Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  The abandonment of compulsory chapel must have provided yet another spur to Jewish enrollment during the second half of the twenties, yet Hopkins was clearly conflicted over the secularization he himself had promoted. In an article published in 1945 in the New York Post, Hopkins declared that Dartmouth was still “a Christian College founded for the Christianizing of its students.” A half-century later, that provocative statement would be cited approvingly by neoconservative students—ironically, some of them Jews—associated with the controversial Dartmouth Review, dedicated to the proposition that multiculturalism and liberalism were running amok in Hanover. It would be interesting to know if Hopkins ever did sit down for a “jaw” about the Christianizing mission of Dartmouth with his friend Felix Frankfurter. If Hopkins had a fault as a booster of his institution—one of the main roles of any university president in any era—it can only have been that he was more candid than his contemporaries at other colleges. If they felt, as many did, that part of their job was to remain faithful to the Christian and WASP origins of their institutions, they didn’t broadcast their views—especially in forums such as a New York newspaper with a large Jewish readership.

  My father and his contemporaries did not need explicit instruction in the prevailing attitudes, at Dartmouth and other old-line educational institutions, toward too-Jewish Jews. It is hardly surprising that Jewish students of my father’s generation suffered from a serious case of tsitterdik syndrome, a condition shared by many Jews, in many social contexts, throughout the nation. The tsitterdik sufferer—the word is derived from the onomatopoetic Yiddish tsitter, to shake or tremble—was condemned to unending worry about the behavior of his fellow Jews. One Jew’s loud voice, pushiness, conspicuous display of wealth—anything, really, that fit anti-Semitic stereotypes—could reflect badly on all Jews. Tsitterdik behavior had long characterized the assimilated community of Jews in Germany (though they would soon learn that looking and behaving exactly like their countrymen provided no guarantee against anti-Semitism on the rampage). In America, tsitterdik responses by German Jews were intensified by the beginning of the Jewish influx from Eastern Europe in the 1880s; the outpouring of German Jewish money into the settlement houses and educational programs of New York’s Lower East Side attested to the nervousness as well as to the charitable traditions of the community. As far as German Jews were concerned, the only cure for these palpitations was the rapid Americanization and assimilation of the new arrivals. Only when the immigrants had abandoned their obviously Jewish and foreign ways would the nervousness of the older American Jewish community subside.

  In 1991, Alexandra Shepard—a student at a very different Dartmouth from the institution my father attended—was working in the college archives when she became interested in correspondence during the twenties and thirties among Dartmouth administrators, and from alumni to the administration, concerning “the Jewish problem” on the Hanover campus. Drawing extensively on archival material as well as interviews with surviving alumni, Shepard wrote her honors thesis in history on Jewish students at Dartmouth between 1920 and 1940. Her interviews with alumni are of particular interest, because they illuminate the social insecurity that pervaded the psyches of even those Jewish students who were most successful and most thoroughly assimilated.

  In the spring of 1931, Michael Stern (a pseudonym), an editor of the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, and a Big Man On Campus, manifested his tsitter jitters by requesting a meeting with President Hopkins to voice his concern over a “deterioration” in the kind of Jewish students who were being admitted. Hopkins agreed, noting repeatedly in correspondence that it was for the good of the Jews themselves that Dartmouth limit the influx of undesirable “Hebrew” applicants from public high schools and places like Brooklyn. The Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where my father’s family lived after moving from Manhattan, seems to have been regarded by many college administrators (not only those at Dartmouth) as the wellspring of a new, presumably pushier breed of Jewish immigrant. Jewish students like Stern and my father were acutely aware of the need to present themselves as worthy representatives of their people and of the adverse consequences of being perceived as part of a “racial problem” (as it was often called in the days when “Hebrews” were perceived by many gentiles as a race apart). “I didn’t know how Jewish to be,” Stern told Shepard in an interview. His requirement that Shepard use a pseudonym certainly suggests that this former BMOC was still conflicted about his Dartmouth experience and about his attitude toward other Jewish students of his generation. My dad, who was not cut out to be a BMOC, must have been as tormented in college as he was in later years by the fear that he could not measure up to a set of amorphous social standards.

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  ALTHOUGH Bob Jacoby was a graduate of a well-regarded prep school and came from the type of cultivated, acculturated Jewish family favored by Dartmouth’s admissions office, his family’s economic comedown had also saddled him with an undesirable Flatbush address. But Dartmouth never knew that. On my father’s college transcript, and in the freshman “Green Book,” his address is listed as 32 Washington Square West in Manhattan. With its Jamesian associations, this was a much better address than any street in Flatbush. Although plenty of Jews lived on, or at least in the vicinity of, Washington Square by 1930 (most of them in decidedly un-Jamesian accommodations), the address still conveyed a sense of Old New York and old money. It was Uncle Ozzie who lived at Number 32 before he married Aunt Mary, and it was he who provided the front for the Dartmouth admissions office. True, Dad had applied to Dartmouth from Poly Prep (which Dean Bill described as “a splendid school” in the alumni magazine). But he also had an identifiably Jewish name and features—a nose, at any rate—that certainly hinted at his origins. A Washington Square address might offset some of those liabilities. While no longer quite “the ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement” portrayed by Henry James in his 1881 novel, the square (in spite of the encroaching bohemia of Greenwich Village) retained an upper-class aura. In the late 1920s, in spite of the presence of several new apartment buildings, one could still recognize the Washington Square of James’s nineteenth-century description: “It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having something of a social history.”

