Harvard’s New Jewish Problem

There was a time when Harvard’s “Jewish problem” was that many young Jews wanted to attend, but the university limited the number it would admit.

But the tables have turned. A new report has revealed that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard is down to just 7% of the student body, the lowest figure in more than a century.

The university is so worried that the dean of admissions and financial aid, William Fitzsimmons, announced that he will be making a special effort to target potential students in Jewish day schools. It will not make his task an easier that the faculty committee on Admissions and Financial Aid has among its members anti-Israel extremists such as Ali Asani and Maya Jasanoff.

Jewish students’ diminishing interest in Harvard no doubt is related to the prominence of such anti-Israel faculty members, and the well-known scenes of campus mobs cheering the mass murder of Israeli Jews and calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state. It’s not hard to understand why that would make prospective enrollees uneasy.

Harvard was not particularly hospitable to Jews in the 1920s, either, but for different reasons.

The American children of European Jewish immigrants, pursuing the American dream through education and hard work, gradually rose to about 25% of the Harvard student body in the years following World War I. That did not sit well with Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his colleagues.

In a letter to an alumnus in 1922, Lowell blamed campus antisemitism on the Jews. “The anti-Semitic feeling among students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews,” the Harvard president wrote. “If their number should become 40 per cent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense…All this seems to me fraught with great evils for the Jews, and very great peril for our community.”

That was why Lowell went to the Harvard Board of Overseers in 1922 with a proposal to reduce the number of Jewish students on campus to 15% of the student body. 

Until then, admissions had been determined on the basis of merit, that is, grades and test scores. Lowell and the board devised new criteria that would allow “careful discernment of differences among individuals,” as Lowell put it.

Under the new rules, a Harvard admissions officer could reject an application based on the applicant’s “character.” Also, the applicant would be required to state his “race and color” and “religious preference,” and would have to explain if either of his parents had ever changed their names—so that the admissions officer would know whose “character” required special scrutiny. 

Applicants from New York City were classified according to whether their family name and photograph indicated they might be Jews. They were classified as “J1” (definitely Jewish), “J2” (probably Jewish), or “J3” (possibly Jewish). Thus Jews could be singled out for rejection without anybody having to explain that it was because they were Jews.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served on the Harvard board in the 1920s, later boasted of his role in this episode. He and his fellow-board members decided that “the number of Jews should be reduced one or two per cent a year until it was down to 15%,” President Roosevelt explained to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the only Jewish member of his cabinet, in 1941. “You can’t get a disproportionate amount of any one religion.”

Lowell and FDR also shared an indifference to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. In his book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, Prof. Stephen Norwood described Lowell’s rejection of an offer by a charitable foundation in 1933 to pay the salary of a refugee scholar from Nazi Germany if Harvard would hire him. Lowell accused the foundation of trying “to use the College for purposes of propaganda.”

James G. McDonald, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, requested an appointment with Lowell in March 1934. Lowell’s secretary told McDonald—according to the latter’s diary— “that he wasn’t interested in German refugees,” and “that he was tied up the whole day,” so therefore “couldn’t see me.” But when Hitler’s foreign spokesman, Harvard alumnus Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, visited the campus three months later, Lowell found the time to have a friendly meeting with him.

In those days, Harvard rejected the Jews. Today, the Jews are rejecting Harvard. The plummeting Jewish enrollment actually began long before October 7, 2023, although the outpouring on campus of pro-Hamas sentiment following the massacre, and the administration’s tepid response, accelerated the trend.

According to a study by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance, in the years preceding October 7, Harvard’s history, political science, and social sciences departments offered a torrent of courses “promoting the view that the Palestinian people are innocent victims of Jewish (white) oppression and that known terrorist groups are simply ‘political movements’.” It was that biased curriculum which planted the seeds for the eruption of pro-Hamas protests on camps in the autumn of 2023.

Following the October 7 massacres, dozens of student groups at Harvard endorsed Hamas, more than 100 faculty members joined the pro-Hamas “Faculty for Justice in Palestine” group, and the recommendations of the university’s task force on antisemitism were ignored, prompting some of its members to resign. The administration appointed, as the new co-chair of the task force, a faculty member who had accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.”

Ironically, then, A. Lawrence Lowell’s prediction in 1922 that the campus environment would become hostile to Jews has indeed come true—not because the Jews provoked the bigots, as Lowell expected, but because anti-Jewish bigots, masquerading as anti-Zionists, were emboldened by the university itself to let their true feelings show. The dwindling Jewish application numbers are a natural response.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.