a 
designation — “j1” for someone who was 
“conclusively” Jewish, “j2” where there was a 
“preponderance of evidence” of Jewishness, 

“j3” for the “possibility” of Jewishness.
Gladwell writes that Princeton sent 
representatives to competitive boarding 
schools in order to rate potential candidates 
from 1 to 4 on “desirability” based on physical 
appearance and other subtle factors that 
could hint at a Jewish background. Yale 
began to center physical appearance with its 
applicants. Masculinity. Height. Charisma. 
Background. All euphemisms, all deliberate. 
The process was quiet but effective. In order 
to limit Jewish overflow, these schools had to 
change the definition of merit entirely.
By the end of Lowell’s term at Harvard 
in 1933, Jewish enrollment had dropped 
to 15 percent. Yale cut down to 10 percent. 
In 1986, Yale publicly admitted in a book 
titled “Joining the Club” that it perpetuated 
discrimination on the basis of religion for 
several decades. A memo from the admissions 
chairman in 1922 titled “Jewish Problem” 
implored limits on “the alien and unwashed 
element,” according to a New York Times 
article. It also solidified prior historical 
understanding that Yale limited its student 
Jewish population to 10 percent for over 40 
years.
“There were vicious, ugly forms of 
discrimination at Yale, as with the larger 
society,” the then-University Secretary at 
Yale, John A. Wilkinson, told the New York 
Times. “It’s part of our history, and we should 
face up to it.”
During 
the 
same 
time 
frame, 
the 
University of Michigan’s Jewish population 
began to grow rapidly. Though U-M has 
never asked about religious affiliation 
directly on its application or campus surveys, 
University of Michigan Hillel and academic 
estimations shed light on this growth.
From 1915 to 1936, the timeframe in which 
many Ivy League schools were believed to be 
implementing Jewish quotas, U-M’s Jewish 
population grew from just over 200 students 
to nearly 1000, according to the Ira Smith 
Papers and Student Christian Association. 
That amounted to an increase from 5 percent 
of the student body to 10 percent in a relatively 
short period of time. 
So it’s intuitive to connect the growth of 
the Jewish community at U-M, the one that 
gathered in the Diag after the Pittsburgh 
shooting, to the discrimination at Ivy 
Leagues: The community I’ve socialized 
with, lived with, cried with, sung with. 
It’s logical, given that context, to lift the 
University on a pedestal; to laud a history 
of tolerance and perseverance; to exude 
unabashed pride. This is a reputation the 
University touts. The Michigan difference. 
Leaders and the best.
Tossed in the middle of the fourth 
paragraph of the “History” section of 
the University of Michigan’s Wikipedia is a 
lofty sentence along those lines:
“The University became a favored choice 

for bright Jewish students from New 
York in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Ivy 
League schools had quotas restricting the 
number of Jews to be admitted.”
“These schools are suddenly seeing all 
these Jewish students and saying ‘We don’t 
want this many Jewish students,’ ” Karla 
Goldman, a Judaic Studies professor, told me. 
“So do they come to Michigan?”
Then a pause and a sigh.
“Um…”
G

oldman sits in the back corner 
of her fourth-floor School of 
Education 
office 
and 
pores 
through 
spreadsheets. 
She 
shows 
me 
yearbooks from the 1930s, in which she 
scours home addresses, parental information 
and occupations in order to establish highly-
educated guesses about who was Jewish.
Documents and books line the walls, her 
computer tucked in the back left corner, 
enclosed by a fortress of miscellaneous 
papers. It’s got a real Robin Williams’s-office-
in-“Good Will Hunting” kind of vibe.
But Goldman’s focus is narrow. She’s spent 
months researching the very question I’ve 
come to ask her: Is there definitive proof that 
U-M’s robust Jewish community originates 
directly from the quotas at Ivy League 
schools in the early to mid-20th century?
And before those words can even depart 
my mouth, she dives in.
“There is some part of University of 
Michigan oral history lore, when it talks 
about itself as a diverse institution, that points 
to that time. That while these Northeast elite 
schools were excluding Jewish students that 
Michigan welcomed them,” Goldman says, 
careful to leave causation at an arm’s length. 
“It’s kind of an informal history, so people 
will mention that.”
She continues.
“I think it’s very likely that the quotas 
at a lot of northeastern schools created a 
movement of northeast Jews, in particular, 
sort of looking farther west than they 
otherwise would have — that’s likely. The 
thing we don’t know is: What was the status 
of Jewish students at Michigan? Are we 
assuming there weren’t quotas? There’s not 
the same kind of smoking gun evidence thus 
far.”
It’s clear she’s spent a considerable amount 
of time in search of that “smoking gun” 
evidence, and is as disappointed to share as I 
am to hear that no such evidence exists. 
“I mean, it was really serious work they 
did at Harvard, Princeton and Yale to keep 
Jews out, and many other schools,” Goldman 
said. “We don’t see that effort here. That’s 
interesting. (And) it’s not that we don’t see 
anti-Semitism. We see it.”
One such area in which anti-Semitism 
crept into the admissions realm was graduate 
school applications. While, again, there was 
no direct invocation of religious affiliation 

