Columbia vs the Jews

History repeats itself

“He had ‘discovered’ that Jews dominated the liberal press in Vienna and the city’s cultural and artistic life, that they were behind the Social Democratic movement - Marxism. Triumphantly he had at last found an answer to the original question he had posted about the Jew. ‘The Jew was no German.’

[…] Many answers have been given and perhaps many are needed, for no single theory can satisfactorily explain Hitler’s phenomenal success with the German people. They were mesmerized by his voice, and they responded to his message. Was it because their moral sense, at least with regard to the Jews, had become atrophied under the effect of generations of virulent antisemitism? Had the German people already become mithridatized by antisemitic poison, so that they had become immune even to Hitler’s deadly brand? Was it because he spoke for them?”

- The War Against the Jews, Lucy S. Dawidowitz.

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A cool thing about being an American Jew right now is you never know which person in your community is going demonstrate how antisemitism is a part of American culture. That the epicenter of modern Jew-hatred over the past year is Columbia University is no accident. Worse, Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is multilayered and nuanced — never a good thing for the Jews, especially in a society that expects $20 jeans delivered to their door yesterday.

I am a Columbia graduate (MFA), as is my husband (PhD), my brother (BS and PhD) and my grandfather (JD). Culturally, Jews value education, and Jewish refugees to America prioritized it above all else as a means to social mobility. And where do the most Jews live in the United States? Jew York City, with 1.4 million of us in the greater metropolitan area , and a whopping 10% of the NYC population.

Thus, the institutions overwhelmed with applications from Jewish students are always NYU, CUNY, Hunter and Columbia. All four institutions have been shaped by both Jews and American antisemitism. My great uncle’s father was the first Jew to graduate from NYU Medical School, in the late 1800¹s. At the same time, the crush of Eastern European Jewish refugees crowding the lower east side of Manhattan began applying to college.

An essay in Commentary from the 1970s explains: “The spectacle of over one million Jews clustered in New York City aroused the predictable xenophobic reaction. America now had a “Jewish problem,” and American nativism a new target. The essence of the “Jewish problem” was how to control the influx of Jews into areas of social activity that were predominantly Protestant.”

Previously, university was for Protestants, which meant you got in with a diploma from Andover, a gin and tonic and a handshake. But now, impoverished Jews with perfect grades — class valedictorians like my grandfather — were banging at the gates, demanding entrance into an exclusive club. And when you admitted them, they weren’t regular college boys. They didn’t play sports in the quad after class, instead racing to jobs or home to help their families. thus Columbia added athleticism and a swimming test to their admissions requirements. The Jews wore shabby clothes rather than J Press². They didn’t sit in the beer hall singing college drinking songs. When Columbia thought about what a Columbia Man should be, Jewish, poor and exceedingly studious were not characteristics that sprang to mind.

Commentary again: “One writer in 1910 observed that in colleges there were “two classes, the one, favored according to undergraduate thinking, holding its position by financial ability to have a good time with leisure for carrying off athletic and other showy prizes; the other class in sheer desperation taking the faculty, textbooks, and debating more seriously. Each class runs in the same rut all its life.”

Columbia quickly closed their doors by rejecting anyone with a Jewish name. Jews responded by changing their last names, which is why I am Schank and not Schenkolowski. (Thank you antisemitism, for sparing me the task of spelling Schenkolowski for dinner reservations? Comment below if your name was also changed.)

Not wanting to be bested by a bunch of swarthy, hairy impoverished people, Columbia decided they now wanted a “regional balance” of students, allowing them to admit Protestants from across the country and avoid the northeast, where American Jews clustered. Finally, Columbia created an entire second location, in Brooklyn, for the Jews.

It was Columbia, sort of, not really, but good enough for a dirty Jew like Isaac Asimov³. Then, in a final stroke of genius, Columbia’s president invented the college interview. The man who developed this device, likely still used to limit Jewish enrollment, was President Butler. Yes, my fellow Columbians, Butler Library, where you spent many wonderful hours, is named after an antisemite who never recognized his own role in cementing antisemitism into American culture.

After Columbia staunched the flow of Jews, Jewish enrollment at CUNY and Hunter hit 90% . And, Jews began to swamp NYU, which earned the name of … NYJew. (Why can’t antisemites be more creative?) In the midwest the same thing was happening at the University of Michigan, or Jew U, and in the south, at Tulane (Jewlane!).

My grandfather was an NYJew undergrad in the 1920s, lived with his aunt in Brooklyn to save on rent, wore his ROTC uniform every day because he was a growing boy and he had no other clothes, and lived off of 5c Hershey Bars. He did not play lacrosse or drink in a beer hall. He did learn the Columbia fight song, which he turned into a super sexist ditty about WACs and WAVEs⁴ during World War 2. We used to sing it at Passover, along with a host of other WW2 drinking songs. (I kept the other songs for my own Seders and jettisoned the sexist cringe ode to Columbia⁵.)

After the Holocaust, in the heady days of post-war unity, American universities claimed to open their doors wide open to Jews. Come on in, Jews. Don’t join our fraternities, and try to play at least a little lacrosse or wear a polo shirt and loafers, but whatever, man. We’re all equal now. By 1967, 40% of Columbia students were Jewish. And, support for Israel was high. People remembered the Holocaust, and thought Jews deserved a little slice of their indigenous land on which to create their own Jewish state.

