GODS & MENTSCH AT YALE

...In other words, the high-minded rhetoric of social change couldn't undo all of that...

...I confess that I haven't yet devised a foolproof formula for distinguishing the nouveau Jew neurotics from the strollers by the still waters...

...It now caters to a hard-core of about forty students, plus another forty or so who take meals there a few times a week...

...We have nominated s o m e ." " W h o ? " " W h y , there was, uh, So-AndS o , " said Griswold, mentioning the name of a wealthy New York banker, an " O u r Crowd" type who had long since lapsed into Episcopalianism...

...Now, working their way out of the muddle, a lot of people have, in the words of William Sloane Coffin, "decided to go for a long, thoughtful stroll by the still waters a g a i n ." For Yale's Jews, the stroll by the still waters has been at once an intellectual, political and spiritual journey...

...Otherwise, he probably comes from a Conservative or Reform background and is justifiably turned off by the over-organized, unmystical sort of Judaism that has been shoved in his face all his life...

...It had t o . " A fallacy of the drive to attract more n o n - w h i t e s , n o n - P r o t e s t a n t s , and scholarship students to Yale is that the place hasn't become nearly as pluralistic as a lot of people would like to believe...

...T h e y are a legitimate reflection of Palestinian o p i n i o n , " he says...

...Politically and spiritually, the most galvanizing "Jewish event" in the history of Yale was the Yom Kippur War...

...The guy's always been a political activist and a pulpit rabbi, and his bearings aren't quite straight at Yale...

...But they keep trying to 'out-Jew' one another...

...Then I was asked to join a minyan and I had to tell them I couldn't even read Hebrew...

...In 1965 Kingman Brewster appointed R. Inslee Clark dean of undergraduate admissions, and the student population began to change rapidly...

...While the newsstand outside Yale Station did a brisk trade in Playboy, some c o m p l a i n e d , the magazine vendors around Harvard Square were selling Dissent and Partisan Review...

...By contrast, for those Jews who prefer to remain " i n the c l o s e t , " Wolf represents a.threatening influence...

...When I called Chauncey he said, 'There is no such list,' I said, 'But if there were such a list, could we see it?' He replied, ' T h a t ' s a silly question, because no such list exists.' Well, finally we got a list and, as I think of it now, I don't know where it came from...

...T h e other strange thing about the Kitchen is all the people there who have so suddenly turned on to Orthodoxy— that is, people with no significant Jewish background at all...

...KingJrewster, J r . , the President of the rsity, privately told Wolf that he snjoyed the a r t i c l e , but then i him for citing numbers...

...Before he came here the word was that he was a luminary in the Reform movement...

...Compared to that, the 'loud-mouthed Jew' looks good tome...

...When I arrived at Yale as a freshman in the fall of 1968, there was no mitzvah mobile, or, for that matter, any other brand of Jewish proselytizers to make my life complicated...

...Being ostracized, however, did not necessarily force the Jews to coalesce...

...I guess through Judaism you can really feed your neuroses...

...That's what's thought of as a happy marriage with the religion...

...That would make your task easier.' We said, 'Of course it would, but we didn't know that such a list existed,' and then we were told that we had to receive permission first from the Secretary of the university, Henry Chauncey, Jr...

...Arnie likes the fast b a l l ." Although it's a refreshing achievement that Yale has matured to the point that its Jews now feel sufficiently comfortable to argue among themselves, Yale's Jews will feel even more secure when they acknowledge that the institution itself, and not the personality of the Jewish chaplain, determines the conditions of their comfort...

...When Clark left Yale in 1970, the 70:30 ratio of private versus public high school graduates in the entering freshman class had virtually been reversed...

...Had I at some time during my four years at Yale been stricken with a crisis of the spirit, chances are I would have gone to see William Sloane Coffin, the University Chaplain, before I would have dropped in on the Hillel rabbi...

...Griswold thought for a moment and said, " T h a t ' s not true...

...During the past school year Presser began to observe kashrut diligently, and next fall, along with two other seniors, he plans to create a Jewish house at Yale...

...Although a fair number of German-American Jews had entered Yale and assimilated with relative ease before the turn of the century, there was a strong backlash when the sons of Eastern European immigrants began to arrive in the 1910's and 1920's...

...First of all, there were clear class distinctions between the German Jews and those of us who were Eastern European and p o o r , " says William Horowitz, a 1929 Yale graduate who later became, the first Jewish trustee of the university...

