The following is a transcript of Episode 171 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, January 12th, 2024. 

I’m gonna start with a kind of confession of failure. When I was applying to college as a senior in high school, I didn’t get into any of the colleges that I wanted to go to. I had set a bar for myself, a high bar in my applications that was way out of reach, which included applying early to Harvard. I didn’t have the grades or the scores. I did have the ego and the misplaced confidence of a young man. 

And so therefore I experienced a flood of rejection, first early from Harvard and then from basically all of the rest of the top-tier schools to which I had applied. And I started to confront the possibility that as a modern orthodox kid, I would just go to Yeshiva University, the one place to which I was accepted. My parents pushed me though, and they were right. They challenged me to consider whether I really wanted to go to YU, in which case they would have been perfectly supportive. That’s where my dad went to undergraduate. But if I didn’t, I should actually go through the process again, try a new approach, reapply, and reach. So I did that. And the following year I was accepted early to Columbia. And that’s where I went. 

Years later, though, I did finally get accepted to Harvard as a graduate student and damned if I didn’t walk into the middle of Harvard yard, and turn around in a circle, finally feeling that I had made it in, a little bit resentful and with some triumphant chutzpah against that first process that had kept me out. I literally did a little twirl like I beat them. 

In retrospect, those choices did matter. I’m quite sure that the trajectory of my academic career and now what I do at the Hartman Institute wouldn’t have been possible without kind of nudging my way in to the Ivy Leagues. 

But I gotta tell you, Harvard was a strange place. Last week, I wrote a short piece on Facebook about some of the anti-Semitism that I experienced there, mostly through some encounters with professors, including a legendary scholar of New Testament who had been a Wehrmacht veteran of World War II, who treated me in class like an archetypical ancient Jew to which he was the early Christian foil. It was like good, old-fashioned Christian anti-Semitism, not the new-fangled kind. That whole experience was kind of odd.

But there were even more oddities to being a Jew at Harvard studying Jewish studies, some of which I discovered my very first day as a graduate student there when I walked into my required seminar and found a room that was almost entirely populated by other men with kippot. I later learned that Jewish studies at Harvard had quietly acquired a reputation over the years, largely the legacy of its founding late director, Professor Isadore Twersky, as, quote, the Yeshiva on the Charles. Squished into one of the most elite universities in the country was this strangely insular expression of Jewish religious and cultural production. And I can tell you now, even a decade and a half later after I left, that department is still working its way past that culture and reputation. 

I think Harvard is probably still a strange place, which makes me wonder whether it’s supposed to be representative of anything. Amidst all the drama around elite colleges in the past few weeks, the botched testimony by the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT in Congress, followed by the quick resignation of Liz McGill at Penn, and then the prolonged process towards the resignation of Claudine Gay at Harvard, I found myself, like many others, both riveted to these stories and also wondering, in periodic moments of self-awareness, why we collectively seem to care about them so much.

I see on one hand, the Ivies, and I guess a few other elite schools, produce certain kinds of elite output that don’t seem to be replicated elsewhere, like most of, if not all, of the justices of the United States Supreme Court and a certain subset of Jewish leaders, like all three founders of the Hadar Institute. Jewish life in places like the Ivy League represents a kind of pinnacle of the American version of sitting at the intersection of Jerusalem and Athens. 

And maybe all of it can be explained simply by the fact that our American Jewish community has been so relentlessly pursuing social, cultural, political, and economic mobility and trying to assimilate for over a century and therefore we are going to disproportionately value those kinds of institutions that represent the pinnacle of opportunity. 

On the other hand, they’re actually small and strange places. Increasingly with the rise of college enrollment across the board, there are more and more elite schools. And the differences, the substantive differences between the historic elites and today’s network of good colleges are becoming negligible. The vast majority of Americans and American Jews are never going to step foot in an Ivy League school. I’ve also noticed as an employer that I now rarely pay attention anymore to where prospective applicants for our jobs studied as undergraduates. I’m not sure it’s dispositive about anything anymore. I’ve noticed even with my own kids that their sense of their future academic trajectory is largely disinterested in that kind of pedigreeing that seemed really important to me when I was going through the process, whatever it was, 30 years ago. 

This past week, I spent a bunch of time in a seminar with our Hartman research fellows, many of whom are professors at elite universities and all of whom are products of elite universities. And I have to tell you, even they are increasingly ambivalent about their institutions.  Some believe that the way we remedy the anti-Israel campus environment is more Jewish communal investment in it. Some are drifting away from the campuses looking for new models entirely. If you’re following Jewish media this week alone, number one, some Harvard students finally sued Harvard for failure to deal with what they’ve experienced as an epidemic of anti-Semitism on campus, seeing opportunity within the evolution of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to push the universities towards greater responsiveness.

Then a major player in Jewish philanthropy, Mark Charendoff, wrote a piece for E-Jewish Philanthropy, calling for the field to invest in other universities to make them more hospitable to Jewish life, move out of the Ivy Leagues, invest in somewhere else. In response, even this morning, my friend Elisha Baker, graduated from the Hartman Hevruta Gap-Year Program in Israel and is now a Columbia undergraduate, wrote a desperate rejoinder on behalf of students at Columbia. What we need is to educate our support, our students rather than try again somewhere else. 

