Antisemitism and higher education in the United States

Jews have faced antisemitism and discrimination in universities and campuses in the United States, from the founding of universities in the Thirteen Colonies until the present day in varying intensities. From the early 20th century, and until the 1960s, indirect quotas were placed on Jewish admissions, quotas were first placed on Jews by elite universities such Columbia, Harvard and Yale and were prevalent as late as the 1960s in universities such as Stanford. These quotas disappeared in the 1970s.

In the early 21st century, there was a resurgence of antisemitism, especially after the BDS campaigns in the early 2000s and notably after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel when anti-Israel activists and protestors were reported to have engaged in physical and verbal violence toward Jewish students and staff in American universities. American university administrations were criticized for failing to protects Jewish students and the president of Harvard, Penn and MIT were criticized for failing to clearly define calls for genocide of Jews as violating their universities' code of conduct. Some called for the genocide or ethnic cleansing of Jews living in Israel.

18th century and 19th century
Only one Jew, Judah Monis, received a college degree from an American university prior to 1800. Monis was given a job in Harvard to teach Hebrew on the condition he converted to Christianity. Despite having converted and married a Christian, he was not embraced by his Harvard colleagues.

Due to the low proportion of Jews in the overall American population (a quarter million out of 63 millon) according to Nathan Glazer "… before 1880 or 1890 there were too few American Jews for them to constitute a question".

20th century
In the beginning of the 20th century, US administrators in elite universities in the United States sought to solve what was called to as "the Jewish problem" referring to there being too many Jews in campuses. Administrators restricted Jewish enrollment and created the modern admissions process to restrict the number of admitted students of Jewish origin. According to the Washington Post, every major section in the application process, including geographic diversity, legacy preference, the interview and freshman class cap were part of an effort to address "the Jewish problem" and reduce the number of Jewish students. Columbia University in New York City, Harvard, Yale and Princeton were among the first universities to restrict Jewish enrollment, following elite universities, hundreds of other US colleges restricted Jewish admission until the 1960s.

According to Mark E. Oppenheimer, vice president of Open Learning at American Jewish university, universities were considering finishing schools for elite Protestant boys, Jewish students sought to use universities as an engine of social mobility and were less interested in the social activities of the university and instead preferred to invest in academic performance and studying, leading to a change in character of American universities which was perceived as a threat to the Protestant American elite.

Jerome Karabel, a sociologist of the University of California wrote in "The chosen: The hidden history of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton" that Jews were seen as socialist proselytizers by nativists as well as a genetically inferior race by some Americans. Jews were considered unacceptable by some elite social circles according to Karabel. Efforts to restrict Jewish enrollment started in New York City, a city whose population was 30% Jewish in the early 20th century. In Columbia university in 1920 had a 40% Jewish enrollment rate according to Oliver Pollak. Since most Jewish students at the time were poor, worked night jobs to pay their tuition and lived at home, Columbia required students to live in dormitories in campus as well as limited scholarships. Columbia also began to conduct interviews in admissions process and according to Oppenheimer, university representatives detected accents or telling signs of Jewish origin even if the name of the applicant was not clearly Jewish. According to Nadell, elite Protestants students began to abandon Columbia due to its changing culture, after the initiation of the program Columbia halved the number of Jewish students within two years. In Harvard Jews composed about 22% of the student population in 1922. Harvard began a geographic diversity program to enroll students from states with low numbers of Jews. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, according to historians James Davidson and Deborah Coe, was "the most significant proponent of restricting Jewish admissions".

US admissions tests were designed to fit a White Protestant elite education with questions on Classical subjects as well as Greek and Latin which were not taught in schools in which the Jews and other immigrants learned. Yale, Dartmouth and other universities introduced legacy admissions that favored the Protestant elite.

According to sociologist, Stephen Steinberg, Jews were most commonly restricted through character and psychological exams. Jews were often given descriptors that were in contrast to the values which the universities sought and those Jews who managed to prove they exhibited such values were considered "pushy". School administrators who were mostly Protestant would characterize Jews with stereotypes and prevented their entry to universities.

Stanford University under President Marc Tessier-Lavigne admitted in 2022 of having limited the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s which he called "appalling antisemitic behavior". According to the Stanford committee, Stanford stopped or limited recruiting students from schools with high ratios of Jewish students. Between 1949 and 1952 following the introduction of the quota for example the number of students enrolled from Beverly Hills High School declined from 67 to 20 while Fairfax declined from 20 to 1. Stanford also misled investigations, parents and alumni who inquired for decades.

In the 1970s quotas on Jews gradually disappeared and admission of students of Jewish origin rose in American higher education.

In the late 20th century, Holocaust deniers were given a platform to run disinformation campaigns in multiple student run newspapers as well as through visits to universities. According to the ADL, through principles of academic freedom and student activism extremists and antisemitic rhetoric were allowed a say in university campuses. According to ADL this forced universities to directly fight antisemitism and extremism.

21st century
In 2001 the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement began to pressure American universities to cut ties with Israeli academics and from Israel. Although such efforts mostly failed, the US Civil Rights commission issued a report in 2005 which states that "antisemitism persists on college campuses and is often cloaked as criticism of Israel". Jewish students were said to often feel isolated and targeted for harassment by BDS activists.

In 2022 the American Jewish Congress released a report stating that a third of Jewish students felt unsafe or uncomfortable in campus due to their Jewish identity.