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  AS IT HAPPENS, the history of 32 Washington Square West offers a neatly ironic microcosm of the constantly shifting social and residential barriers that affected Jews of my father’s and uncle’s generation. When Uncle Ozzie lived at that address, in a building erected on the site in 1925, he rented his apartment. After World War II, the rental building was transformed into an elegant and exclusive cooperative—a form of apartment ownership largely unheard of outside New York—where, it was well known, Jews need not apply. No Jews were permitted to buy apartments at Number 32 until 1962, when the building’s board of directors caved in under pressure from the city’s recently established Human Rights Commission. Until that time, co-ops had successfully argued that they were exempt from city policies prohibiting racial and religious discrimination in rental apartments. Uncle Ozzie (even though he had a way of gaining acceptance in venues, like the Dallas Country Club, that were generally closed to Jews) would not, in the late 1940s, have been permitted to buy the apartment he had once rented in New York. It is sobering to reflect upon the fact that for much of the twentieth century, no Jew—however well-off, however well-connected—could take for granted the right to live anywhere he chose in the city with the largest Jewish population in the United States. And if that was true in New York, why should my father not have suspected that it might also be true in Okemos, Michigan?

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  THE PHONY address on my father’s transcript provides one more piece of evidence of the family’s thoroughgoing desire to conceal its true social, economic, and ethnic backgr
ound. What an immense amount of thought and energy must have gone into this accumulation of fictions, great and small, in the service of another identity! In view of the attitudes expressed by men who had the power to keep a Jewish boy out of a good college, it is easy to understand why the Jacobys went to such lengths. What is so striking about the Dartmouth administrators’ correspondence on the “Jewish problem” is the matter-of-fact, unashamed tone in which the sentiments were voiced. No one was embarrassed to be talking about how to exclude Jewish students of the wrong kind, and it obviously never occurred to these refined WASP educators that posterity might take a different view of their views.

  In 1997, Dartmouth president James O. Freedman (now retired) quoted a telling piece of correspondence at the dedication of a campus center for Jewish students. The letters were exchanged in 1934 between Robert C. Strong, Bill’s successor as director of admissions, and Ford H. Whelden, an alumnus from Detroit. Whelden observed that “the campus seems more Jewish each time I arrive in Hanover. And unfortunately, many of them (on quick judgement) seem to be the ‘kike’ type.” The admissions director told Whelden he was “glad to have your comments on the Jewish problem, and I shall appreciate your help along this line in the future. If we go beyond the 5% or 6% in the Class of 1938, I shall be grieved beyond words….It may be that all of the Jewish boys [accepted for admission] will come, in which case we may get up to 6%, but I do not see how it can climb as high as 8% or 9%.” Both Whelden and Strong would surely have been grieved beyond words, and utterly disbelieving, had they known that Dartmouth would one day have a Jewish president, and that the president would cite their correspondence as a prime example of the anti-Semitism shared by many of the college’s alumni, administrators, and students during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

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  READING THESE old words in the Dartmouth archives, more than thirty years after my dad first admitted to me that he was Jewish, I could finally comprehend, on an emotional rather than a purely intellectual level, the depth of his fear that his children might be deprived of something they wanted in life simply because their father had been born a Jew. My father wasn’t delusional (as I had ignorantly half-concluded in 1966) to think that a Jew could never quite predict when a door might be slammed in his face. Instead of directing his anger at people who talked about a “Jewish problem” in the thirties, my father internalized the judgments embedded in President Hopkins’s and Dean Bill’s letters.

  In his formative years, Dad could not have seen these attitudes for what they were—one piece in an overarching edifice of unexamined prejudices and stereotypes applying not only to Jews but to everyone outside the WASP elite. Bill, after all, was as certain that the whole world loved a homely Irishman as he was that the whole world despised a hook-nosed Jew. His views of black Americans were cut from the same cloth. In March 1932, Bill took time out from his incessant worrying about Jews to focus on the much less significant (in terms of the number of applicants) but still anxiety-producing question of whether to admit a Negro or two. He was trying to decide on the application of “a Negro boy from New York City who is evidently an outstandingly fine member of that race.” The young man, a high school track star, had been recommended by Dartmouth’s track coach, who assured Bill that the prospective freshman “should at least add color to the campus. Inasmuch as this boy can run a 440 in 52 sec. flat…even tho he be a Chinaman we can use him….”

  Much to my regret, the question of admitting women to Dartmouth never came up during the thirties. It would no doubt be edifying to read Dean Bill’s analysis of the intellectual abilities of female applicants, and his image of what a girl ought to look like in order to gain full acceptance by the Dartmouth community.