If your head is spinning about Jews and elite campuses, join the club. So I invited Mark Oppenheimer here to talk this through with me. Mark is a writer, a thinker, a podcaster. He serves now as Director of Open Learning at American Jewish University. He previously got a doctorate in religious studies from Yale and taught there for 15 years. He wrote the Beliefs column, about religion, for the New York Times. He’s had about six careers. His fifth and latest book is about, is called Squirrel Hill, The Tree of Life Shooting & the Soul of a Neighborhood. He created the Unorthodox podcast and co-hosted it for eight years, which means he has good podcasting equipment. 

But perhaps most material to today, he also created and hosted a special podcast series called Gatecrashers about the history of Jews and the Ivy League. Mark, thanks for coming on. And I guess I’ll start with this. What is the seduction of this conversation about why are we so interested? Why is Harvard so interesting, especially to Jews, but maybe even to Americans more broadly?

Mark: Yeah, that’s a good question. There’s no simple answer. I do remember one time I was in England, I think, and I was touring Oxford, just as a tourist. And I remember seeing the students lounging on the grass. Maybe I misremember, but I feel like the students could be on the grass, but the tourists couldn’t, or something like that. And we were staring at them as if they were animals in a cage, and we were taking pictures. I think I was a teenager in high school, and I thought, this is so weird. They’re just students, and yet here they have to endure tourists taking pictures of them as if there’s something special about being an Oxford student.

And then I ended up at Yale College and there were tourists coming by taking pictures of me. And, you know, I don’t know that there’s any very profound explanation for why certain elite institutions in particularly Anglo-America, Oxford, Cambridge, and then the Ivy League in the United States, have this spell that they cast over people. It has something to do with elitism. 

In the United States, I think there’s an argument to be made that because we don’t have a peerage, because we don’t have dukes and lords and a kind of quasi-royalty, I guess, an aristocracy is the word I’m looking for, that people, given their need to see the royal family on the cover of People magazine, we have to find substitutes, so if it’s not Harvard students, it’s the Kardashians. 

You know, people have a need to have a royalty and a meritocracy. It seems almost innate in us. And given the historical centrality of the Northeast to the United States experiment, which was something I was very interested in graduate school, I remember, I almost wrote a dissertation on Northeastern or New England exceptionalism. Why do you have this big country where all of the Christmas culture depicts snowy winters when most of the country gets no snow? It’s because New England gave us our sense of ourselves as a culture. 

And the Ivy League is the kind of old school system of New England, really. So I think there are a lot of reasons, but it certainly represents a bit of a deficit in our creative thinking as a country.

I actually disagree with you. I don’t think there are lots of other schools that have come up, they’ve come up in terms of quality, but in terms of the popular imagination, there’s no cult around Duke or Rice or Washington University at St. Louis or Wesleyan, schools every bit as excellent as the Ivy League schools, the way there is around Harvard and Yale. I actually think almost nothing’s changed.

Yehuda: Right, well what I was trying to say I guess, let me be more clear, is from a quality standpoint I think the education you’re gonna get at a whole number of schools is identical to, if not is equal to what you’re gonna get at Harvard and Yale. But you’re right, mythically, mythically there’s certainly a unique status.

Mark: Yeah, or better, sure. Yeah. And I would add one thing to that, one caveat, which is what you get at Harvard is the kind of student who aspired to go to Harvard. And so I think there is a quality of ambition and competitiveness, maybe well-submerged under a nice personality and decency and ethics, right? But a quality of ambition that you don’t get at a lot of schools that may be just as good.

Yehuda: Yeah, well that’s also what you get at Yale, the kind of student who wanted to go to Harvard. 

Mark: Hey!

Yehuda: Okay, but what about for Jews? I mean, is it simple, simply the question of Jewish social, economic, political mobility that Jews then said, okay, if this is where the aristocracy of America is, we want to find ourselves there? Is that what it essentially comes down to?

Mark: Yes, yes, that’s pretty much what it was. And you know, it was a phenomenon of basically the World War I era, before which the Ivy League was not an engine for social mobility. It was really a set of finishing schools for the upper class, right? But early in the 20th century, they become less divinity schools or finishing schools and become more democratic in their admissions, quite honestly, very early on, and then start attracting a lot of Jewish students. Then there’s a period where they try to limit that number, but from about the 1910s until, say, the Clinton era, they were pretty good engines of social mobility, and Jews who wanted social mobility or prestige or classiness, however defined, gravitated toward them, just as other ethnic groups that wanted those things aspired to them. 

But Jews were concentrated in big cities, they took to universities as engines of economic mobility, in much the way other ethnic groups might have taken to unions or certain, you know, craft guilds or labor guilds. The universities were a kind of guild that Jews aspired to and saw as useful for social mobility. And these were the best schools. My sense, by the way, is that this began to attenuate actually 20 or 30 years ago. I remember hearing stories of… I had a friend from Florida, and he said he knew lots of Jews in the Miami area whose parents would say, look, just go to University of Florida and we’ll buy you a car. Let’s save the money. Florida’s a good school, go to Florida. You know, they have a good Hillel and we’ll get you a BMW. And this would have been total heresy to my parents. I mean, education was so much more important than cars. 