Today, Jewish student enrollment has dropped sharply across the Ivies, to 20% at Columbia (which also houses a Rabbinical school), and 9% elsewhere. While I was a student there, I was a Jew in a not-very-Jewish program. On my second or third day of school, I stayed after class to correct a professor’s pronunciation of my name⁶. Then, she asked me if I knew how to pronounce the name of another student in the class — the other Jew, as it happened. Was she asking me because I was a Jew?

I was 30 by the time I got to graduate school, and aware of how lightly Jews must tread in America. I’d already been paired with another New York Jew as my undergrad roommate at a very midwestern school, encountered students who’d never met a Jew but had some preconceived notions about New Yorkers that hewed closely to antisemitic tropes. At my job as a change management consultant, and later at dot com startups, I’d begrudgingly participated in Secret Santa exchanges, and quietly used vacation days to observe Jewish holidays. I’d dated a slew of non-Jewish men who thought I was marriage material if only I’d get over the whole Jewish thing.

The thesis I wrote at Columbia, which became my first book, was about the insanity of wedding planning. I left the fact that it was a Jewish wedding until the end, because I didn’t want to be known as a Jewish writer. When the book came out, another Jew review bombed it as Chick Lit, which was just as bad.

But what surprised me at Columbia was the prevalence of Marxism. I was coming from the private sector, where people’s jobs required them to sit in front of MS DOS and later Windows for 8 hours, swap voicemails, run meetings, and attend PowerPoint training. They did this to pay their bills and feed their families, which is generally why people work. Yet somehow everyone at Columbia believed they were smarter, wiser, and more equitable than the people in the private sector. The private sector was BAD. Academia was GOOD. Therefore, anything that happened on campus was true and correct.

Which is how we get to today. I didn’t go to Columbia to learn about Marxism. I went to learn how to be a writer. I bushwhacked my way through the Marxist theory to become the writer I am today. My husband went to learn the intricacies of Russian Literature, then ditched academia when he was asked to personally save the field of Russian Literature, ideally with post-colonialism and Marxist theory. My brother went to get a decent college education and a leg up in American society. My grandfather, to claw his way out of poverty and into an American life.

Whatever your feelings about the events on the Columbia campus, I am certain no one has been getting an education there for some time. People are learning all the wrong things, protesting all the wrong things, directing their anger at all the wrong people, and Jews, again, will be the ones who suffer.

Antisemitism is thoroughly baked into American culture. All Jewish women are either The Nanny or Glee’s Rachel Berry, both hilariously, Jewishly unattractive, pushy and annoying⁷. And, all men are either the nerdy schlub Ross Geller, lusting after a shiksa goddess he can never have, or greedy hooked-nose goblins of Gringott’s Wizarding Bank. It doesn’t take much to fan the flames of something that has been ever-present in the culture.

Like Germany pre-World War I, most Americans already understand antisemitic tropes, no matter how much they might protest. One of my Columbia professors, a man who I respected as a writer, revealed himself to be a clueless White man shortly after 10/7, when I shared that my cousin’s memoir about surviving Auschwitz was only available for purchase from a White Supremacist book store in Texas. He commented, “Why would a White Supremacist bookstore want a book about Auschwitz?”

Naturally, he has also been posting Hamas propaganda, and recommending books that offer a one-sided take to the situation in Gaza. He was my first workshop professor, which is a big deal in an MFA program — you always remember your first workshop professor.

The Auschwitz comment was devastating. Here was someone I knew and respected, despite his Marxist view, someone I considered well-read and high educated, who could not figure out what White Supremacists might have against Jews. But, his view is to be expected. America is awash in antisemitic tropes, so deeply rooted we don’t even notice them. And our universities are the epicenter of the fight.

Predictably, well-meaning people have fallen for the world’s oldest hatred, with massive rallies for a Palestinian terrorist, rather than massive rallies to free the American Jews held hostage by the same terrorists. You might wonder what a terrorist was doing at Columbia in the first place, unless you know that Columbia wants Jew hatred. They court it. They never stopped being antisemitic. Importing foreign terrorists as students is simply their latest attempt at keeping Jewish student enrollment low.

So I ask, of these people rallying behind the terrorist student Mahmoud Khalil: is it because their moral sense, at least with regard to the Jews, has become atrophied under the effect of generations of virulent antisemitism? Have American universities already become mithridatized by antisemitic poison, so they’ve become immune to this new pro-Hamas brand? Or is it because Mahmoud Khalil speaks for them?

1. I said this to a friend once who quipped: I was the 100,000th Jew to graduate from NYU Medical School.

2. Jacobi Press, also a Jewish refugee, changed his name and became famous as the tailor and later clothier to the preppie elite.

3. https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/gatecrashers

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAVES

5. Hail to the WACs/ Hail to the WAVEs / Hail to the lass who packs a gun / giver her some paint and a little powder too / and we’ll soon have the Nazis on the run.

So here’s to the ladies of the armies of our nation / But who will carry on the job of propagation?

6. YOU try going through American life with Hebrew first and middle names and a fake last name. My name is not pronounced Hannah. It is an attempted Americanization of Chana, which my parents knew no American would be able to pronounce.

7. DO NOT Mrs. Maisel me; she’s not played by a Jewish actor.