Sometimes, the headlines from 2024 are reprints from 1924. “Harvard Was Unresponsive to Antisemitism,” the Wall Street Journal headlines its story on the findings of a report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Of course it was. It’s an Ivy League tradition.
“Life finds a way,” we all learned from Jurassic Park. Jewish life found a way in the United States, progressing down paths that are obvious only in retrospect. When Ivy League schools intensified their discrimination against Jewish applicants in the early 20th century, many Jewish students who were more interested in becoming doctors or lawyers than in becoming Whiffenpoofs pursued their educations at institutions such as City College in New York (now CUNY), and, whether they intended to or not, raised the academic and cultural standards of those institutions far above what they had been.
That was Jewish-American immigrant…