on the application, it is clear Jews were at 
a disadvantage given the large number of 
Jewish applicants U-M’s graduate schools 
received annually.
In one case, now publicly available, a 
recommendation for a Jewish dental school 
applicant makes explicit reference to that 
double standard.
“Mr. (redacted) is Jewish but not the loud 
offensive type of Jew,” the recommendation 
said. “He is courteous, pleasant, courteous 
of others and very hard working. … So I am 
hoping that he will be admitted in spite of his 
Hebraic origin.” 
In 1935, two students were expelled for 
something the school categorized as “radical 
behavior.” Both students were from the New 
York area. It’s widely understood, though 
not explicitly stated, that both were Jewish, 
according to Goldman. The expulsions 
sparked an internal discussion about forming 
a quota at U-M, limiting the number of 
students from New York and New Jersey 
— the backbone of the out-of-state Jewish 
population at U-M.
“And it’s clear they were discussing: 
Should we limit these Jewish students who 
come here and tend to be radical?” Goldman 
said. “They decide not to do it.”
At this time, the same infrastructure of the 
Jewish community that exists today began 
to take shape. The University of Michigan 
Hillel — the central hub for Jewish social 
and academic programming — was founded 
in 1926, becoming the third Hillel on the 
continent. At the time, Jews were isolated 
to the same dormitories (often Mosher-
Jordan Residence Hall). Jewish fraternities 
and sororities formed, as the sole source for 
Greek life inclusion for Jewish students. In 
the 1933-1934 school year, for example, the 
84 students who self-identified as “Jewish” 
in Greek life were the sole members of seven 
fraternities on campus. In the 41 other 
fraternities, not a single member identified 
as “Jewish.” Alignment of sorority members 
followed a similar spread.
Slowly, overt anti-Semitic acts that were 
once commonplace began to dissipate. 
Jewish 
quotas, 
anecdotally, 
ceased 
to 
exist by the 1960s. As campuses continued 
to diversify demographically, Jews began to 
pass as white, gaining many of the privileges 
that come with it. Harvard in the 1920s, for 
example, almost exclusively comprised of 
white Protestants and Jews. As colleges 
become a melting pot for people of all races, 
ethnicities and religions, it became harder to 
stigmatize Jews as “the other.”
Anti-Semitism in the modern context 
exists more subtly. Many of those flashpoints 
on campus manifest through the blurred lines 
of good-faith critiques of Zionism and bad-
faith swipes at Jews writ large. The Trump 
administration’s Executive Order, one issued 
under the guise of Title VI of the Civil Rights 
Act, complicates those matters by blanketly 
conflating all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, 
and by unilaterally categorizing Judaism as a 
race.
These defined identities only muddle 

conversations, much of which manifests in 
campus environments.
“I’ll tell you what my hope is, my wish is, 
for a college environment,” Goldman said. 
“Instead of being the place where we have 
these flashpoints of conflict, we’re actually 
all here together, could this be the place 
where we actually are able to engage each 
other in ways that aren’t possible elsewhere 
in society?”
I

n academic terms, Goldman’s venture 
is a noble one. The history of the 
Jewish people — one littered with 
oppression and perseverance — extends to 
the higher education system some take for 
granted today. She wants to know whether 
U-M’s self-image of acceptance holds true. 
She’s interested in proving whether the 
causal claim at the core of Jewish community 
at U-M passes muster. I am, too.
But why should students who may not have 
grown up in New York or New Jersey, or may 
not be Jewish, care about the origins of the 
strong Jewish community at U-M? That was 
the question I posed to Goldman near the 
end of our conversation, and one I’d grappled 
with plenty.
“It both reshapes our sense of what that 
time was, the presence of anti-Semitism in 
spaces that we’re used to thinking as very 
comfortable, very easy presence,” Goldman 
said. “So there’s that. We also tend to think 
of the university as a very static thing. But it’s 
not, it’s changed so much.” 
“And then when you begin to think of 
inclusion now and exclusion. … You have to 
think about, well, in what sense is university 
meant to be an institution for privilege — a 
place to perpetuate privilege, which it is. 
But also, to what extent is it meant to be a 
place that creates opportunities as a point of 
access for people who start without a lot of 
privilege.”
That last point stuck with me. In 2018, a 
group sued Harvard for discriminating 
against 
Asian 
students 
in 
admissions 
processes, claiming it weighted race too 
heavily in admissions processes at the 
expense of merit. It was, once again, a 
challenge of affirmative action. The suit, 
though hardly a facsimile of the claims 
about Jewish quotas in the 1920s, resurfaces 
difficult questions about merit. Who belongs? 
Who does not? Who gets to make that 
distinction? We are all here, on this campus, 
because that determination about us was 
made in the affirmative. Acceptance. Are we 
willing to grapple with why?
These difficult questions are ones those 
with the privilege of existing in higher 
education are not forced to confront. They 
are questions that have persisted for decades 
and will continue for many more.
They are not questions I, nor my peers, 
considered on the Diag when we sang, 
reveling in the intense healing of community.
But we’re here and we’re singing the Mi 
Sheberach and that, in itself, is an immense 
luxury. 
If only for a moment, all that matters is not 
where we’ve been, but where we are.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020 // The Statement
4B
5B
Wednesday, February 19, 2020 // The Statement

BY MAX MARCOVITCH, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

INFOGRAPHICS BY JONATHAN WALSH

Was Michigan an answer to the ‘Jewish Problem’?