But I think, you know, by the third or fourth generation, depending on where you live and the kind of culture you’re immersed in, Jews become Americans and Americans are basically materialistic mediocrities. So I think probably the aspiration of the Ivy League peaked in the 70s, 80s or 90s. And since then, I think Jews have made a lot of calculations about where to go.

Yehuda: So you think that’s all it’s about? I mean, you said this in the last episode of Gatecrashers when you were talking about Harvard, which is you think ultimately that the reason why there’s been a shrinking of population of Jews in the Ivy League is basically, I think you said it’s too much success for Jews in terms of the assimilation process, distance from Jewish roots, we’re insiders like everyone else, and it reduces the fire of Jews to want to fight their way into the system. 

There are other hypotheses about anti-Semitism, DEI, right? Like, is this what it’s about?

Mark: Yeah, I mean, the problem with the other hypotheses is that they don’t have as much evidence as my hypothesis. I mean, none of these hypotheses has, nobody’s ever done the big empirical study that would really pass sociological muster. So let me put that out there and say that I think all of us are working from a kishka’s level sense of anecdotes and anecdata. 

And I think that claims to knowledge about anything really, the percentage of Jews at Columbia or Harvard in a given year, for example. These are guesses at best that would, you know, I mean, we say, oh, Harvard is seven percent, the freshman class is seven percent Jewish based on a poll that the Harvard Crimson took, which is a total opt-in poll. You know, it did get several hundred responses, but there were problems with it. If you chose atheist or agnostic, you couldn’t also choose Jewish. So how many Jews elected atheist or agnostic, but actually would say that they’re ethnically Jewish also? 

Like, there’s so much problem with all this data we think we have. What we do know is, or what I know is, I’ve never met a Jew or another human being who has turned down Harvard because they thought there was going to be bigotry toward them at Harvard. Let me qualify that a little bit. I think it would probably not be difficult to find African Americans who chose historically Black colleges and universities because they thought they’d be especially welcoming places. Certainly there are women who choose women’s colleges because they want the culture and the support of the women’s college. 

But I’ve never met, in all of my years of reporting and doing some pretty thorough reporting, the high school senior who gets into Harvard but turns it down because of perceived antisemitism and goes to a substantially lower ranked school. I think that’s a unicorn, find me one.

Yehuda: I want to come back to that, but I first want to ask, but you are skeptical of the narrative that universities have reduced their admission of Jews.

Mark: No, I’m not skeptical of that. There are clearly fewer, in the broad picture, there are clearly fewer Jews at Harvard College or Yale College, the undergraduate colleges of these schools and maybe a dozen others, elite schools, than there were 20 years ago. I think that’s unquestionable. I think we know that, for example, from attendance at high holiday services at these schools, if you talk to rabbis and say, how many students were you getting 20 years ago versus now? I think that we know that based on Hillel attendance.

Look, crudely speaking, I can take you through the yearbook of Yale class of 1996 and just based on high school attended and last name, make pretty strong guesses for a Jewish population somewhere, I don’t know if it would be 15%, 20-25%, but it would be much lower today, right? So whether you’re looking at crude data or somewhat more sophisticated data, like high holiday attendance, which is a pretty good set of data, there are fewer today.

What I’m skeptical of is the idea that anti-Semitism has anything to do with it. Certainly affirmative action toward other groups, because Jews are perceived as white, and the number of white students has gone down. But even that, you have to be more sophisticated. They’ve held the number of athletes steady at most of these schools, at Division 1 Ivy League schools. So when you reduce the number of white students, but hold steady the number of lacrosse, football, and hockey players, and rowers, and Jews I think are somewhat less likely to be recruitable athletes, and then you decide the school’s gonna be 10% international, which these schools have by and large decided, and they’re not recruiting from Israel and England and Canada and Argentina. They’re recruiting from South Asia, East Asia, the Arab Gulf, places that have almost no Jews, there are all these structural reasons why the Jewish population would have to go down. 

Finally, I would just say that the Jewish populations at these schools have always been principally non-Orthodox. They’ve had sometimes robust Orthodox minyans, but they’ve been principally secular, Reform, and Conservative families sending their boys and girls off to these schools. And the number of teenagers coming out of those families has stagnated or shrunk. So like, how could it possibly be that Yale would still be as Jewish as it was 25 years ago? It couldn’t be.

And by the way, nobody, let me just say, nobody wants to believe that. The people behind the anti-Semitism theory that the number of Jews at Harvard say has shrunk because for all these structural reasons, perhaps in addition to other reasons, but that it’s principally structural reasons, I can explain this to them. They don’t change their minds. They are convinced that the admissions offices have anti-Semites who are trying to ferret out Jews and make it less likely that they come. And there’s no smoking gun for that. There’s no evidence for that at all.

Yehuda: Well, I guess the smoking gun is that you have demonstrated that at earlier times in the history of Harvard, there was institutional disinterest.