In northern autumn 2023, before the October 7th attack a Palestinian literature festival was held in Penn campus, critics of the event pointed to controversial guests including Roger Waters who had called for the destruction of Israel as well as used antisemitic language.

Following the October 7th attacks
Following the October 7th attack on Israel, some members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) celebrated the attack and said that all Israeli Jews were legitimate targets. The organization is supported and financially sponsored by the American Muslims for Palestine, which according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is linked to Hamas. A bipartisan group of lawmakers called for a federal investigation into the funding of SJP. Columbia University and Rutgers University suspended the SJP chapter in their university in late 2023. In late November 2023, the Center for Antisemitism Research found that 73% of Jewish college students and 43.9% of non-Jewish students experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the 2023–2024 school year.

In the first 16 days after the October 7th attack by Hamas against Israel there was an increase of 400% in antisemitic incidents, including assault, harassment and vandalism against Jews in the United States, the Washington Post said that some of the most visible instances of antisemitism occurred in US campuses.

In 2023 the American Jewish Congress released a report that found that 44% of Jewish students were affected by antisemitism on campus. 25% of Jewish students avoided wearing or displaying items that could identify them as Jewish. More than 50% of Jewish students were excluded or felt excluded from other students more than once.

Of the non-Jewish students targeted 46% said it was because they were assumed to be Jewish. According to the research center only 38.6% of Jewish students reported feeling comfortable in universities compared to 63.7% prior to the October 7th attack on Israel. A majority of students, Jews and non-Jews reported feeling their campus administration did not do enough to fight anti Jewish prejudice. Only 45.5% of Jewish students said they felt physically safe and 32.5% emotionally safe in universities.

The center also found that only 18% of American students underwent any training related to anti-Jewish prejudice compared to 55.8% having undergone DEI training. In December 2023, President of Harvard, MIT and Penn testified before Congress regarding the state of antisemitism in their universities and were asked if "calling for the genocide of Jews" is against the codes of conduct in Penn, MIT and Harvard. The three presidents answered that it was a violation depending on the context. The President of Harvard, Claudine Gay and president of Penn, Lizz Magill subsequently resigned following criticism. In December 2023, The United States Congress launched an investigation into antisemitism at the American universities.

In late 2023, the New York Times reported that some Jews in Harvard have stopped wearing openly Jewish headwear. In the New York Times article, Mark Oppenheimer noted in light of the history of antisemitic quotas against Jews in Harvard, "To see newly resurgent antisemitism against this backdrop of fairly recent, wonderful acceptance is a very, very painful thing for a lot of Jews,". Dr Gay after her resignation apologized for her testimony in Congress as well as saying that chants heard in Harvard such as "globalize the intifada" and "from the river to the sea" are antisemitic and a call for violence against Jews. A Jewish student told the New York Times that some students may have different definitions for their chants and gave the benefit of the doubt while another student remarked that after October 7 there has been a major shift and felt the campus was an alien place, saying his classmates explicitly praised Hamas and denied the rape and abduction of Israeli women.

In late 2023 a protest that began in the outskirt of Penn campus resulted in the targeting of a Jewish owned restaurant in Philadelphia.

In 2024, American President Joe Biden and US Vice President Kamala Harris condemned antisemitism in campuses.

Some pro-palestinian students called for intifada, as well as calling for Hamas brigades to kill Israeli soldiers. Some protestors called to burn Tel Aviv, a major Israeli city, to the ground. Anti Israel activists also sang "Oh Hamas, our beloved, strike strike Tel Aviv". Some students also chanted "Go Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too". The Palestine Solidarity Working group said that militancy breeds resistance as well as praised Hamas' attack against Israel. The Jews of New York Instagram shared a video of a woman protestor with a sign reading "Al-Qassam's next targets" pointing toward a counter protest waving Israeli and American flags.

Anti Israel protestors also called for Jews on campus to "Go back to Europe, you have no culture. All you do is colonize". A counter protest was taunted with calls of "Jews" and "Go back to Poland". According to Jerusalem Post, a Jewish counter protestor tried to stop anti Israel activists from burning an Israeli flag while another Jew was splashed with water. The anti Israel protestors also proclaimed "From the water to the water (a reference to the Jordan river and the Mediterranean), Palestine is Arab" which is considered a call for the cleansing of the region from Jews and the denial of Jewish rights for self-sovereignty in their ancestral homeland.

Jewish students in Columbia reported feeling unsafe, being spit on and feeling relief at leaving the university. A student told Jerusalem Post that they felt their student representatives did not represent their grievances. A protestor yelled at Jewish students "The 7th of October is going to be every day for you!". Seth Mandel wrote in the "Commentary" that universities were teaching students that Jews must be supplanted from their homes because they represent a race that belongs elsewhere which according to Mandel is the reason why Jews were told to go back to Poland by students in Columbia. SJP had celebrated the October 7th attack and called for the targeting of Jewish Israelis and both SJP WOL which have both called for the destruction of Israel and the targeting of Jewish Israelis, helped organize the protests in Columbia.

The Anti-Defamation League graded 85 American universities in 2024 regarding policies to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus. 12 universities including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, Princeton and others received an F. Two schools received an A. Columbia and Penn university received a D in the ADL ranking. Brandeis and Elon received an A in the ADL ranking.