Columbia University students occupying Low Library during the campus protests of late April 1968.
Source: Columbia
University
Following the Second World War, American Jews benefited from new opportunities in higher education. By the 196os, most universities had eliminated quotas and once more opened their doors to Jewish applicants. By 1967, the percentage of Jewish students at Columbia rose to around 40%, while at Harvard it was estimated to be as high as 25%. Though American Jews only numbered 2.8% of the national population in 1970, the percentage of college faculty that was Jewish was 8.7%, while Jews comprised 10% of all graduate students. Jews also assumed leadership roles in postwar campus social movements, especially during the 196os.
Protesters at Columbia University, 1969.
Source: Columbia University
The majority of the steering committee of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 was Jewish; the chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia and the University of Michigan were both more than half Jewish. At Kent State University, where only five percent of the student population was Jewish, Jews constituted nineteen percent of SDS membership (moreover, three of the four students shot there by the
National Guard in 1970 were Jews). As left-leaning Jewish students embraced activist causes, they sometimes clashed with their elders, highlighting a generational split among American Jews.
One topic of disagreement involved the legacy of the Holocaust. Student radicals, such as the leader of Columbia University's SDS chapter, Mark Rudd, universalized the significance of the Nazi era, proclaiming that, "American racism [is]... akin to German racism toward the Jews," adding that the war in Vietnam recalled
"the genocide of the Holocaust." In response, older Jews compared student radicals to the Nazi students of the 1930s, with the Austrian Jewish psychologist and University of Chicago Professor Bruno Bettelheim telling Congress in 1969 that the New Left reminded him of the "academic Hitler Youth" in Nazi Germany, noting that they had "little patience for the voice of reason" and yearned for the
"authenticity of confrontation."
Shulamith Firestone.
Source: Wikipedia
Jerry Rubin.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Jewish student activists also struggled with internal tensions, particularly related to gender equality. Jewish women were involved in multiple causes, including the antiwar movement, women's liberation, union activism, and racial equality. But they found that, despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the New Left, its male leaders often relegated women to the sidelines by assigning them menial tasks involving clerical work and food preparation. When women protested this sexist treatment, they were met with hostility, as when Jewish feminists Marilyn Webb and Shulamith Firestone were harassed by male hecklers at the New Left's Counter-Inaugural to Richard Nixon's first inauguration in Washington D.C. in 1969, with some in the crowd famously yelling, "Take her off the stage! Rape her in the back alley!"
Years later, one of the leading Jewish Yippies, Jerry Rubin, attributed the New Left's mistreatment of women to Jewish religious practice, recalling that, "the 'men' talked their business and humored the women when they began to talk, not expecting to hear anything 'worthwhile? During all that time I was seeing, not Joan, Barbara, or Laurie, but my grandma on the second floor of the synagogue watching my grandfather with the men downstairs." In response, Jewish women
activists shifted their efforts to women's liberation and religious reform, resulting in both a prominent Jewish presence in the feminist movement and improvements in American Jewish gender equity.
