From Nazis to Vietnam protesters, NY exhibit highlights history of campus antisemitism
At NYC’s Center for Jewish History through Dec. 31, ‘Between Antisemitism and Activism’ looks at Jews in academia facing obstacles like quotas, Holocaust relativism and anti-Zionism
Reporter at The Times of Israel
NEW YORK — In 1969, as protests seized the Columbia University Morningside campus, student activists frequently charged that the Vietnam War was akin to “the genocide of the Holocaust.” Meanwhile, some Jewish faculty who were Holocaust survivors called the students “academic Hitler Youth.”
The phenomenon resembles contemporary protests that have gripped American college campuses since the Hamas-led terror onslaught of October 7, 2023, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza after 1,200 people in southern Israel were brutally murdered and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip. It’s also one of the historical parallels at the heart of “Between Antisemitism and Activism: The Jewish University Experience in Historical Perspective,” a new exhibit at the Center for Jewish History (CJH) in New York City.
Running through the end of the year, the exhibition highlights how Jewish students and faculty have navigated antisemitism for more than a century. It also accentuates the positive, showing how Jewish students and faculty have asserted their identity on campus, from the founding of Jewish studies programs and campus groups such as sororities and fraternities.
“There are people who will look at what’s happening today on campuses and say we’re back in the 1930s. We’re not, but there is a through line from that period throughout the whole postwar period until today. We find that the experience of early May 1933, when the book burnings by [German] university students took place, created the kind of prototype of Jewish suffering in the university context,” said CJH president Gavriel Rosenfeld.
Indeed, a photograph of Nazi students storming the Anatomical Institute at the University of Vienna in 1933 looms large in “Suffering under the Swastika,” one of the exhibit’s five sections. Evocative of the photos of Columbia University students storming Hamilton Hall in April 2023, the image sets the tone for the exhibit, Rosenfeld said.
In this section, visitors learn about the persecution Jewish students and faculty faced in Nazi Germany, from the forced retirement and dismissal of more than 1,300 Jewish, “non-Aryan” academics in 1933 to the expulsion of Jewish students from universities.
“Antisemitism in the American Academy” dives into the antisemitic admission quotas in elite institutions including Princeton, Dartmouth and Columbia during the 1930s and 1940s. It also addresses the overall discrimination Jewish faculty and students faced in American universities.
The quotas stayed in place through the 1960s. Before 1920, Jewish enrollment in Columbia was upwards of 40 percent. By the 1920s, it dropped under 14%.
As the exhibit points out these quotas prompted many Jewish Americans to matriculate at other schools, such as the University of Illinois, or private universities such as MIT.
Faculty were not immune from quotas. In 1930, there were only 100 Jewish professors in the entire US, according to the exhibit.
In “Between Antisemitism and Activism,” and “Students, Signs, and Slogans,” the exhibit addresses the line between free speech and hate speech as well as the current Jewish experience on college campuses.
For example, in December 1933, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler invited Hans Luther, the Nazi Ambassador to Washington, DC, to speak on campus. Butler, who sympathized with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and endorsed British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 settlement with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, was “a fan of European fascism,” Rosenfeld said, adding that the main library on campus is named for him.
Luther’s visit sparked massive protests on Broadway. While a number of students and faculty opposed giving Luther a platform, there were also those who didn’t, like the Jewish journalist Meta Lilienthal, who said, “We must give free speech rights to all people, including Nazis.”
The issue of free speech versus hate speech and antisemitic rhetoric emerged again in the 1960s.
At the time Mark Rudd, who was involved in the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), equated America’s role in Vietnam with the Holocaust. Rudd then joined the far-left Marxist militant group the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a series of bombings.
“You have this Holocaust and Nazi subtext informing student activism in the 1960s left. Meanwhile, you have an actual Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust testifying before Congress saying the new left reminded him of the Nazis who were occupying buildings,” Rosenfeld said.
The Nazi subtext didn’t stop in the 1960s.
Last January, former Harvard president Claudine Gay, together with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, testified before Congress about their universities’ handling of antisemitism.
“[Gay] essentially said people can march through the Harvard quad and say Jews should be subjected to genocide, that that kind of speech is okay. A lot of pushback came with that, but it shows these are not issues we’ve solved,” Rosenfeld said.
While much of the exhibit focuses on antisemitism, it also spotlights Jewish student activism. As the exhibit points out, three of the four students that the National Guard shot and killed at Kent State in 1970 were Jewish. Additionally, the majority of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement steering committee in 1964 was Jewish.
Lastly, “Affirming Jewishness on Campus” explores how antisemitism motivated Jews to assert their identity on campus, from the founding of Jewish fraternities and sororities such as ZBT to Jewish centers such as Hillel.
In 1923, Illini Hillel at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign became the first Hillel in the United States. There are now 150 campus Hillels across the states. In recent years a crop of new campus groups like Jewish on Campus have emerged to combat antisemitism and celebrate Jewish identity on campus.
“There is a long history of activism, of Jewish students and faculty fighting for recognition,” Rosenfeld said.