...For me, it comes down to the fact that I don't expect this place to be Jewish but I don't expect anyone to dump on my Jewishness...

...Arnold Wolf, it turns out, has become a bit of an issue himself at Yale, subject to criticism from both the most Orthodox and the least observant Jews among the student body and faculty...

...He is polite and generally a serious student—most likely headed for law or medical school—and extremely reliable when it comes time to write a check...

...the annual Yale Jewish Appeal campaign, by comparison, produces $ 8 , 0 0 0 - $ 1 0 , 0 0 0 . (Act u a l l y , the $ 8 , 0 0 0 - $ 1 0 , 0 0 0 figure is adm i r a b l e for a school Yale's size...

...To win meant to become the first Jew and the first petition candidate ever to be elected, but Horowitz lost to John Lindsay...

...The Kosher Kitchen crowd, which tends to be Orthodox and Conservative with a smattering of Reform Jews, has generated its own community, replete with internecine squabbles...

...By the time he reaches Yale, he' s looking for a different kind of experience...

...reactions to Rabbi W o l f s artime from a number of quarters, was, for instance, a sizzling emitic diatribe by a 1912 Yale ate — almost refreshing in its honesty — that appeared in the Notes section of the alumni zine...

...Two years ago, when the Yale Law School explored a proposal for a seminar in Talmudic law, there was pressure to call the course "Selected Problems in Near Eastern L a w . " It finally emerged, lo and behold, as "Jewish L a w , " but one wonders what the course might have been called if the Law School weren't something of a "Jewish enclave" — perhaps forty percent of the students, as well as the present and previous four deans, are Jewish...

...If the estimate is accuand no one has ever challenged means that Jews now constitute 'ious plurality in this school id by earnest New England is...

...I doubt iny people outside the Yale adation even knew the number of students there until the Jewish in, Arnold Jacob Wolf, writing fanuary, 1973 issue of the Yale ii Magazine, noted that the uniuate Jewish enrollment "looks e-third...

...the university had been willing to admit them to fulfill part of its towngown obligations...

...Since then, the only time Yale tried to compete h e a d - t o - h e a d with the Kosher Kitchen, it failed miserably...

...Harvard was barefoot and bohemian — the tired metaphors extended to read: Harvard is more congenial to Jews...

...Two new faculty appointments last year — one in medieval history and the other a joint appointment in religious studies and sociology — have boosted the academic offerings somewhat, but it's hardly likely that an autonomous department of Jewish studies will be created any time soon...

...In the warm glow of "doing g o o d , " it became a local joke that Yeshiva of Flatbush was the only prep school in the country that consistently succeeded in placing all of its Yale applicants...

...For some members, the place occasionally seems too confining, too myopic...

...That was on the first night of Passover a couple of years ago, when creative management threw together a menu of matzah, chicken soup, gefilte fish—and sweet and sour pork...

...W e plan to observe Shabbos closely, we'll invite other people over to join us, and we'll just see how it works out...

...When you consider the people I talk to and spend my time with around here, it's hard to be reminded that Yale is this aristocratic, goyish p l a c e ." Presser admits, however, that he didn't feel quite as secure when he first arrived at Yale...

...They wouldn't have chosen Wolf if they'd opted for taste...

...A 1957 graduate tells me, " W e l l , it wasn't as if the Jewish students in my day ever spontaneously decided that it would be a good idea for all of us to get together...

...Beyond that, even though the Jews in my day were made to feel very self-conscious, you could count on one hand the people who seemed truly interested in things Jewish, who went out of the way to observe the religion What one can glean today about the history of Jews at Yale is almost entirely oral, rather than recorded, history— strangely out of character for a place so passionate about facts, so devoted, as the university motto states, to Light and Truth...

...Yale's recruiters had begun to shift some of their attention from Andover and Choate to places like Bronx Science and Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High...

...also for the record, a lot of people swear he did say it...

...When I began to research this article, I called the university registrar, the admissions office, and the Office of Institutional R e s e a r c h , the latter being a computer-crazy little bureaucracy so efficient and so infatuated with demographic scorekeeping that some people at Yale will swear that the office keeps track of the numbers of one-eyed, left-handed cellists from southern Idaho — Accepts and Rej e c t s . Invariably, my queries about Yale's Jewish enrollments, past and present, were greeted with responses like, " G e e , we don't even bother to keep information like that around here...

...For the next few hours, whenever a suitably Semiticappearing student walks by, the men approach and ask the inevitable question: " A r e you Jewish...

