>> Joan Weeks: On behalf of all my colleagues in the African and Middle Eastern Division, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to everyone. I'm Joan Weeks. I'm the assistant chief of the division, and we are very pleased to present today's program cosponsored by the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. However, before we start today's program, Joining the Club, A History of Jews in Yale and Sharon Horowitz introduces our speaker, Dan Oren, I'd like to give you just a brief overview of our division and its resources in the hopes that you'll come back and use our collections. We have just moved our reading room to the beautiful Northeast Pavilion, and I'd like to invite you to come on a brief tour of the reading room after the program. All you need to do is go through the little corridor into the back area and up to the second floor, and you'll see our magnificent new reading room. The AMED Division is custodial, which means that we house the books in the reading room, you can access those books. We have three sections that build and serve the collections to researchers from around the world. We cover over 78 countries and more than two dozen languages. The Africa section includes countries of all Sub-Saharan Africa. The section continues to advise and collaborate in building the collections through the Nairobi overseas offices, as well as provide references and maintain liaisons with other research and teaching institutions in the United States and abroad. The Near East section covers all of the Arab countries, including North Africa and the Middle East, Turkey, Turkic Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia and Georgia. And the Hebraic section is responsible for Judaic and Hebraic worldwide. And I'll Sharon tell you a bit more about that section. And we invite you to connect with us through our Four Corners blog and Facebook. Now I'd like to invite Sharon Horowitz to the podium to give you more details about the Hebraic section, introduce the president of the Jewish Genealogy Society and introduce the speaker. Thank you. Sharon. [ Applause ] >> Sharon Horowitz: Thanks Joan. I'm, as you heard, I'm Sharon Horowitz, reference librarian in the Hebraic section. Before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to call on Ms. Sheila Wexler, president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and a cosponsor of today's program to say a few words about the society. >> Sheila Wexler: Thank you, Sharon. We are very pleased to be here today, and we're very pleased to be a sponsor of this great event. It is something we do every year, and we have come up with some wonderful speakers. Let me mention something about JGSGW. I know that's a mouthful, but it's a little shorter than the full name of Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington. We encompass the DC, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland. We have been in existence for close to 39 years. We currently have about 328 members. And we are here to encourage people to do genealogy, specifically on their Jewish roots. We also educate. We do presentations in addition to our monthly meetings, and we go out and speak to organizations who want to know more about what it is like. Tracing Jewish roots is very different than tracing non-Jewish roots. There are some techniques and things that are certainly the same. We all look at census records, and we all, you know, look at the birth and vital statistics. But we're also interested in a lot of things like immigration and ships' records. We're also tasked with trying to read things in foreign languages. My husband, who's not Jewish, you know, I traipse through many a New England cemetery, and everything's in English. Even back six generations and seven. And if we jump the pond, we're jumping to an English-speaking country. So, we're tasked with figuring out how we read Cyrillic, how we read Yiddish that's written in Hebrew characters. How we are reading all these languages. How we are looking for records that many people say they don't exist anymore except days don't go buy when new things aren't being turned up somewhere. And so we have a lot of sources online and also where you have to go to the location itself. We do not have those holdings. We are not the ones who take those, but we are the ones who give you help through our mavens and our educators to figure out where you go to find these records. What do you do? Where do you start? How do you put together a research plan? What are you looking for? When we met Dan last summer, I believe it was in Warsaw, Poland, and we had 36 of members from JGSGW who went to Warsaw for the conference that was there. I see several of the people here today who were there with us. It was an amazing trip. We had amazing speakers, and that's when we knew that Dan just had to be not only one of our program speakers but also he was an excellent choice for us today. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Sharon, there you are, you're hiding out. Thank you. >> Sharon Horowitz: Thank you. Thanks, Sheila. Okay, let me tell you the Hebraic section considers itself to have begun in 1912 when we received a gift of 10,000 books and pamphlets assembled by Ephraim Deinard and purchased for us by the New York Jewish Philanthropist Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items. Our holdings are in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and other Hebraic script languages. And the Hebraic section also includes an important collection of books in Ge'ez, Amharic and Tigrinya, which are the languages of Ethiopia past and present. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. And one way we accomplish the second goal is by hosting lectures and by having programs such as the one we're having here today. If you would like to be on our email list, Facebook is not the only way to find out about our programs. If you just want to get an email from us in advance of a program, so then see me afterwards and I can add your name to our email list. And now, a word about our speaker. Dr. Dan Oren is an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University. He has worked for 30 years as a psychiatrist and a faculty member at Yale, and he is a former research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Oren's other books are How to Beat Jetlag, a practical guide for air travelers and The Wedding Photo. The latter is a collection of genealogical adventure hunting stories. He is an author or co-author of numerous scientific articles, and his scientific interests center on the mechanisms of lights, antidepressant effects in treating seasonal effective disorder. As far as today's book, joining the club, A History of Jews in Yale, I want to say that a recurring theme of American history is the tension between ethnic and racial minorities and majorities. For the past century, America's universities have witnessed these tensions up close. More than 100 years ago, deans at Yale and other elite universities wrestled with the question of how many Jews deserved college admission and what kind of Jews they were seeking. As one reviewer pointed out, most historians find it difficult to obtain primary materials documenting prejudice, primary source materials, documenting prejudice. Dr. Oren has, therefore, used oral history obtained by interviews to create his story of Yale's discriminatory practice against Jewish students and faculty from 1701 until the mid-1800s. I also want to say that Dr. Oren's books are for sale in the back of the room, and he has graciously agreed to sign any books for anyone that wants. And now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Dan Oren. [ Applause ] >> Dan A. Oren: Thank you for the very kind introduction, and it's really a privilege to be here at the Library of Congress. It takes me back to when I was working on this book many, many years ago, and I first, for one of the part of the book I came to this library to learn about Judah P. Benjamin and other records that were here and just walking into the building that first time is a memory that I will always have. So I'm grateful to be invited back here to share this material today. So I do thank the Library of Congress and the Hebraic section of the African and Middle Eastern Division and Joan Weeks and Sharon Horowitz in particular for your kind invitation to mark Jewish American Heritage Month with this talk. I also thank, and let me go to the first slide. I also thank the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, Mary Jane Roth and Sheila Wexler, for your support of this program as well. Sheila and I were talking before the session began just about how research is done. And before I get to the formal talk, I'll just share with you briefly how I began to work on this. A long time ago in 1976, the bicentennial year, I was young. I didn't have a beard. I had a full head of hair. I was 17-years-old and a young student at Yale. And at that point in my life, from my high school education, I had a really solid high school education in Milwaukee, so I knew a lot about American history. I had a good Sunday school and Hebrew school education and knew a lot about Jewish history in general. But it was the bicentennial year, and I realized that I knew virtually nothing about American and Jewish history. That fall, fall of '76, there was a one-time course being offered at Yale, again, bicentennial fever was in the air, on the topic of American Jewish history and I want to pay my honors to the late Lloyd Gartner who was the professor of that course, the teacher of that course, who came up to Yale every Thursday afternoon. And the assignment for that course, you know, besides coming to class, was one assignment for the whole grade, which was to write a term paper