Mark: Yeah, but in the 1940s, I mean, I’m a historian, and I really hate that the good work that I did with the Gatecrashers team, and I have to credit Tablet Studios for the hard work that was a group project of about half a dozen people, it bothers me that people say, look what happened in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Clearly they never, because it’s this weird genetic fallacy. It’s this idea that there’s something in the DNA of institutions that’s ineradicable.

And that’s just sloppy thinking. Like thoughtful people can’t think that, because institutions aren’t anti-Semitic, humans are. So you have to find me, you have to find me the people and the smoking gun and the evidence because I’m a historian and a journalist and I want evidence.

Yehuda: Great. So let’s talk about the conversation that’s taking place today about the rising of what is either or perceived as institutional anti-Semitism connected to the Ivy Leagues. And let’s unpack what you think the dimensions are that are either, you don’t have to tell us all of your cards, but how you understand the phenomenon of the now perception that, as you’ve said, some of the people who are doing this are basically saying, look, Harvard was anti-Semitic in the 1920s and therefore Harvard never let go of its anti-Semitic roots and you’re setting that aside and I agree with you. 

There is, however, something strange happening and it was on display in Congress even though the actors involved with that were succeeded at trapping people who they wanted to trap the way that they did.

But something else is going on that’s prompting students to sue universities. Harvard’s this week was one. I can tell you just from sitting outside of Columbia University where I am right now, we hear the helicopters. It is an uncomfortable place for many Jewish students to be on campus. Maybe you could give us a little bit of where you think the DNA of that new phenomenon of Jewish discomfort at the Ivy Leagues looks like.

Mark: Well, so you’re closer to this than I am. I mean, I’m sitting two miles from Yale College, but I’m not a Yale teacher anymore and don’t have a close sense of what’s on the ground there. You tell me and I’ll reflect on it, but are the Jewish students afraid that someone’s going to hurt them?

Yehuda: Jewish students across the country are afraid that people are going to hurt them because in some cases.

Mark: No, at Columbia though, I mean, what are they, are they, and by the way, it doesn’t, I don’t think that only a fear of physical harm is worth noting. I think it could be that they think people hate them, but I’m curious, if you’re there, tell me what the sense is that what constitutes the antisemitism?

Yehuda: Right, so a few weeks ago in conversation with Mijal Bitton, we talked about a distinction between what we might call real genuine lack of safety, unproductive discomfort, and productive discomfort. What the dream is, obviously, in a liberal arts education, you should have some measure of productive discomfort. I would say students overwhelmingly, from my experience, experience a lot of unproductive discomfort. Being yelled at, being felt that their pathways on campus are obscured, watching as it’s not just that fellow students hold to positions that they find to be anathema, but that those positions get endorsed by professors in the university. 

I think that at Columbia was the particular trigger, which was the university banning Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace because it violates the university’s rules code of conduct in a few different places, and then having professors, over 200 professors, walk out of their classes to endorse Students for Justice for Peace and Jewish Voice for Peace. 

Does it endanger students? Well, it might endanger their academic record. It does make them feel as though the university, capital T, capital U, is somehow on the other side of what are considered to be Jewish issues. So that’s, I think, a better descriptor.

Mark: Right, I think there’s a tremendous lack of precision in how we talk about this. And it’s hard to try to beg for precision because it’s so easy to slip into big sweeping narratives. I will tell you that I was in Los Angeles talking about this, it’s about similar topics, giving a lecture at the University of Southern California. And I talked to a whole group of people afterwards who had children at various universities back east. And the stories coming to me from the Columbia mom were so much worse than the stories coming from other schools, right? 

I know enough about what’s going on at Yale having talked to Jewish faculty there that the environment is simply quite different from what it is at Columbia, right? I mean, the Columbia seems almost uniquely bad from everything I’ve heard. And that’s not to in any way diminish what’s going on there or at other places because again, you can have terrible antisemitism under a veneer of tremendous gentility, right? The classic British antisemitism is not one of physical threats. It’s one of gentleman’s screamings and kind of quiet mutterings and raised eyebrows and a sense of, you know, of who’s a proper Brit and who’s not, right? Antisemitism can be very sneaky. And it can be just as bad. 

So I’m not trying to rate who wins a misery derby, but I am trying to say that I think the Columbia experience and to some extent the experiences at several elite universities have been globalized as if they’re also the experience at Tulane, at Muhlenberg, at University of Maryland, at Michigan, at Arizona, at Florida, and like they’re not in lots of ways. Every school has its own experience. 

What’s happened? I mean, I think there are a couple things that have happened. Number one, there are a lot more anti-Zionist students at these schools than there used to be. Many of them are international, but many of them aren’t. There are a lot of students who identify particularly strongly right now with the left in a way that was not true in the 80s and 90s. These schools were more centrist, Clintonite, liberal then, and they have more far-left kids now, partly because of what’s happened in recent American history. You’re talking about students who were in high school and kind of coming to political consciousness during George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and Me Too. And anti-Zionism has become very popular on the left and has become intertwined and seen as intersectional with lots of other left events. 

