Allan Appel photo
Mark Oppenheimer with his high school teacher and dean Alice Baxter on Sunday.
How about a written application — as opposed to an old boys’ nod from the rowing coach — and in-person interviews to detect your excessively Lower East Side manners?
How about a questionnaire requiring you to indicate, for example, what business your family is in? And written recommendations and aptitude tests?
These requirements, considered today the norm in the college admission process, were actually specifically devised by the good folks at Columbia University in the early decades of the 20th century to keep bright Jewish students out.
So revealed Yale alum, former Yale English professor, and celebrated local author Mark Oppenheimer in a troublingly entertaining talk about his newest podcast: Gatecrashers: The Hidden History of Jews and the Ivy League.
That talk took place Sunday morning before 75 admirers thanks to one of the regular cultural programs organized by Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) synagogue at 85 Harrison St. in Westville.
Oppenheimer’s eye-opening eight-episode aural tour covers each of the Ivies’ high — and low — points in their struggle with how to deal with Jewish student admissions from the turn of the 20th century pretty much through today. It’s available, yes!, wherever you get your podcasts, and is a creation of Tablet Magazine, where Oppenheimer has long worked as an editor and where he co-helms another popular podcast, Unorthodox.
Appreciative audience members Paul Fiedler and Gary Hochman.
The purpose of these creations for Columbia’s admissions process, Oppenheimer explained on Sunday, was both to identify and weed out the increasing number of smart New York City Jews applying and also to bump up the number of faint-hearted Protestants, wary that they may have to rub shoulders with too many of the Hebraic persuasion during their formative college years.
In a tone of irony, composed of 98 percent enjoyment and maybe 2 percent retrospective indignation, he concluded, “That’s Columbia’s gift to the history of Jews.”
Princeton’s dance with anti-Semitism pirouetted around its eating clubs, which is how the then (in 1960s) fairly rural school fed its students. But what do you do with the Jewish students who routinely were not tapped for the clubs? You get embarrassed on national television and begin to change your ways, Oppenheimer averred.
Oppenheimer’s highlights — like the podcasts — are nuanced. The prep-school educated Jewish kids got into Princeton eating clubs just fine, he said. “It really was a problem for lower-class Jews.”
He quoted a revealing remark made by Stephen Rockefeller, Nelson’s son, who had been tasked to solve the Jewish Eating Question at Princeton. Rockefeller tried to explain, Oppenheimer said, “It wasn’t that they were Jewish [that some two dozen were being excluded from the eating clubs], but they didn’t fit in socially.”
Part of the genesis to explore anti-Semitism in the Ivy League, he said, was to focus on whether, over the decades, actual Jewish quotas existed, or just a generalized anti-Semitic culture that resulted in limited numbers. That’s why Yale’s story was of particular interest to Oppenheimer, and also, of course, because in a manner of speaking he has lived it, or its aftermaths.
Without a specific number ever being put to paper, Oppenheimer said, Yale admissions mavens realized the prevailing 6 to 7 percent Jewish student population in, say, 1957, had to be going up. Why? He traced it in part to the launch of Russia’s Sputnik that year. Rowers and a cappella singers will not help the United States compete in the space race. Bring on the Stuyvesant kids, and the Stuyvesant progeny from around the country.
There were other reasons too, of course, including the leadership of prejudice-hating admissions staff such as Sam Chauncey, so that by 1967 Oppenheimer estimated the Jewish student population was close to 25 percent at the college.
“Under the influence of post-World War Two shame, and of the Civil Rights movement,” Oppenheimer added, an old line Protestant president of Yale, such as Kingman Brewster, declared, when he arrived as president in 1963, “I do not intend to preside over a finishing school on Long Island Sound.”
The podcasts hit a lot of targets with telling detail, including interviews with the then young Jewish students, now in their eighties and older, who recall the indignities and relish in their success in spite of.
That’s one reason, Oppenheimer said, that the material became a podcast as opposed to a book. “I presented it as a podcast because it’s got so many audio riches,” and many from people in their last years. “And many are extraordinary raconteurs.”
What’s up next for him? He’s going full speed ahead on the eating club experiences at Princeton, which he said, made sustained, shame-inducing national news. Oppenheimer is trying to track down everyone who was a part of the experience.
But it’s going to be an old-fashioned book.
Listen to the Yale episode of Gatecrashers below. And click here to listen to the full series.