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February 19, 2020 - Image 12

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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’?

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