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  I WAS SURPRISED at the depth of my anger as I sifted through these letters. Most of them were written nearly seventy years earlier, yet they retained a certain power over me because the authors, and men like them, wielded a great deal of power over my father. Cultivated men, men dedicated not only to their college but to education itself, the administrators of Dartmouth used part of their power to restrict the opportunities of those whom they regarded as social inferiors. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner? Not a chance. Although anti-Semitism was an error bred in the bones of upper-class gentiles at that time, some of Hopkins’s and Bill’s contemporaries, like Eleanor Roosevelt, made a serious attempt to wean themselves from the prejudices with which they had been raised. It is no excuse, though it is an explanation, to acknowledge that the administrators at Dartmouth, and throughout the Ivy League, were typical products of their social class and generation. Their policies—the logical extension of their ingrained biases—lived on for decades. A Dartmouth alumnus (not Jewish), now in his mid-sixties, tells me that some of his classmates were furious when President Freedman’s speech, quoting excerpts from the anti-Semitic letters, was reported in The New York Times. “The campus certainly has more than its fair share of Jews now,” one of my friend’s ex-roommates had said to him, “so what’s the point of airing out that dirty linen?”

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  MY FATHER’S conflicts about his Jewishness formed only one strand in his unhappiness at Dartmouth. The outstanding student at Poly Prep had turned into a C student in college. My father participated in no extracurricular activities (another contrast to his years at Poly), although “well-roundedness” was considered more important than academic distinction in the Dartmouth of that era. Moreover, Dartmouth, unlike a number of other private colleges, does not seem to have placed any barriers in the way of Jewish students interested in extracurricular activities. Jews occupied prominent positions on Dartmouth student publications, in drama groups, and in intellectual discussion clubs—all activities that had attracted my dad at Poly. At Dartmouth, he seems to have formed few lasting friendships. I was unable to track down anyone who remembered my father from college, as Charles Wardell remembered him from Poly, even though many members of his class were still alive when I began working on this book.

  The fraternity system at Dartmouth divided Jews and gentiles in much the same manner as it did on all other campuses (though Dartmouth’s non-Jewish fraternities did occasionally pledge Jewish BMOCs, which was not true at every school). There was one Jewish fraternity on campus at the time, composed mainly of men from German Jewish families like the Sondheims and the Jacobys. However, I doubt that my dad would ever have joined a Jewish fraternity even if he had been selected as a pledge, and even if his family had been able to afford frills like fraternity initiation fees. Becoming a member of any identifiably Jewish group would have gone entirely against the grain of his upbringing. Jews, he had been taught, should not set themselves apart. And if most Jews could not expect to be invited to join a gentile fraternity, better to be unaffiliated than to appear “clannish.” Better to be seen as one of the heathen than one of the chosen.

  My father’s tight budget was also a social liability—more so at Dartmouth than it would have been at Columbia, which enrolled many day students who lived at home in order to save money. (Columbia did pressure freshmen to live on campus—one way of discouraging applicants from immigrant families, who would find it hard to pay dormitory room and board.) Dartmouth’s geographical isolation meant that every student’s family had to come up with money for room and board, and this requirement virtually guaranteed a more affluent student population than the one at Columbia or Harvard. My dad told me he began to gamble seriously during his college years (even if he didn’t have many close friends, there was never any shortage of gambling buddies) in order to come up with the money he needed to invite a girlfriend to social events like Dartmouth’s Winter Carnival and to accept invitations to mixers at women’s colleges. The man was, of course, expected to pay for everything, whether his girlfriend visited him in Hanover or whether he visited her at her college. Dad often came up short. “Sometimes I had to throw myself on the mercy of the girl,” he recalled, “because of course I usually lost more mon
ey than I won in an effort to pay for my share. I would let it be known that my family had lost its money in the stock market crash and there was just enough left for my tuition. Which was partly true. It wouldn’t have impressed my dates to learn that I’d lost the money meant for a Hanover Inn dinner in a poker game.”

  When my father filled out a questionnaire for his twenty-fifth class reunion in 1960—which he did not attend—he noted only, “Did not return to Dartmouth after sophomore year (remember the Depression).”

  By the time my father left the college, the Dartmouth administration was well on its way to attaining its goal of a sharply reduced Jewish undergraduate presence. In the fall of 1932, only 5.8 percent of entering freshmen were Jewish, compared with 10.8 percent in my dad’s class just a year earlier. The Jewish delegation, Bill reported in an alumni magazine issue published a year after his ill-advised quip about “the chosen and the heathen,” was now “back to normal.” Furthermore, Bill observed with satisfaction, the number of those stating no religious preference had declined from ninety-seven to nine. Given the small furor over his comments about the previous freshman class, Bill would have been well advised to refrain from making any further public statements that could be regarded as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from returning to the sensitive subject of physical appearance as an admissions criterion. “One boy was admitted,” Bill explained, “because he had such lovely light hair and blue eyes and was about six feet two in height. Our Phi Beta Kappa societies are getting so swarthy that it is well to lighten things up a bit.”