...One by-product has come in the form of increased demands for courses in Jewish studies...

...But, W h i t , " Horowitz protested, "we don't think of him as J e w i s h ." The President of Yale said, without hesitating or smiling, "We d o...

...I can't imagine a Jew passing through Yale without sensing, at one time or another, an intrinsic identity clash between himself and the i n s t i t u t i o n . Details c h a n g e , but the theme does not...

...Yale's image was the white buck shoe...

...Some people believe that Wolf tries to sell out in favor of being too cool, too hip...

...Numbers certainly don't tell the whole story, but the institution's self-consciousness about numbers reveals a good deal...

...Anyway, many of the social changes of the Sixties had a curious, disorienting sort of leveling effect — the meanings of words like egalitarian and pluralistic have become hopelessly muddled...

...They speak so softly — literally, in terms of decibels—that I can't understand them...

...The Jewish kids at Yale try so hard to be self-effacing...

...Perfunctory stuff...

...I do remember once counting the Jews living in the entryway of my dormitory— there were eleven out of twenty-six — but the figure didn't strike me as being significantly high...

...Whatever...

...We have more Jews who are religious and more who don't observe at all...

...It's a problem—the choice between the two — at Yale and in all society, but particularly at Yale...

...At any rate, we were Jews from different places and, presumably, different backgrounds: I Mark Singer, a 1972 graduate of Yale, is on the staff of THE NEW YORKER...

...In the mid-1960's, Yale, like many private colleges and universities, adopted liberal new recruiting, admissions and financial aid policies...

...The Kitchen was created sixteen years ago for the mutual benefit of a half dozen Orthodox graduate students who had banded together to observe kashrut...

...everyone has a choice anecdote...

...We have more of everything...

...They accuse me, for instance, of being insufficiently Orthodox, which is l u d i c r o u s . The fact is that those clowns haven't even learned yet what I've already forgotten...

...T h e problem is a matter of s t y l e , " says one student...

...A Yale undergraduate I 'm not sure what the Lubavitch have found at Yale, but I suspect they've come to realize that whatever palpable Jewish "community" exists is a relasmall portion of the large r of Jews attending, teaching at, rking for the university...

...T h e r e ' s an u n s a v o r y 'fuck-thegoyim' mentality on the r i s e , and it's wellrepresented at the Kitc h e n , " says Eli Spielman, a Yeshiva of Flatbush alumnus and former chairman of the Yale Daily News, who graduated last spring...

...Two came each year...

...The Emergency Fund Drive r a i s e d $45,000...

...It was not until almost forty years later that most Jewish undergraduates stopped believing that they were at Yale under the grace of a ten percent quota, although by the time anyone was willing to speak out about the problem the Yale administration had grown sophisticated enough so that no smoking pistol could be located...

...Nobody came to my office screaming for more Jews...

...If he thinks much about Judaism, it's an intellectual rather than spiritual terms...

...He ran again in 1965, and this time he did win, still in time to establish two precedents...

...Brewlid, " First of all, you don't know act how many Jews are here and, if you do, you shouldn't be sayhat the figure i s . " Brewster, who sen President of Yale for almost :n years, during which the complexion of the place has changed cons i d e r a b l y , was saying, in effect, "Dammit, don't blow my cover...

...The first person I met was a Jew...

...In retrospect, I see that I was probably a prime candidate for the Hillel course titled "Judaism for Friendly Skeptics," but the timing didn't seem right...

...For the record, Brewster denies making the statement...

...Horowitz said, " Y o u realize, of course, Whit, that the members of the Corporation have never nominated a Jew for a successor trusteeship...

...They regard the P LO as butchers, but they wouldn't try to stop a PLO person from speaking on the Yale c a m p u s . " Arnold Wolf, too, has upset Jewish students and faculty members with his public statements that not only is the PLO entitled to be heard, but that its members should be heard...

...T h a t ' s one of those typic a l , perfectly inscrutable Yale phenomena: a list of Jews that doesn't exist but somehow d o e s ." The question arises: When did the lists officially cease to exist...

...So unseemly...

...Someone who hasn't forgotten this is William Horowitz, Yale ' 2 9 , whom I have saved for last because his experience, above all, is worth remembering...

...A lot of Judaism is still a game to him, such as the r i t u a l s ." W o l f ' s defenders, chief among them William Sloane Coffin, say that as long as he remains at Yale and continues to care about his effectiveness, people will complain about his style...