on any subject of our choice in American Jewish history with one caveat. And this goes to [inaudible] and his research, he said that it had to be based on primary sources, original documents. It wasn't enough just to go and read the literature. Yes, one had to read the literature. But one had to get in touch with the primary sources. So that led me not just to do oral interviews, which I did as many as I could, but also go through the primary records where available. And in some cases, there were primary records available that were fascinating. And it became a term paper. And my former colleague and teacher at NIMH, Norm Rosenthal is here. Tom Wear [phonetic], what a treat to see you as well. And also, Tommy, a Yale grad. As sometimes happens with me, an interest became an obsession. So the term paper eventually became a senior paper, and the only way to eventually get it out of my system was to turn it into a book, and that's what I'm sharing here today. I will pay one other respect at the beginning to Professor George Pierson. Was he ever your professor, Tom? He was the chair of the history department probably when you were at Yale. George Wilson Pierson was a descendant of the first president of Yale University, Abraham Pierson. He was probably as blue of blood as exists in this country. Academic royalty and human royalty, almost, if you will. And when I was ready to, when I had done the first 100-page draft of the book, I took the manuscript to him, and I asked him because I knew the university historian needed to read this before, you know, I tried to publish it. By that point, he was retired, he was an emeritus professor in his 80s. I was an undergraduate. He certainly would have had every right in the world to say he had better things to do with his time. But he was very courteous, and he took the, at the end of that academic year, he took the manuscript home with him for the summer to read through it. It was a 100-page manuscript at the time. And at the end of the summer, he took the whole summer for it, and at the end of the summer he sent me back a 10-age single spaced typed response to it where he went through line-by-line, you know, challenging me on every other thing that I was saying. Not necessarily saying that I was wrong, but he was saying, have you thought about this? How do you know that? Can you document that? And that was such a, and it was absolutely the right thing to do, I mean for hose of us who have tried to publish and have published scientific papers, we get it in peer review. This is the very best peer review. And I think, any teacher who gives their students, the people they work with, criticism, if it is constructive, it is the most valuable thing in the world. So I praise George Pierson for all that, for all the mistakes the he helped me avoid along the way. And any mistakes that I share today are mine and not his. So, let me begin. When one's talking about a subject that connects to Yale and to Jews, inevitably, right or wrong, people will go back to the Yale seal. The center of the Yale center has the Hebrew words Urim v'Thummim, and I show this slide in this kind of a talk because it allows me to say that before there were Jews in America, Jews were part of America. And that's represented in part by this seal. Before even the United States was founded, Jews and their ideals were part of the American ideal. Urim v'Thummim are the words you can translate them as was done in the seal, light in truth looks at Veritas. It happened to come from the exact middle verse of the Hebrew Bible. So it's a clue to the person looking at this seal that this book here is a Bible, at least it was at the center of the Yale education when it was founded, and it's a reminder of the Judeo Christian origins to Yale, to Connecticut where it was founded and to the nation. Those Judeo Christian origins, whatever status they are today, the origins are very real. Obviously, Judaism and Christianity are two very different religions with critical theological differences, yet they have common origins, and as I'll come back to later in the talk, in some ways some common outcomes. For the first Western settlers in what would become New England and later the Northeast of the United States of America, Judeo Christian is a fine defining term. And I realize that leaves out the Native Americans who were here already. But those Puritans who first settled, as they called themselves, they were very much Christian. They were also Hebreophiles [phonetic]. An example of this is Benjamin Franklin's suggested design for the great seal of the United States. In this picture which, a design which he proposed and submitted wasn't approved as we know. It shows Moses leading the Israelites after having crossed the Red Sea from Egypt. So why was this part of America's founding? Let's go back to the Yale seal. Well, as I mentioned, the Connecticut area's Puritan founders, and this included up in Massachusetts, the first Puritans who settled into US, what would become the US, they saw themselves as the spiritual successors to the ancient Hebrews. They saw themselves as having experienced an exodus from England to their new promised land in the American colonies. They even called their earlier colonial laws a mosaic code. The Yale seal is testimony to the theological respect that America's Puritan founders had for the ancient Hebrews. They didn't know any Hebrews, but they had tremendous respect for them. I went through, about then years ago, I went to the Yale archives and tried to find the first surviving example of the Yale seal. And Yale was founded in 1701. To the best of our knowledge, a seal wasn't started, wasn't used until about 1722. This is the first surviving seal, the oldest surviving Yale seal. The Diploma of Benjamin Woodbridge, who was graduated in 1740. And as they used to do in those days at the great universities and colleges of the world, the seal wouldn't be stamped. You didn't have a rubber stamp. You didn't have a clamp stamp. You would pour wax on a ribbon and then press the seal. And this, Woodridge's diploma. If you do closeup, it's not in good shape anymore. But with very careful eyes, and it looks better if you see the real thing, you can actually still make out the center of the Yale shield, and take my word, you can make out the letters of the Hebrew, the Urim v'Thummim surrounded by the Latin looks at Veritas. Many people think that the Hebrew on this Yale seal dates back to Yale's president Ezra Stiles. It's a common myth. I want to quickly disabuse you of that myth. Stiles was not president until 1778. I've just showed you a diploma from 1740 where that seal was being used. Now why do people associate Stiles with the Yale seal and with Hebrew? Well, if you, he was a Hebreophile. If you look closely at this painting of his own by Yale University, one of the books on his bookshelf is a Hebrew book, a [inaudible] discussion about by [inaudible] Ibn Ezra. He was friends with Rabbi Carregal, a famous rabbi out of Newport. Stiles made the students at Yale study Hebrew for at least a year or two. And that continued throughout his tenure, and after them, the students pushed that requirement out. It was still on. But if you look at this painting, if you look at that symbol in the upper left in the closeup here, right in the middle again, it's a little hard to read from the screen, but at the center of the disk that's right behind Stiles and the painting are the four letters yud-hey-vav-hey, the Hebrew, the tetragrammaton, the four-letter unpronounceable, unknowable word of the name of God. So it represents, you know, styles like all of Yale's first presidents was a minister. Yale was very much a theologically-oriented school. It was a congregationalist school, although non-congregationalists were also welcome at the school. If you look at Stiles' own diplomas, so this, I have not found yet his bachelor's diploma. It may be that his bachelor's diploma still exists in his family's archives somewhere in the country. But the family donated his master's degree from 1749. Here, one can very clearly see in the Hebrew letters in the middle looks at Veritas. So that clearly when he received his master's degree, it was already in regular use. So, what was Yale about in its founding years? Where did, you know, how did it work? Well, in Yale's earliest years, Yale College was intended to mold the students who would one day lead not just the church but also the public via the civil state. And indeed, the first charter of Yale specifically in 1701 when Yale was founded, Connecticut gave Yale permission to exist in order to train leaders for the church and civil state. In those days, social status was a critical component of student life. For the college's first decades, students were ranked, and they were seated according to their fathers' social positions. First rankings went to the sons of prominent, as sons, by the way, that's going to persist for about 206 years. First rankings went to the sons of prominent church leaders and prominent civil officials. Progeny of less illustrious college educated men were placed in an intermediate position. And trailing the rosters were the sons of ordinary farmers, merchants and artisans. I mention this because as we see from news sources, I'll come back to it, the link between college and status is no less a concern for some people. This ranking system continued until the 1760s, from 1701 through the 1760s. And it's no coincidence that in the 1760s, the students demanded that the ranking system cease and students were arranged in an order that we still use to this day, alphabetical order and like that. But this did not happen in a vacuum because, as we know, America was becoming a place where the fervor for democracy was growing. So what goes on, and this