But I also think, and then of course the faculty has, is probably farther to the left than it’s ever been on these campuses. Although William F. Buckley was writing in God at Man in Yale in the early 1950s that, the religion department at Yale was atheist and the economics department was socialist. And he wasn’t far off. I mean, that was, these places have always been, you know, sort of like that. And then of course, the percentage of students who have, because they’re Jewish or from, let’s say, Jewish adjacent communities, your Newtons, your Scarsdales, your Skokies, the percentage of students who kind of culturally feel an affinity for the Jewish concern for amcha, for Jewish people, but also Israel is smaller than it used to be as these schools have gotten more diverse and students from those communities that have gone down. 

So there are a lot of structural reasons that there would be a, that at a time like this, when Israel’s in the news, that the politics would have swung in the other direction. It doesn’t seem mysterious to me, but let me just lay on top of that, that your question presupposes the administrative state university. It presupposes that what we want, that what Jews want, and Jews have a thousand percent bought into this, is we want assistant deans of safety and DEI and student support and wellness comforting Jews and making sure they have safe spaces just as they have been doing or trying to do for other groups for the past, say, 10 years. And I don’t think that’s a healthy climate. And I think it’s really problematic that Jews have decided we want to leverage that climate for us.

Yehuda: Well, I don’t know that I would presuppose it as a position that I hold. I think it is out there. I think it’s in the water. I think partly it’s in the water because this is just a, I don’t want to go too far off course. I think the prevailing view by many institutional American Jews for the past century has been kind of, you’ve looked back at like medieval anti-Semitism, do I ally myself with the nobles or do I ally myself with the king?

American Jews, by and large, decided to ally themselves with the infrastructure of law enforcement and believed that if we’re on the side of law enforcement, that’s ultimately going to be in our better interest. That’s the roots of the ADL. And that’s like a lot of how American with the power structures and we look to the power structures to protect us. 

What I think makes it particularly complicated about the administrative structure on campus is that there is a narrative in the Jewish community that says what’s happened in the administration is that the embrace and the building up of the DEI bureaucracy has been one that protects certain populations on campus and alienates other populations on campus. And I have some real questions about whether I think that’s accurate. I’m curious what you think about whether that plays into this narrative.

Mark: Oh, well what do you think? Then I’ll tell you what I think.

Yehuda: Oh, great, I love it. I think it misses the story of what’s going on with DEI, which is largely the universities trying to protect themselves from litigation. I think that structure is there to help the university navigate essentially a whole bunch of claims, Title VI and other, that enable them to say, look, we are responding to accusations that there are forms of systemic bias.

As opposed to, in other words, I don’t think universities have really gone woke on the administrative level. I think they have at the academic level, but I don’t think they’ve actually gone woke at the administrative level.

Mark: I think what you’re saying is true, but not contrary to the prevailing narrative. I think that one reason there’s always a lot of money for DEI, or at least was until this year, now it seems to be swinging back in the other direction, is because of concerns about litigation and liability. But I also think it’s partly to mollify students. 

In the post-George Floyd moment, it wasn’t just universities that were beefing up their DEI regimes. They, individual departments, you know, at Yale, several professors and several grad students and very few majors have their own DEI committees, as if the one for Yale College isn’t enough. And a lot of that was to say we’re doing something. 

And what I always said is, I do think that we need to do things about racism and sexism and homophobia, but I’m not sure that creating a committee and then putting a vertical on the website, which is always part of it, there is always now a diversity vertical on the website. I’m not sure that does anything. And what we have to say is what’s effective. 

And so I think that as it’s developed, there’s not strong evidence that the DEI regimes are effective at helping historically marginalized groups. I want better regimes. I want evidence-based regimes that help all groups on campus. All people should feel safe and secure. I think it’s just laughable how many people, particularly in the conservative world, who were enormous critics of DEI, have this position that they hate DEI, but want more of it for Jews. 

I mean, it’s, you know, what’s interesting, I was texting with a good friend last night who said to me, he had just been reading about the Palestinian American artist or Palestinian artist whose show was yanked somehow by Indiana University, but maybe it’s gonna go up at a public museum. I forget, I don’t know the story well. But you know, this is someone who apparently is a very good artist, whose work is in the Guggenheim and whatever, and because of her politics or being Palestinian, people are saying, well, now we don’t wanna look at your art. 

And I said, we’re Jews. We go to Wagner operas, we read Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie. Are we actually, is this the move now? We’re gonna become small-minded people who don’t wanna look at art by antisemites? What art is left? In Christendom, so much of the great art is by antisemites. Don’t we wanna be the broad-minded people? Is this how small we’ve gotten, that now we want, give us our own mid-level dean to, you know, to help us. It’s, we’re, 

Yehuda: Yeah, I get it. I get it. You’re basically saying like you can’t do a safety for me and not for the kind of argument. And then the question becomes, do you want the university to be in the safety business?

Mark: I don’t want them to be in the safety business. I want a free speech university like the one we had in the 90s where people went and said stuff. I went to college with Neomi Rao who’s a Federalist Society far-right circuit court judge now. People talk about her as a Supreme Court contender in a Trump, you know, a Trump potential Trump or whatever appointee. And she was very far right then and she said things that were disagreeable and we talked with her and she had people in, you know, the conservative movement on campus. And you know, we had beers with them and we talked. 