...Rabbi Wolf recalls: "Whoever it was we spoke with said, ' H ow would you like a list of Jewish students...

...T h e people who promulgate this sort of thing take the attitude, 'We have our territory, it's tight and secure, and so are we as Jews.' The problem is that there's a lot of bad Jewish p.r...

...I t might be a happy marriage," counters Arnold Wolf, "but there isn't much screwing...

...He saw me and said, 'Ah, landsman...

...Nowhere is there mention of the enrollment of Jews, the ineluctable but apparently uncounted minority...

...If anything bound us together, it was an unspoken sense that we were more concerned with becoming Yalies than with immersing ourselves in Judaism...

...Two members of New H a v e n 's L u b a v i t c h Chassidic settlement emerge from the truck — otherwise known as the "mitzvah mobile" — and station themselves on opposite sides of the street...

...Statistics dictate that every third or fourth passerby should answer, " Y e s , " but hardly that many do...

...A lot of Jewish kids around Yale refer to him as the "town mentsch...

...At Yale, you see, where pluralism is regularly applauded but then skillfully co-opted, there is no one more conspicuous than a Lubavitch fundamentalist riding shotgun on a mitzvah mobile...

...in America right now— you can feel a bit of it around Yale— and I prefer not to get caught in the fall-out...

...At some point during the 1950's, long before Horowitz contemplated that he would ever want to run for the Yale Corporation himself, he went to see his classmate and friend, A. Whitney Griswold, the man who preceded Kingman Brewster as President of Yale...

...Having grown up in a city in the Midwest where Jews make up less than one percent of the population, I hardly expected that in New Haven, only seventy-five miles from New York City in body and spirit, I would be made to feel self-conscious about my Jewishness...

...When Jewish chauvinism hit the fan in 1 9 7 3 , " says Lester Bronstein, a recent graduate who is headed toward the Reform rabbinate, " I formed my mental image of what I suppose I regard and the archetypal 'Ivy League Jew,' a type that seems to predominate at Yale...

...I like to think of much of my experience as a paradigm...

...raises as much each year as the Yale Charities Drive, a secular affair that solicits from the entire student body...

...Whenever Presser does get dumped upon, the flak comes from fellow Jews who disagree with his contention that the Palestine Liberation Organization should be granted territory of its own in the Middle East...

...It simply wasn't an issue that preoccupied me then...

...Many of the Jews at Yale during this era came from New Haven families...

...It was just a matter of natural selection...

...But when the enrollment of Jews jumped from nine percent in 1924 to 13.4 percent in 1925, someone among either the alumni or within the administration blew the whistle, and the following year the Jewish percentage returned to 10.8...

...Although Wolf had been at nly four months at the time the was published, he showed reble perception in defining the ir marginality that characterizes i experience for so many people e. He saw, on the one hand, :thing affirmative . . . a flagrant [among] many very Jewish ' but he also recognized that {ale people, Jews included, opccording to those implicitly uniod, genteel notions of how ly-educated, refined, rationalisks deal with one another...

...The Orthodox attitude holds that Wolf, who came to Yale from a Reform congregation in suburban Chicago, simply isn't Jewish enough: he lacks Talmudic sagacity...

...T h e group in the Kosher Kitchen is thoughtful," he says, "But of course their viewpoint on Israel and the Palestinians is firmly set...

...Overt anti-Semitism from the political Right is virtually non-existent today, but there's no question that during the Twenties and Thirties, when membership in fraternities, eating clubs and senior societies truly mattered, Jews were not welcome...

...Some people can throw the change-up a little better...

...Once the applicant pool was deeper and stronger, when we began to draw on all of those places where we had never recruited before," says Clark, " i t became clear that a lot of alumni c h i l d r e n and boarding school graduates weren't going to make it...

...Such a tidy metaphor...

...A Jew at Yale To begin, a vignette: It is a Sunday afternoon in the early spring of 1975 in New Haven, Connecticut, and music is wafting — actually erupting — from the carillon housed within Harkness Tower, the neo-Gothic spire that marks the center of the Yale campus...

...Yale still homogenizes people in many, many ways...

...Once upon a time, Kingman Brewster either did or did not state that "Yale has an obligation to produce a thousand male leaders each y e a r . " (This in the days before coeducation and before the entering class size increased to 1,300...

...Nor were they free to join the Yale Daily News, the Whiffenpoofs or most other extra-curricular organizations...

...Part of the reason is lack of money, but one also suspects a natural intransigence within the academic establishment...

...Horowitz is a genuinely modest man — generous and soft-spoken...