is one central theme, what happens outside the university affects the university and vice versa. Where did Jews fit in? We would do well to remember that in the 18th century, there were very few Jews in the colonies at all and then in the new nation. As late as 1790, there were only about 1,500 Jews among the nearly 4 million Americans. That's less than 1/20th of 1%. Barely visible. A few descendants of immigrant Sephardic Jews entered Yale in the 18th century and early 19th century. In the 19th century though, Yale was still very much a Protestant Christian college. Jews were welcomed as curiosities and as students as long as they attended the required Protestant chapel services each day. And this slide shows the, this is the frontis [phonetic] piece from the main textbook of the college in Yale's first decade. So it's called The Abridgement of Christian Divinity. It reads, this textbook leads us, so exactly and methodically compiled, that it leads us as it were by the hand to the reading of the holy scriptures, the ordering of common places, the understanding of controversies, the clearing of some cases of conscious by John Wollebius, a professor in England, I'm sorry, Switzerland, the University of Basel. This book was said to be like mother's milk to the students at Yale. Yale was not, it wasn't all about a Christian education. That was part of it, but it was also to teach students all of the important secular fields that were necessary to be a leader in the world. This was not true just at Yale. I'm going to show a couple of the other seals of prominent universities that had a Hebraic connection. This is the original seal of Columbia College, originally King's College. You can actually still find this seal in a corner on their website somewhere. And you can see at the very top of the seal is the Hebrew letters, again, yud-hey-vav-hey, the tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name for God. So again, this was part of a mission not unique to Yale but to many of the great, what became the great colleges and universities. Learning about one's place in the cosmos and a relative God was as important as any other kind of learning. Lower on this has two other Hebrew words, ur-e-l [phonetic] God is my light. The next seal is from Dartmouth College. If you look there at the top there are the two Hebrew words El Shaddai, God Almighty. So many of the colleges were founded by deeply religious ministers and their colleagues to try and develop the best leaders. And here, this is the quote from the collegiate school as Yale was first called, from its charter in 1701. The great objective was fitting young men for service both in church and civil state. One of the early Sephardic descendent Jewish students to attend Yale was a man named Judah P. Benjamin. Benjamin was a role model for what Yale education promised of educating future leaders of the country in all different fields. Benjamin became famous, eventually as the secretary of state and briefly the secretary of war for the Confederacy during the Civil War years He was a star student during his two years at Yale. He was a champion in the Undergraduate Debate Society. He was very popular, but he was expelled from Yale after his sophomore year under what remains a cloud of mystery to this day. And many have explored, and I don't think anyone has a definitive answer. However, there's no evidence at all that it's related to his having been Jewish. Some researcher in the last couple years have raised a very intriguing theory which is that it may have related to homosexual activity that was certainly unacceptable at the time. The official records refer to him being expelled for ungentlemanly behavior. Again, it's not clear, there's no key that tells us what exactly they meant, but this is one theory. And it's possible that it may have been found out and then was swept under the rug to protect both Benjamin's name and the Yale name from ruin. Though expelled, he was still held in high regard by his classmates. He lived down in the South. In those states you have to take a train to return home. And he came from a poor family, and when his classmates heard that he was stranded halfway from Yale down to his home without money to get home, his classmates raised the funds to pay for the rest of his train fare home. He later reported his autobiographies and his comments to others that he left because money ran out at home because of poverty. There's no evidence that that is the case. In fact, there is a letter that he wrote to the Yale president after having been expelled a few months later pleading to be allowed back into Yale. We don't know what the reply was, but we do know he never returned. Later in the 19th century, when German Jews started migrating in large numbers to the US and formed Jewish communities, Yale's occasional Jewish students would be excused from mandatory chapel when they attended religious services at the local synagogue. It was still a Christian college, but there was a respect for Jewish students who wish to express their faith in a different manner. Let me start with a slide showing how this, the question of admissions became an issue. In the 1840s, Jews from Germany began to immigrate in significant numbers to this country due to restrictive laws and economic hardship back in Germany. By the 1870s, the numbers start to grow. If you can see from this slide, this just looks at the population in Connecticut. We'll come to the national population later. But in Connecticut, in 1877, about 1,500 Jews were living in the state, making up about a quarter percent of the population. By 1905, that grew to just under 1% of the population. So you had a roughly, it's still a small number, but it's a three-fold increase. And the German Jews, to a significant degree, not universally, but to a significant degree, they became successful in American life. Many working in business and as peddlers. And due to their rapid economic rise, some people in this country started to become fearful. This is not 1877, but you may have thought that when young men marched in Charlottesville two years ago chanting the Jews will not replace us, you may have thought we were witnessing something new. But nativism is never new. It is recurrent and in current America reemergent. I show this slide because it's evidence of what we think the beautiful quotation from William Faulkner who famously wrote, the past is not dead, it is not even past. By the 1870s, German Jews were visible everywhere. And to a significant degree, many of them, not saying all, but many were not well-mannered. They were not polite. As historian John Higham has written about this era, and I quote, Not only were most Jews more or less uncultivated, but there is considerable evidence that many were loud, ostentatious and pushing. The Jew became identified as the quintessential parvenu, glittering with conspicuous and vulgar jewelry, lacking table manners, attracting behavior by clamorous behavior and always forcing his way into society that was above him, unquote. Hold on to those behavioral descriptions, some of which may have been based on truth, often applied stereotypically, but you may later consider the possibility of similar stereotypes applied to other ethnic groups in later generations. With the increasing numbers, and I showed you, we'll go back to this slide, you can see between 1905 when in Connecticut Jews made up about 1% of the population. Between 1905 and 1917, they quintupled in size to about 5% proportion. And this was happening throughout the East as Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Russian persecution and saw the promise of America, which was, welcomed people throughout the world. They came to America, and they became more visible. And the nature of the reception changed. People in Benjamin's days had, Jews had little difficulty in general becoming part of all levels of American society. But by around the turn of the century, in some places, exclusionary behavior began. This is an advertisement from 1906 from a Cape Cod hotel, the Menauhant Hotel, in Menauhant mass it refers to all the beautiful reasons why you should stay at that hotel. It'll be open for the season on June 16th, 1906. It has many things make it delightful. And at the bottom we have no Hebrew patronage. At some of the finer resorts, the Jews were not welcome. Of course, not just Jews. In some places it would be Italians, certainly, some other minorities as well. In 1907, this was an ad placed in Life Magazine, the Life Magazine of this, not an ad, a cartoon, and the caption read, welcome to our city where Christian children may not sing Christian songs in public schools. And if you'll notice, this version of the Statue of Liberty has a very hooked nose. So it's clearly intended as an anti-Jewish sentiment. But what I'm also sharing with you is that some issues are not old and recur. And then Yale, this is the old campus. This is the oldest buildings at Yale. This is a photo of about 1895 shows a gentleman sitting along the old fence. Social classes began to reemerge. People were seated any way they wanted, but within the student tree, there was increasing class consciousness, and education became secondary among the student culture. It was really more becoming prepped, if you will, for leadership in the world and for taking over the world. And at Yale and throughout the great universities of the nation, not just at Yale, the nature of education was changing. Academics were forced to compete with socialization. And religion was also secondary for students and their faculty. Remember, in the 18th century, the great universities, the religion was a core part of the education. By the late 19th century, yes, there was mandatory daily chapel, but it was, there was no other mandatory