And one thing that happened post-Trump was everyone decided that every friendship was now apocalyptic and millennial and you couldn’t be friends with the enemy and everyone had to pick sides. And we began to destroy civil discourse. And I think that the idea that now we’re going to cancel, you know, the left on campus, and we’re gonna say certain groups can’t meet here because they’re perceived as antisemitic, that we’re going to buy into that whole safety regime, which 10 minutes ago we were criticizing. It’s a bad look.

Yehuda: Yeah, but of course the argument would be the great old days of the 80s and 90s were less diverse on campus than they are today. So the nostalgia for open-mindedness seems to go together with a nostalgia for a more closed community. What do you make of that critique?

Mark: Right, but… Yeah, well, no, it’s not, but they’re not the same nostalgia. You can be, that’s not true. I mean, you can be nostalgic for a particular good thing about the 90s, which was on campuses anyway, there was somewhat more openness to free speech as an ideal in the kind of classic ACLU way, without being nostalgic for the fact that there was more homophobia in society. I mean, that doesn’t scan at all, I don’t think. 

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean that’s how I felt a little bit looking back at my own experience as an undergraduate in the 90s, which was, yeah, there were a whole bunch of things that happened on campus which I didn’t like, including professors who said outrageous things in classes that I didn’t like, but I kind of felt like everybody was a little bit uncomfortable. And I kind of liked that, and didn’t feel particularly threatened by it, and something else, yeah.

Mark: I also want to say like, it didn’t occur to us then, even when I felt very uncomfortable, and I do think this is a good thing. I think it’s more good than not. It didn’t occur to us to always go to the grownups and ask them to intervene. I mean, one of the things I saw at Yale College when I was teaching there was students who had beefs with other students, and I don’t mean beefs about racism and sexism and homophobia, I mean roommate disagreements between people who were ethnically the same, right? Or annoyance about something someone had said in an extracurricular club meeting, resorting to going to the Dean of Student Life and ask them to intercede and mediate before they even asked each other out for a cup of coffee to see if they could work it out themselves. 

And I just, I think that the sense that, I mean college students, remember, are grownups. Remember, 18, 19-year-olds, if they’re in Israel, they’re in the IDF. If they’re in Singapore, they’re in the army. They are grownups. So why do we have this massive superstructure and why are we suing to demand more of it?

Yehuda: Mm-hmm. Okay, so let me change channels a little bit and talk about Jewish life on campus and not just the regime to finite antisemitism. So I’m gonna share a theory with you. I think you’re a person who likes theories. 

Mark: Yeah. I love theories, actually. I always called my brother Theory Man, because he always had the best theories. He’d call me up and just say, got theory for you.

Yehuda: Yeah, this is what got me in trouble when I was writing my doctorate because I didn’t have any patience for the footnote part, but I had a lot of ideas. Yeah, I got through it. Here’s the interesting theory. So in the 20s, before there’s infrastructure of major Jewish life on campus, the first types of efforts that get created in the universities are things like the Menorah Society, which I have a dream of bringing back one day. 

Menorah Society is incredible for those who are not familiar. I probably have talked about it on the show in the past. It’s basically a student-led intellectual effort that takes place on a number of campuses winds up producing a journal that among other things, I love the idea that a student-run journal winds up producing the first draft of what became Mordechai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization. It publishes original pieces by Hannah Arendt and other major intellectuals of the time. That there’s, as you say, they’re understood to be adults by their professors and their adults take them seriously. 

The effort on campus becomes, the Jewish, the effort to build Jewish life on campus mirrors the dominant culture of what the university is supposed to be. We’re going to build an elite, intellectual engagement with ideas. And that’s what Jewish life is supposed to look like. 

Starting later on in the 60s, especially with the rise of Hillel, paradoxically, as Jews become more comfortable in the university, Jewish life becomes separatist. You actually need a separate place for Jews to go to live Jewish life. And that feels to me like a weird irony that we have now experienced the turnabout, which is that Jewish life on campus is not supposed to be something that fuels engagement with the main ideas of the university, but actually is a social and cultural means of standing apart from the university. And I wonder whether today on Jewish life on campus, we’re kind of reaping what we sowed. What do you think of that theory?

Mark: So, I mean, your argument would be that Jews don’t have sufficient allies on campus today because Jewish-identified students, are not engaging other students as much?

Yehuda: That, but also as opposed to investing the Jewish infrastructure and like how do we make the experience of Jewish life at the university intertwined with what people are supposed to do at the university, which is engage across difference, flourish intellectually, challenge our ideas. We’ve actually built Jewish life as being something that’s supposed to be, here’s how I show up as other.

Mark: I think that’s a great theory, but I, and I think there’s sort of, my gut tells me standing on one foot, there’s some truth in it. There’s a lot else going on that doesn’t capture. So for example, the, one of the things that happens when campuses become more comfortable places to be Jewish, is you get more Jewish students who are observant. And so not for nothing, do they want a kosher kitchen? Do they want spaces to daven? And do they put some of their finite extracurricular energy into creating Jewish religious life, which is not really what Menorah Society was doing. Menorah Journal certainly ran pieces that dealt with Judaism as a religion, but these were largely secularized and in a sense assimilationist Jews, religiously speaking and culturally speaking, who were interested in a certain intellectual project. 