...We can't imagine why anyone would care about such a t h i n g ." At the onset of the Yom Kippur War, a contemporary watershed in terms of heightened Jewish consciousness at Yale, the organizers of Yale's Israel Emergency Fund drive asked a middle-level university administrator for a computer print-out of all Yale students, from which they hoped to isolate Jewish-sounding names for their canvassing effort...

...I think of a lot of these people as nouveau Jews, and some of them are very rigid and legalistic...

...Some who say no do so because they have encountered the Lubavitch previously and now wish to avoid being reminded of which of the holy precepts they have recently violated...

...Arnold Wolf A couple of nice-sounding words have entered the Yale argot during the r e i g n of Kingman Brewster: egalitarian and pluralism...

...Arthur A. Chiel, a New Haven rabbi and historian, has discovered in the archives of the Yale Library dozens of internal memoranda from the 1920's — many of them exchanges between the President of Yale and various nameless deans — which reflected alarm about the "acute e v i l " of rising Jewish enrollments...

...Others say no not because they've heard the Lubavitch spiel before, but, rather, because to be seen t a l k i n g with a pair of properly b e a r d e d , frock-coated Chassidim means to have one's Jewishness confronted, acted upon...

...Now, each fall, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions releases statistics on the composition of the entering freshman class, noting the numbers of blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans (mainland and island), American Indians, Asian-Americans, public school versus private school graduates, and children of alumni...

...T h e three of us really like one another and we want to live together," Presser told me...

...For a long while, critics from within and without Yale had attacked its " a n t i - i n t e l - l e c t u a l i s m , " drawing unfavorable comparisons to places like Harvard and Columbia, which were thought of as pluralistic and egalitarian ahead of their time...

...When I graduated in 1972, the mitzvah mobile still had not arrived, but it must have been around this time that the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Crown Heights realized that there was a mass of ripe, young, lapsed Jewish students at Yale and so, after a fashion, told his l i e u t e n a n t s , " G e t thee to New H a v e n ." ' Whatever you want to say about the Jews at Yale, there's more of it...

...The Y.J.A...

...The counterpoint to Lester Bronstein's "Ivy League J e w s " are the "very Jewish J e w s " who can be found three times a day at the Kosher Kitchen, run by the Young Israel House at Yale...

...came from Oklahoma, someone else was from Canada, another boy from Maine, others from Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and, of course, several from New York...

...When the selection committee that hired Arnie got together," says Coffin, "they were offered the choice between, let's say, taste and truth...

...Either they've recently returned from Israel or else they're subject to the same conversion/reaction mechanism that inspires Jesus freaks...

...As it has every Sunday afternoon for several months, an oversized white panel truck pulls u p o n the High Street sidewalk and parks beneath the tower, at the entrance gate to Branford College, one of Yale's twelve undergraduate residential communities...

...The official Yale press release that announced his election referred to him as the "first non-Protestant" to serve on the board of trustees...

...When we were picking that first class in 1965, no one counted Jews, but I knew that it was going up...

...Was Volf asked, an "attempt to bemore goyish than the gentiles in midst we l i v e ? " And what was mt even observant Jews who ated a joyous occasion like SimTorah in a manner that seemed ther too serene, uncommonly )us...

...An important fact worth remembering: Yale College, now 274 years old, survived 242 years before a Jew was appointed to its faculty — 246 years before a J ew was granted tenure...

...GODS & MENTSCH AT YALE MARK SINGER ' Whenever I hear about some wonderful, grand Yale football game that was played in the I890's, I think of where my family was in the I890's — in a ghetto in Bialystock...

...Frankly, I think he came here to get into being Jewish...

...The point is that no matter how hard the local dissidents protest that the "thousand male leaders" idea is both fatuous and mildly fascistic, it nevertheless has a certain allure for a lot of people who financially support and influence the way Yale is run...

...The 1967 Arab-Israel war had marked the beginning of organized faculty fund-raising for I s r a e l , but the surge came in 1973...

...In 1971, the Yale dining hall management decided to allow students to transfer their meal contracts to the Kitchen — a wise move...

...In 1964 he ran for the Yale Corporation, circulating a petition to gain a place on the election ballot...

...I came here with the assumption that this is a political place, and so I wore a yarmulke freshman year because I wanted to make a political statement about my Jewishness...

...One of the more interesting undergraduates I met when I visited Yale last spring was Stefan Presser, a legitimate stroller, I'm quite sure...