religious education. It became by that at time a place where people would be competing to be in part of the most elite senior societies an discreet societies. This is a picture of the famous Skull and Bones, they have an expanded building now. And typically, people like the head of the student newspaper, the captain of the football team, would be chosen. Some of the more famous graduates from Yale who entered. The society, presidents George Bush the elder and George Bush the younger. In today's society, Steven Mnuchin, our secretary of the treasury. There were several societies, some had different foci. This is Scroll and Key, a more intellectual society, and some of its most distinguished graduates whose names are recognizable today include Fareed Zakaria of CNN, Garry Trudeau from Doonesbury. And during this time, enrollment at Yale and the other great colleges increased, increased, increased. And it was only natural that with the number of Jews rising in America, the number of Jews attending Yale and its peer institutions would raise as well. After all, then and now, college was seen by many immigrant and middle class families as a ticket out of the ghetto and a ticket to the prosperity that America offered. And an elite college such as Yale could offer a ticket that parents and children hoped would lead them to highest social circles of American life. College was relatively cheap for the era, especially if one lived at home and didn't have to pay college room and board fees. And before the 1920s, virtually any qualified student could gain admission to an elite college, including Yale. You simply had to work hard and apply. And in fact, for a place like Yale, this is a photograph from the 1950s, but what it shows was applicable certainly back in the 1920s. The Yale campus is in the back of the photograph. This is the [inaudible] right next to the old campus I just showed you. This is Phelps Tower. And two blocks away was the Jewish neighborhood, this is synagogue B'Nai Jacob. It was literally two blocks from the campus. And of course, there were many other minorities living in that area as well. But so it was easy for students to live at home but go to college during the day. And especially in towns with a sizable Jewish population, for New York and Columbia, for Boston and Harvard, for New Haven and Yale, Jewish students studied hard, and their parents urged them to take advantage of the local opportunities. The timing of the increased number of Jews entering college paralleled the increase in Jews in America, rising to about in Connecticut 6% of the Jewish population by 1927. And soon different colleges started to be concerned that perhaps there were too many Jewish students, whether just because they were Jewish or they weren't fitting into the social pattern. Now, this is today, actually last summer, this is a headline from the Wall Street Journal where the Justice Department was reporting that, or was investigating that Harvard was hurting Asian American admission prospects with personal ratings. Here, again, ripped form the headlines back in September, the United States is right now investigating Yale over a complaint of bias against Asian American applicants. So some issues reoccurring in different times. And indeed, just out of this week's news, we have here the college admission scandal should prompt broader soul searching. This is a nationwide issue, and we just read this week about, and even, you know, the Yale, two weeks ago I was joking with some of my male classmates that, you know, at least I could take some pride in Yale because the person who had to bribe their way in paid $1 million for their bribe. So Yale retains its dignity, and it's still the most expensive school that you have to pay a bribe to get into. But no, this week we find out that a family from China paid $6 1/2 million to get their daughter into Stanford. Stanford today, perhaps the most selective college in America. So how did we get to this place as a nation where college admissions became so competitive. And this ties back to the stories of Jews at Yale and elsewhere. It began with American Jews who carefully observed the rewards that a university education could bring a child and saw those chances even higher at elite schools. And so because we need to go back to that era, we can look again at the numbers. Here, these are nationwide numbers. In 1880, the US Jewish population was less that 1%. By 1920, it had quintupled again to over 3% of the population. And that's a small number, but in a place on the East Coast where there are a lot of Jews, it could lead to higher and higher enrollments. And at Yale, people took notice. Students began to find discrimination in the fraternities. At Yale in 1895, a fraternity called Pi Lambda Phi, Pi Lamb is its nickname today. It's not at Yale anymore, but in that year in 1895, three Jewish students found that they could not gain entrance to the Christian fraternities at Yale, so they responded by founding a nonsectarian fraternity. It happened to be all Jewish members, but it was a nonsectarian fraternity. And that was the first of many either nonsectarian or Jewish fraternities that were formed and still exist to the US by this day. Now, why weren't the students accepted socially as students? Well by the end of the 19th century, as I said, Yale and the elite colleges were not primarily about book learning. For the faculty, learning was critical. But for the students, it was not so much book learning and religious faith but about learning the codes of success in life. The soul of the university and the soul of the nation had changed to success, whatever that meant. For the stereotypical first generation American Jewish students, still very much under the spell of being the people of the book and encouraged by their parents to achieve, college was largely about book learning, not in the social world. As numbers rose, they were not always wanted. Now I'd also like to offer another perspective as to why else the Christian fraternities have excluded Jews. It's complicated, surely ugly prejudices were part of the equation. But another part was what fraternization entailed. One phenomena that the fraternities exemplified was the building of close bonds and friendships with a guy who might introduce you to his sister whom you might marry. Unlike today's era, where in-marriage is the exception and intermarriage is the norm, except in the orthodox communities, in the 1890s and through World War II, it wouldn't have made sense to build fraternal bonds that couldn't be consummated, so to speak. The established white Anglo-Saxon largely Protestants on campus also didn't appreciate a larger number of students who they saw as grinds, cheating and the use of purchased papers were widespread among the elite students, and the menial labor of writing papers was left to what they called the fruits, the meatballs and the man of minority ethnic origins and public school education. Enthusiastic intellectuals were not necessarily grade grubbers, but they were equally despised. As one Yale graduate and later professor Henry Seidel wrote, and I think he wrote this tongue in cheek, but it illustrates a point. Quote, the generation from east of Europe was beginning to come to college. Polish Jews with anemic faces on which were set dirty spectacles, soft-eyed Italians too alien to mix with an Anglo-Saxon community. Seam-faced Armenian boys and now and then a Chinese. These, except the Chinese, were all in college to learn how to live in America. Their mean was apologetic. You could see them watching with envious curiosity, the courteous indifference of the superior race. They took little part in discussions, and they asked for no credit. Yet often, their more flexible minds could be felt playing round and round the confident Anglo-Saxons, admiring, skeptical, puzzling, somewhat contemptuous. Occasionally there would be a revelation of intellect or a hint of the future when some Chinese boy caught off his guard and forgetting the convention of the classroom which was to answer a question and then sit down, would give a praxis of the entire lesson and perhaps the previous one and the next, which only a French intellectual could have equaled. Or some Russian Jewish exile asked to comment on an Ibsen play and losing control of his guarded intellect would expound a social philosophy that made the class squirm as if a blast of fire had scorched the seats of their comfortable pants, unquote. The increasing presence of a wealthy elite in the elite campuses of America made the focus of student life turn to the propagation of wealth and status. And colleges became more like a private club. Early to notice an act on the rising number of Jewish students who entered Yale because with numbers they got higher with more Jews in New Haven, more Jews in America, the numbers got higher, was Frederick Scheetz Jones, the dean of Yale college from 1909 to 1927. In the aftermath of World War I and the nationalism that accompanied the end of World War I, ethnic rivalries were stirred worldwide. The US was not immune. In the US, Henry Ford was actively propagating the protocols of the elders of Zion, a conspiracy accusing American Jews of, or Jews of all sorts, of participating in a plot to dominate the world by weakening American morals. This is from Ford's newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, May 22nd. He wrote the world, the international Jew is the world's problem. The national immigrant hostility was successfully whipped up and Congress passed the Immigration Act in 1921, restricting annual immigration to 3% of the number of that nationality residing in the US in 1910. Anti-immigrant sentiment boiled over into action. At the college level, the presence of Jews aroused concern. By 