I mean, not so different from say a Hannah Arendt, right? Who was Jewish and knew she was Jewish, but you know, it was an intellectual project for her and not a set of mitzvot. So, the population changed, it grew and it changed. The other thing to remember is, you take 1920 Harvard, it was a smaller place. The freshman class was much smaller. Even the Gentiles were more likely to be from Boston and New York. And it was not a particularly hard place to get into. So if you had a dozen or two dozen intellectually curious Jews who were there for intellectual reasons, that was a really substantial club.

And today you’re talking of schools of, you’re talking of a Harvard of six or 7,000, where even the Jews were varsity athletes in high school. And, you know, I think there’s just less purchase of a, you know, I mean, these schools still have undergraduate Jewish magazines. But I think that the idea that Jewish life is about that kind of intellectual threading with traditional Ivy life is, I don’t know that there’s the population for it. 

And I would circle back here to the fact that our students are less well-read. The humanities has taken a huge hit. 

Yehuda: Right, that’s the other data, is the crisis of the humanities.

Mark: One of the things I’ve, one of the things I’ve, you know, my, you know, my whole line about, and I’m sure I stole it from somebody is, you know, you don’t get to talk about from the river to the sea unless you can say which river and which sea. And I think most Jewish students can’t. And certainly most anti-Zionist students can’t. 

And when you’re talking about, one of the things that’s happening right now is that we are all of a sudden being forced to have a conversation that’s impossible to have unless you know something about European, colonial, Middle Eastern, Jewish, Turkish, Ottoman, and Arab history and politics. And 20 or 30 years ago, there were, by orders of magnitudes, more students on these campuses who had taken a class in something like that. And now they’re all taking computer science and economics, including the Jewish students whose parents say, don’t major in the humanities, don’t read Shakespeare, go make money.

Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah, there seems to be a link, at least a correlative link, to what’s going on campus for Jewish students with the fact that like at Yale, for instance, now there’s a Jewish studies major, but last year there were none. There’s something,

Mark: There was nobody majoring in Jewish studies last year?

Yehuda: Yeah, so that tells you something else about how Jewish students are showing up in the university, what’s important to them, what their priorities are. It feels to be like a strange correlation to say, on one hand, Jewish students feel beleaguered about aspects of their identity, on the other hand, they’re actually not doing a lot in the university itself that would reflect an investment in that identity as a major part of their education.

Mark: I also think that, and again, I don’t want to belittle or demean the experience of anyone who feels othered or beleaguered, I think antisemitism is a terrible problem. And I think it’s a bigger problem than most other racist and bigoted-isms. 

Statistically speaking, we know from the ADL and FBI statistics that antisemitism is a massive problem. I do want to say that students who don’t have Jewish learning, knowledge, or identity are probably at more risk for feeling insecure and unsafe when confronted with a kind of vague and free-floating and notional antisemitism or anti-Zionism, then students who know a lot and are secure in where do they feel about, you know, there are students who are observant, but anti-Zionist. There are students who are very pro-Zionist, but non-observant, but if there’s some knowledge base there and it’s something they’ve talked about with adults they’ve trusted over their lives, I think they feel they have more footing.

Yehuda: Yeah. We have some interesting data from that just a few weeks ago in a seminar we did for college students. We had a very high percentage of students who showed up precisely, it was a week-long seminar, precisely because they felt beleaguered on campus and they had never really done serious Jewish learning before and they recognized that something about that learning was an antidote. It was like at least let me understand what someone’s mad at me about or at least let me understand where I stand, as opposed to having these kind of inchoate feelings of vulnerability and otherness.

So let’s flip to the kind of prescriptive side. There have been kind of some bold suggestions that this was in tablet a few years ago, you know, that Jews should essentially divest from the Ivy League. I thought that was amusing. Jews who want to continue to get into those schools are going to get into those schools. The idea that people are going to just say, forget it. I don’t want to go to Harvard. I would rather go to Florida State. There’s a lot has to happen to get to that change. 

It’s being pushed again now. I believe Bret Stevens is arguing this, Mark Charendoff, as I said before, is arguing that the Jewish community should invest in a new round of universities that should be hospitable places for Jews, and that the counterargument is actually Jewish philanthropy, once upon a time, made the Ivy League universities better places for Jews. They invested in it. I’m curious where you sit when it comes to the prescriptive question.

Mark: So, you know, I have kids. One of them’s a high school senior. The others are, you know, coming along, not too far behind. And I think about these things, and I can only say, I am so profoundly uninterested in structural questions about how to combat antisemitism at colleges, partly because I think these things are cyclical, as my teacher and doctoral advisor, the great late historian, Paula Hyman, always said, anti-Semitism is cyclical, she said, and this was in the 90s and early aughts, we are in a trough right now, times are good for Jews, anti-Semitism extremely low, don’t worry, it will change. 