1918, Jewish enrollment at City College of New York had increased to almost 80%, and it had become stigmatized as the Jewish university. NYU's Jewish enrollment reached 50%. Columbia's reached 40%. The other school deans did not want to see that happen to them. And we have from the Yale archives, there are records from May 1918 of Dean Jones meeting with the New England college deans and warning them of the dangers of being overrun by Jews. No college, they were happy to have Jews. They liked having bright students. They liked the diversity, but there was a limit. Jones compiled statistics, and these are largely based on his statistics and some work that I did. We see that at Yale in 1989 to 1900 about 2% of the undergraduates were Jewish. By 1916 to 1922, that number had quadrupled to almost 10%. It became a cause of concern. I don't expect you to read this, but this is to show you, this is a letter from the internal archives at Yale from the dean of Yale admissions, Robert Nelson Corwin to the dean of Yale College. And by the way, this was all written in the pre-Watergate era. So these are the kinds of records that once existed that certainly in the post-Watergate and the email era may not. But what the dean of admissions writes to the dean of the college, he writes: Dear Fred. The Yale trustees have asked me to report at an early date on the number and status of Jewish origin now in the undergraduate schools and to discuss with them the advisability or necessity of concerting measures to limit the numbers of those race or religion to be admitted to college. The restrictive measures to be enforced or to be enforced at other colleges which draw from the same sources as we make serious consideration of this imperative. End quote. By the end of the month, Harvard announced that they would start restricting admissions because of the high proportion of Jewish students there. This is the New York Times headline Friday, June 2nd, 1922. And it reads discrimination against Jews suspected in new Harvard policy on admission. The nationwide response was explosive. This was before Facebook or internets, but it went viral in that era's way. And in the same way that surely all of us have talked at some point the last several months about college admission scandals currently, then everybody was talking about limiting Jews. Harvard was excoriated by the high-minded public, especially the Jews in the public, for engaging in ugly behaviors that they describe as reminiscent of Tsarist Russia. It was the worst of public relations nightmares for Harvard, and it was all directed at Harvard. Other universities took careful notice, including Yale. They wanted to limit their Jews, but they certainly didn't want any public embarrassment. So they took a different approach. They announced that the undergraduate colleges had become overcrowded, and they simply didn't have room for all the student who were applying. So they did publicly announce the commission of a committee on the limitation of numbers that would try to figure out how to address this problem. What they didn't announce was that secretly, the committee had a different name. The Committee on Limitation of Numbers of Jews. It was a secret committee. Why was it secret? Well, I think it could be argued that Yale, like most of its peer institutions, was wrestling with what did it stand for? What were its goals? Was it a Christian school? Was it a research institution? Without a clear mission, it could only proceed in a muddled way, and it had to keep its complex reasoning and schemes secret. This limitation, and this is I think an important thing that affects every student applying to college today, this limitation that took place in 1922 at Yale and elsewhere was what created the selective admissions process that probably all of us who applied to college and our children have gone through, and it's basically the admissions process we know today. Yale instituted a highly restrictive set of admissions. But I want to emphasize, this was not a formal quota. They didn't want to say to themselves, we're going to limit the number of Jews. Instead, they created tools that have the intended net effect of limiting Jewish enrollment. It was an informal quota that would last for 40 years. How did they do it? They had scholarship grant restrictions, so they made sure that if it was harder to afford college, they would give fewer scholarships to Jewish students. They gave fewer loans to Jewish students. They instituted geographic quotas to emphasize, to give more discretion to taking students from all across the country. And they introduced what was called in that era psychological tests. Today we know them as the SATs and the ACTs. It was thought that these tests would help differentiate the ideal student and leave out Jews and also the small number of unwelcome Italians and other minorities. And they started evaluating people's personality and character, all of which are still done to this day for different origins. This was an even large issue in the medical school at Yale and elsewhere. Just to show you in 1930, 3% of the Hebrews, as they called them in the records, who were admitted to the medical school were Jewish. Non-Hebrews, non-foreigners, I'm sorry, 3% of the Hebrews were admitted, 17% of the non-Hebrews were admitted because there was the fear that Jews would take up too much of the class. The irony at the medical school was that it was a Jewish physician, Milton Winternitz, the dean of the school who instituted and ran the admissions process. But let's return to the question of collegiate admissions. For 40 years, from the early 20s through the early 1960s, the quotas persisted. And then something happened. The Russians, always the Russians. In October of 1957, the Soviets fired, as you see in The New York Times headline, a satellite, Sputnik, into space. It was circling the globe, and today Sputnik, and we just think of as trivia from the past from the first satellite that was orbited. But for America in the late 1950s, it was terrifying. It was the thought, you know, the US, and we had won World War II. We had had, you know, the atomic bomb helped bring it to a quicker end than it otherwise might have ended. But then the Soviets had gotten a hold of an atomic bomb of their own. And now they were the first in the space race. And there was a tremendous fear. And I do not exaggerate when I use that word. There was a fear that we would be overrun by the Soviets if we didn't do better for our education. The entire American way of life was threatened. And this had an effect in education. Look at this quotation right after the Sputnik lunch in The New York Times. The chief physicist of the US said, the nation is warned to stress science. We face doom. That's not an innocent word. We face doom unless youth learn its importance. He wrote, unless future generations appreciate the role of science in modern society and understand the conditions under which science thrives, he said, our way of life is I'm certain doomed to rapid extinction. These were powerful words across the country, and it reminded universities of what their mission was, at least for this century, which was to first educate. To really, to develop leaders, not just of church and civil state but also academically, the leaders for the country. Leonard Doob, who was a young professor at Yale, was appointed by the Yale president Whitney Griswold. Doob was a fascinating man, but he chaired a committee that set an agenda for admissions at Yale to number one require education as the first criteria for admission, education and commitment to learning. And things began to change. This is a photograph from the early 60s showing from left to right William Sloane Coffin, who was the chaplain at Yale at that time. Professor Paul Weiss, the first Jewish professor, full Jewish professor at Yale College. On the right is Richard Israel who was a Hillel rabbi at Yale. And I show Weiss because his presence at Yale, he was appointed after World War II, he was the first full Jewish professor at Yale College, and it was evidence that one couldn't have a great university without, at least in America of that day, having, by discriminating against Jewish faculty. Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., he would become famous for his antiracist and antiwar activities in the following years. But he exemplified two critical aspects of how conditions for Jews in America changed during the 60s. First, he was a World War II veteran of what would be called the greatest generation. These men had fought in World War II and physically risked their lives against the evil and racist ideology of Nazi Germany. They had risked their lives at a time of a clear fight of good versus evil. Now that they were coming into age and positions of authority and power in America, their ideals came to the fore. They were to significant degrees champions of idealism and embarrassed by racial and religious prejudice. The other important thing to note about Coffin was that he was the chaplain of Yale, a Protestant minister, the religious head. He was one of the people who advocated most strongly with the Yale administration to open up admissions, not discriminate against Jews in admission and to make students who were observant at Yale to make them feel more comfortable at Yale so that they wouldn't have to be penalized for missing an exam on the sabbath. So they'd have a place to find a kosher meal if they needed one. And for Coffin, and this is where I get back to the mission, for him being a good Christian meant being a good supporter of other people of faith as well. And this was a very powerful argument, because when the secular heads of Yale were arguing against him, he could say that he represented the core. And soon afterwards, a kosher kitchen was opened up at Yale. This is the ledger from about 1962. Of the people on the ledger this one name you might recognize, the second name signed for meals was J. Lieberman, who was an undergraduate at Yale that became a famous Senator Joseph Lieberman. By this era, the presidents of the university, A. Whitney Griswold and Kingman Brewster, Jr., Griswold in the 50s, I'm sorry, Griswold in the 50s, Brewster in the 60s and 70s. They did not want the Yale of their generation to be tarred with the prejudices of the past. In the university records, we know that, we learn that Griswold wanted Yale to be a model for intergroup relations for the whole nation. So it wasn't just when there was tension. He said, how do we deal with this? He wanted to create an environment. He had a ideal that Yale would be a place where one could take pride in the harmony not tension. Brewster wanted Yale to be a model for nondiscrimination. When Yale would start looking for better students in response to Sputnik, he said go out and get the best students he told his dean of admissions. Now, he didn't, Brewster, President Brewster didn't say go out and recruit more Jewish students, but Clark told me he said, nobody told me to admit more Jews, but it was inevitable by recruiting in more places and emphasizing academics more that more Jews would be entering Yale. The informal quota was stopped, and the Jewish enrollment at Yale in the late 60s through 80s effectively increased significantly. Not everybody was pleased. The dean of admissions, Dean Clark, was invited in the early 60s to make a personal presentation at the Yale Corporation. This was an unusual event. The dean addressed the Board of Trustees describing the changing trends of admission policies in the 60s. One trustee hemmed and hawed throughout the report, and he attacked Clark's modern ideas. The trustee said, and I quote, Let me get down to basics. You're admitting an entirely different kind of class than we're used to. You're admitting them for a different purpose than training leaders, unquote. Dean Clark responded that the America of the 1960s was different from it had once been and that more national leaders would be coming from more groups, including women. The trustee was unsympathetic. He said, you're talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this Board of Trustees. These are America's leaders. There are not public school graduates here. There are no Jews here. Indeed, as late as 1964 the Board of Trustees was solidly white, male and Protestant. But that would change too. The next year, William Horowitz, Russian Jewish descent. This is Mr. Horowitz sitting at the Board of Trustees, the corporation table in Woodbridge Hall at the administrator's center of Yale, shows him at the table. He was elected to serve a term as trustee of Yale. And in due course, Yale would even have a Jewish president, Richard Levin, who was successfully president from 1993 to 2013. And today's president of Yale is also an identifying Jew, Peter Salovey, the famous rabbinical Saloveychik family. For the past 50 years, Yale admissions has been guided by the following principles, which Brewster articulated in 1967. One, Yale leaders, Yale graduates are hoped to become leaders in their generation. To become truly outstanding, whatever they undertake. Two, the goal is to seek students who will make the best use of Yale's opportunities, especially the faculty, the library, the labs, but also the other components of Yale from athletics to music to theater. Three, Yale is seeking students who will stretch their capacity. The zest and self-discipline, quote for playing over his head in some aspect of life who gives every ounce to do something superbly, unquote. Four, Yale was seeking students with moral concern and consideration for others. Amorality and selfishness was not a way to get in. Five, variety for its own sake is reasonable in making up a whole class. An excessively homogenous class will not learn anywhere near as much from a class with backgrounds and interests that are different from each other. Six, convincing equality of opportunity for admissions to Yale is a very important consideration. It's important for Yale's sake as well as for the sake of widespread confidence in an open society. It's the only way to assure we're drawing to us the people who give us the most promise of being leaders in their time. And these principles guide Yale admissions to this day. So let's briefly come to this day. So today there are lawsuits, investigations, one against Harvard, one against Yale. Harvard has a lawsuit. Yale doesn't have a lawsuit, but it's being investigated by the Justice Department, both for discrimination potentially against Asian Americans. This situation is current events and not history, so many of the details are quite private. Some of them I know and can't share, and frankly, most I don't know. I'm not aware of any evidence showing that Asians are being discriminated against in any way for being Asian at Yale per se. But of course, we see that the issues of what the soul of the university is, whom should a university serve are very much issues today as they were a century ago. Jews in general have become an economically successful group in America. Not all, but in general. Jews of conservative or reformer reconstruction background or no affiliation are generally not differentiable from their Christian classmates. 7 There aren't so many Jews in America proportionally anymore. Once it was over 3%. Today it's probably under 2%. This is in part due to intermarriage and in part due to other minorities increasing in population. There are also more options for great prestige as well. At one time, Harvard, Yale, Princeton were the three big schools. Today, the ivy league as a whole carries great prestige. But there are other prestigious universities as well. For example, Stanford today is thought to be the most selective college in the nation. But as many have considered the question has been raised as to whether Asian Americans are the new Jews. I can tell you that surely many Asian Americans and Asians are seeking admission to Yale. If you walk across the Yale campus on a typical day today, you will see buses full of Asians of high school age arriving in groups to tour the campus. None of the admissions criteria that operate were designed to limit Asians, but they are designed to limit homogeneity. And it is possible that may be adversely affecting some Asians. Although I haven't heard yet of any testimony or credible evidence that someone as an individual has been discriminated because of Asian descent. We will know far more about this in future years. And then let me return to the other current event in college admissions at Yale as elsewhere. As you're surely well familiar from the news media, there is a widespread public scandal that became public this winter of wealthy people bribing their way into America's elite colleges. In some ways what they're doing was modeled on the examples at Yale and virtually all private elite universities going back to the days of their founding. Of admitting some students because of parental privilege or wealth. There are certainly known instances and plus unknown instances of multimillion dollar donations being made to universities to inspire the admission of specific children. Such instances are usually not contracts. They're not contractual quid pro quos, but they are effectively such, and they are at least transactional in the terms that the university is strongly hoping that the admission of the student will prompt a major gift from a wealthy parent. It is naïve to think otherwise. Elihu Yale was honored by having his name become that of a world class university by donating a small library. Imagine if we could do that today, you know, donate a few bucks and get a library. Such transactions fuel the private university to this day. So, this year's college scandal. Well, it's a twist on that theme, a clever and criminally-minded ringleader is accused of developing a scheme where he'd partner with partners at universities and with parents and insiders at preeminent universities across the country, a so-called tax deductible donation would be made to the orchestrator's charity. Some would help to pay the fixer to help the candidate prepare a false application inflating their talents, and some would be used by the ringleader to bribe local university officials to collude in getting the candidates falsely inflated application approved by the university involved. At Yale it is said this involved an Asian parent who ended up funneling almost a half million dollars to the women's soccer coach to advocate for the acceptance of a daughter advertised as a high school soccer star but who lacked those credentials. The newspaper report from Stanford this week tells us of the widespread nature of this scandal with the Chinese parents who lived in Beijing and may have thought they were just doing normal business, paying $6 1/2 million to get their daughter into Stanford. There are reports that in this payment scandal, a disproportionate number of Asians or Asian Americans are disproportionately caught up. Perhaps they feel driven to get in because they see no other way in. Those applying, however, now may be experiencing parallel issues to which Jews at Yale faced and Jews at other universities faced in the 1920s through the 1960s. So let me conclude and go back to the Yale seal. The story of Yale admissions and its relations with Jews and other ethnic groups is a story that took place all across the country at many of the best universities. Each with a different, a unique local flavor but all sharing a common theme. In one era for Jews and perhaps in another not for Asian Americans or perhaps for Asian