I think it’ll change back, that doesn’t mean be complacent. Largely what it means is I don’t think we can do much about anti-Semites, I don’t think we can browbeat them out, it’s a sickness, for some of them it’s a fairly benign one and I wish them compassion because I think being eaten up by baseless hatred is a bad thing. For some of them, they make it my problem and I want them to go away and I keep my distance and hope that that’s all that’s required. But in general, I don’t think we can fix anti-Semites. I don’t think we can cure them. 

I think what we can do is live happy, joyous lives and when necessary, take measures for our safety. But the idea that we can somehow, as a community, intercede in higher education and turn it toward hospitality for us, strikes me as a very far-fetched project and one that could drain enormous resources that would be better spent improving the salaries of day school teachers and summer camp counselors.

Yehuda: It’s also quite loaded politically because it gets correlated with, you know, Ron DeSantis this week saying, let’s, we’re going to make it easy for Jewish students to transfer into Florida universities as part of, which is inextricably linked to his larger political objectives and what he’s trying to do with the state of Florida.

Mark: I also just think, you know, that while I think that Judaism can be many things, I think it obviously has an ethnic aspect, a national aspect. I prefer the metaphor of a family, above all, rather than a tribe or a nation. For me personally, you know, so much of it is that it’s a set of texts, and from which we derive religious practices and values and rituals. 

And I’m not sure what is gained by saying as a Jewish community, let’s drive more of our kids to be together at a place that doesn’t have a great history of Jewish practice. Just putting Jews together, quad Jews, so that they can play video games and watch bowl games as Jews, I know there’s an argument for it. I know there are people for whom that aspect Jewish Greek life or Hillel life is the one that is the glue. I’m not demeaning it, but what I can say is it’s not the one that I find most interesting or concerning.

Yehuda: Let me ask you one last question, which is, you know, we’ll go back to kind of where we started, which is to the extent to why we look to the campus. And, you know, I think one of the reasons we look to campuses and why the Jewish community is consumed by looking towards what do the kids think and what’s going on college campuses and our youth and TikTok and Instagram, is because there’s this weird prevailing hypothesis that will tell you the future. If you know what young people think about something, it’ll tell us the future. 

I’ve had a hard time with that ever since it kind of dawned on me that like, 12 years after like the revolt on college campuses in America in the late 60s, America elected Ronald Reagan. Do you feel that there’s a sense that, and you’ve signaled that you think that these things are cyclical, but do you feel that there’s a reason to believe that the trends on college campus intellectually, that we see among faculty around anti-Zionism are strong predictors and indicators for the general American public?

Mark: To some extent, sure. Trends that start on campuses move outward. That was true of how, you know, Reagan and Buckley and, you know, Jude Wanniski and all these people and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, it’s true of how they built a conservative movement. It certainly, there’s a piece of it that comes from idea production on campuses and funding campus centers and things like that.

It seems like anti-Zionism is particularly strong on campuses, that if there’s a future for a kind of far left, and in many cases, anti-Semitic, anti-Zionism, that it will derive its intellectual energy from campuses. As the labor movement, which I’m supportive of and worked in when I was a Yale grad student, has given a lot of organizers from, you know, who started on campuses in, say, graduate student unionism, and then went into the labor movement, hundreds of them, in fact. 

So sure. But as you say, I think I’m also in line with your skepticism, which is, you know, what’s happening on campus is in no way predicted Donald Trump, just as it didn’t predict Ronald Reagan, just as it probably didn’t predict Barack Obama, you know, I think, I think it’s finite. I share with you, I think your founding premise or an hour ago, which is that we, we make too much of these schools. 

One of the things I point out in my podcast, in Gatecrashers, is that 100 years ago, when the Ivy League began conspiring to limit Jewish presence on their campuses, to shrink the number of Jews, so let’s say around the time of World War I, 105 years ago, a century ago, the United States was exactly one third the population that it is today. It was something like 110 million, now we’re 330. 

So not only has the population tripled, but the number of literate people who are capable of doing college level work has even has gone up as a percentage within that. So the number of people who could be a good student at a Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Michigan, UMass, whatever, at a good four-year college, has more than tripled. But our perception of how many elite schools there are has not tripled. We don’t think of there as being 24 Ivy-level schools and a dozen more MIT, Chicago, Stanford. We still think of there as being like 10. And that’s obviously just a tremendous failure of imagination. And I actually at the end think it’s a game theory problem. 

Which, by the way, if your goal were to drive Jewishly engaged students to some other campus, it’s a game theory question. You have to get them together and figure out which campus you’re gonna go center around. And nobody realizes that’s the problem. Nobody says in their op-eds, let’s pick this school. They all say, let’s just go elsewhere. But the really serious person would say, here’s a school that seems like we could make a difference. And they don’t.

Yehuda: Well thanks so much for listening to our show this week, and thanks to our guest, Mark Oppenheimer. Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter, our executive producer is Maital Friedman, this episode was produced wth assistance from Sam Balough and Sarina Shohet, and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically about a week after an episode airs. You can sponsor an episode of the show by following a link in the show notes or visiting shalomhartman.org/identitycrisis. We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about, if you have comments on this episode, you can write to us at [email protected] You can subscribe to our show everywhere podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week and thanks for listening.