Americans as well. The question though, the philosophical question that can be asked is does this really matter? Whether in terms of Jews, Asian Americans or for America in general. My first answer to the question of does this matter is that the issue of discrimination against Jews or any other group on the basis of religion or ethnic background when specifically targeting that ethnic group, it goes to the heart of what is the soul of a university? For a private university, that's not necessarily wrong. A private institution can be whatever it wants to be. It doesn't necessarily have a right to get federal money, but it has the right to be what it wants to be. I would expect that a private Catholic or Protestant or other Christian or Jewish college might well wish to maintain its character. Would we expect Brigham Young to stop being a Mormon-centric place? Or Georgetown to deemphasize Catholicism or Yoshida University not to focus on traditional Judaism? After all, if they have a particular mission, why not let them do it privately. It shouldn't have to hide that mission. What would be unethical, however, is if they claim to be religiously neutral institutions and then secretly act differently. What about private universities that use geographical quotas to be sure their students are diverse? This is not necessarily harmful, and this is an opinion, there may be some advantages. I think it is pretty obvious that we live in a polarized society today where people of different backgrounds have great difficulties speaking with each other. Colleges, especially colleges like Yale, like Harvard, like Princeton, that have what are called residential colleges where students live together and eat together and spend quality time together, they offer ample opportunities for young people to build relationships and genuine connections with those of different backgrounds. A college with too much homogeneity will not be able to accomplish that. And what also may make this less of an issue today than a century ago is as I said, the world of great universities is no longer Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Though I'm a Yale alum 40 years out from my undergraduate experience, and I see a few other Yale alums here in our group, I think I can say, and I'm only speaking for myself, but I think I can say that one success in life is not based on where one went to college but on what one makes of the opportunities that one encounters in life. I'm not naïve. Having a degree from a respected university makes it easier to take the next step in one's life. But that pedigree fades pretty quickly if one doesn't have the talent and personality to move forward successfully. Leaders in every field can be found among the alumni of every university. And it's not as if one doesn't get into Harvard one will never succeed. How does this matter? I do think this raises the question of the soul. What is the character of a university? What is the mission of a university? If there is a clear vision of what the mission of a college is and what a university is, that will provide unambiguous guidelines to carry out that vision and to admit students. Their leaders will be able to articulate those visions with moral clarity and resounding authority. But we don't live in that era. I showed these slides. When was the last time we've seen a university president on the cover of Time Magazine? When is the last time? How many of you perhaps, besides your own institution, know the names of more than one other university president? The university presidents who were national leaders are not national leaders anymore. And in fact, even if they were to take the step of saying something of national importance, how many of us would listen? How many people would listen, and how many wouldn't be fired by their board of trustees the next week? He Yale seal I think proclaims an underlying mission of light and truth. The great universities of America were dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the purpose of shedding light, so imparting knowledge. They, like Yale, were founded to develop the future leaders of America with the inspiration of light and truth. The story of Jews and Yale, therefore, I believe, is the story of the pursuit of light and truth colliding with the values of a private club. When those values clashed, truth was sacrificed as a silent informal, not formal quota was established. Regarding Jews, the launch of Sputnik by the Russians in '57 scared America to its core with the realization that if it did not promote its academic enterprise, it risked losing all to Russian domination. And in choosing to drop the quotas that restricted Jews, the pursuit of light and the pursuit of truth, which I think are also part of the American ideal, returned to Yale. So thank you for your patience. [ Applause ] >> Sharon Horowitz: Dr. Oren has agreed to take some questions, but before, let me just say in the back of the room where my colleague, Dr. Ann Brenner is standing, we have two carts in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month, we have two carts of very interesting books that we're giving away. So I would direct you to look there on your way out. And Dr. Oren's book is for sale in the alcove as you're leaving this building, as you're leaving this hall. And if you could repeat the questions for the video. Thank you. >> Dan A. Oren: Sure. Please. >> -- read your book 25 years ago when my son was [inaudible], and I was really pleased it's been republished. But in your book you also deal somewhat with the faculty at Yale and the Jewish, or limited Jewish faculty. I would like you to speak to that a little. And the second question is, if possible, we've dealt with the undergraduate admissions, but I wonder how this affected admission into the graduate schools, law school, medical school, etcetera. >> Dan A. Oren: Sure, that's another lecture. >> I'm sorry. >> Dan A. Oren: It's all right. But I will briefly say that for, Yale College was in many ways the core of what became a university. And the Christian mission was central enough that until after World War II, there was no Jew who was permitted to reach the level of full professor at Yale College. There were a couple of assistant professors, but Paul Weiss, a philosopher, was appointed after the war. And in fact, if one goes to the Yale archives, there are, when someone is appointed to a faculty position, letters of recommendation are solicited, both from outside the university and within the university. And it was very clear that after World War II, one of the professors wrote how we are undertaking a great experiment to see if someone of his background could work with us. And the other schools of the university, the Christian core was not so critical. So for example, in the graduate school and in the medical school and the sciences, some of the finest professors, a small number, but did achieve great renown. In the medical school, it was very interesting because a Jewish man was the dean of the medical school during the quota years. And he was a man named Milton Winternitz. He was married to the daughter of Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's partner. So of great social standing in America. And I think he was very interested in protecting his position, so he was very careful to make sure there was a strict Jewish quota in the medical school at Yale. But I'd have to go on at great length, but it's in the book though. >> I know. >> Dan A. Oren: Please. Oh, I'm sorry. >> An uncle who I was very close to was Yale '27, and I was looking last night through his 25th anniversary report in 1952. They would have been admitted almost in 1922 when that directive came out from the dean to limit the number of Jews. I did a very rough survey based on last names, but I thought Jewish names were above 4 or 5%, a little bit lower than the percentage you came up with. Is that an aberration, or is that probably right from that period? >> Dan A. Oren: Yeah, so the numbers that I shared for those years in the 20s were based on the dean's counting. So the definition was that if the dean count thought that they were a Jew in his records, for that purpose I counted them as if they were a Jew. It's a, measuring on the individual, measuring any individual number and putting too much stock in an individual number is very different, but I think we can learn a lot from seeing the trends over the years. Some Jewish students would, before coming to Yale, would change their names and try and hide their background. Sometimes that was successful. Sometimes they couldn't hide, and they couldn't -- >> Well most of them kept their Jewish names. That's how I was doing this survey. By contrast, I applied to Harvard in 1952, and my class of '56 I think was at least 20 to 25% Jewish, so maybe -- >> Dan A. Oren: Harvard was earlier than Yale in -- >> And had more Jewish professors, etcetera, etcetera. >> Dan A. Oren: Yeah. Yeah. >> And we had a Jewish president as well. >> Dan A. Oren: Yeah. Sir. >> The background of this question is I'm Yale '72. I entered in '68, so I'm sort of the, not the tail end but the middle of all of this. I was at Trumbull College, Trumbull College, the colleges has fellows. One of the fellows at Trumbull was Inky Clark, Dean Clark. And we would sit around and shoot the shit, because that's what you did with the fellows. And Clark was this incredible engaging guy. And I remember sitting in the common room drinking terrible coffee until 2 a.m. talking about all this, and we were very aware in the late 60s, '68, '69, college [inaudible] was the big thing. But we were very aware of the changing composition of Jews in the class as well. And we would talk about that with Inky. And the issue, which is what leads to my question and whether you found anything about this, is the perception of the undergraduate Jewish population in '68, '69, was that there was a quota. It was like 15 to 18%. That it would always turn out that we would be totally merit-based because of Brewster's principles. And we would end up with a totally merit-based system of 15 to 17 or 18% Jews, not higher, but not lower as well. And when we would talk, we would push Inky on this over the terrible coffee, and he would, who is this wonderful candid guy, he would smile beatifically, and shrug, and we would think go on to the next subject. Did you in the course of this, and perhaps it's in the book, which I haven't read yet, did you come across stuff that either rejects that or that shows that indeed there were, if not quotas, limits that would influence the decision process, much as the kind of issue we have today with Asian students where the Harvard and Yale say, well, we're 20% Asian. And the answer is yes, and if you were truly merit-based, you'd be 40% Asian. >> Dan A. Oren: So I can't give you the definitive answer that you're looking for. I can only say, I haven't found any clear evidence, either from interviewing people or from records that would support that anybody was counting Jews for enrollment or that anybody was consciously discriminating against Jews. Now, geographic quotas persisted, and that does make it harder, if most of the Jews of America are in the Northeast, it does make it harder. I can't, I entered Yale in 1975 coming from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If I think rationally about it, I probably coming from, you know, the far reaches of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which for most people at Yale thinks, you know, the end of the universe, I probably, whether I was Jewish or Chinese or Protestant or Catholic, I probably had a better chance of getting in than somebody of equal education from New York. So geographical quotas can have real effects without being discriminating specifically against a particular group. Sir. >> Daddy was a young man. How many Yalees do we have here? How many Yalees remember that song? Daddy was a young man, he'll be married soon. Right, okay. So he was class of 1935, and he was from Englewood, New Jersey, public school. And I've always wondered what it was like for him, whether he was the quota that year or what it was like for him at Yale. He told me a few things about it. And I was class of 1965, which was the first class which was more than half public school. I didn't count the number of Jews, but I became friends with a lot of non-Jews actually because of the residential college system. But what, could you say something about admission to Yale in the early 1930s? I've always been curious. >> Dan A. Oren: Yeah, just briefly, it was really a continuation of the 20s. There was still an informal 10% quota where they had the different routes that were taken, and they would count at the end of the year to see what they arrived, and it usually came out intentionally to somewhere around 10%. One point that you raise about student life, and it actually ties into your question about faculty. Virtually, all the students that I spoke with from that era, as far as in the classroom. I mean there was clearly discrimination in admissions. But as students, they never felt that they were discriminated against in the classroom. They always felt fairly treated by their professors, and they felt they have the best, you know, their education performance was based on how they did. It wasn't like, you know, in Europe at that time, there were universities where Jews would be forced to sit on a back bench. There was never anything like that at Yale. One academic limitation, this gets to your question, students who fantasized a career as being an English professor, a literature professor, in the prewar years were at a clear disadvantage because the thought at that time was that to understand English well, you had to be well grounded in the New Testament. And a Jew, the English literature, and Jews would, you know, be well grounded in the New Testament. So before World War II, Jewish students who were interested in going into a career to become an English professor, career and graduate study in English, they were strongly discouraged from applying. Now some of that was realistic, and they said you can go, but you're not going to get a job anywhere. So they were being, in other cases, they were, so Gene Rostow, who became a famous dean of the Yale law school and attorney, he was one of those people who had his heart set on English, but then he ended up having a great career in law because he was told that there was no future in that. Please. Wherever the microphone goes. >> Dan, I was admitted in 1959, and so I've learned a few things about that. I was not Jewish. I was from Kentucky. And I was building rockets. >> Dan A. Oren: You were? >> Building rockets as a high school student. >> Dan A. Oren: Wow. Wow. >> So it was a good trifecta, I guess, apparently. But the other thing, the thing I wanted to ask you, I was also something of an athlete, and at my 50th reunion, the dean admissions from that time said that there was a sort of informal rule that something possibly as high as 50% of the students were to be athletes. Have you looked into any aspect of that and its implication? >> Dan A. Oren: No, no, that's fascinating. It's certainly, in that era, that could have had very significant implications. It's less of an issue today because today, at least for Jewish students, they're probably just as likely to be athletes as non-Jewish students. The Asian Americans, not so much yet. Because it's the immigrant experience. But that's, I need to learn more. Thank you. Sir. Okay, you've been waiting in the front row and then you sir. >> Sharon Horowitz: Sorry, okay, two more questions. >> Dan A. Oren: Okay, two more questions and then we're done. >> Sharon Horowitz: And then if people want to talk with Dr. Oren afterwards, that's fine. But we're going to have to cut it off, so two more. Thank you. >> Fascinating. There's one aspect you haven't touched on, and maybe you didn't do any research on that, but certainly say in the past 20 or 30 years, the role of Israel has been linked to Jewish students in various ways as a sense of connection, as a sense that they should take a particular stance as some sort of linkage. Did that come up at all, the role of Israel vis-à-vis Jewish students in perceptions of non-Jewish students and perceptions of Jewish students themselves? >> Dan A. Oren: So, that isn't something I studied extensively. I wanted for this talk I focused mostly on admissions. It wasn't an issue to a large degree before 1948. There was no Israel, but I will share one anecdote in that regard. There's a wonderful play that just finished in New York called the Lehman Trilogy about the rise and fall of the Lehman brothers family and their, and the fate of their firm in the financial crash in the US in 2008. And there was one young member of the Lehman family was a Jewish student at Yale in the early 20th century. And his family was exceptionally wealthy at that time, and so he was not one of the intensely studious kids. But some of the other Jewish students tried to recruit him to participate in a Jewish activist group on campus. There was no Israel but to try and do things for the plight of Russian Jews, you know, across the ocean. And his response to them was, can't we just have four years of freedom from Jewish issues in college. So, that, I think the whole question on Israel on the American campus today and the issues it raises, it's a very important question. But it's beyond the scope of today's discussion. Yeah. Last question, sir. >> This can be a very broad question, but I'll try to narrow it down and focus it just on Yale. Do you think the cost of going to Yale is prohibiting many students who would otherwise be qualified from not going? >> Dan A. Oren: Yeah, so I don't know what the latest cost is I think for, the cost of Yale is very similar to most private school universities across the country. It's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $75,000 to $80,000 a year tuition room and board. For me, the number that sticks in my mind, I remember when I enrolled as a freshman in 1975, it was $5,920 all encompassed. Tom, a few dollars last in your day. Yeah. But so, what you have in 44 years, the Yale tuition was probably about $100 back in the 1920s. In 44 years, the cost of Yale tuition, room and board, and for most of the private universities in this country, has skyrocketed far, far more than the, you know, inflation rate over this entire period. So, may answer, I think that's a very fair question to ask us, not just the Yale, it's for, especially if a parent is thinking about sending a child to a state school versus a private school. It's a very fair question to ask, and the answer will, in my mind the answer to a significant degree depends on to what degree the child will make use of the resources available at the more expensive school. It's not the right answer for everyone. And as I've said, you know, the, having gone to Yale or any specific college is not going to determine where you end up in life. It's not going to be the number one factor determining where you end up in life. So, yeah, I'm sure that the cost of private universities is keeping many people out. Now, at Yale and some other universities, Yale does have what they call a need blind admissions policy where they admit people without respect to, without regard to financial background. And they commit to funding them through loans or scholarships so that they can afford to attend Yale. So there are steps that are taken to relieve that burden, but it's a burden. Yeah. thank you all very much. [ Applause ]