The Affirmative Action Roots of Campus Antisemitism

Of all the anti-Israel protests heard around the world since the Hamas attack on Israel last October 7, none have been as profoundly disorienting for American Jews as the eruption of protests and antisemitic sentiment on American college campuses. The Anti-Defamation League reports 505 antisemitic incidents on college campuses within the first three months following the attacks. This deluge represents a direct strike at the liberal civic identity of secular Jews, and it has left critics pondering the fate of Jewish political affiliation, power, and cultural status. When three elite university presidents, sitting before Congress last December, could not confirm that mobs calling for the genocide of Jews were violating their universities’ codes of conduct, one writer for the Jewish journal Sapir responded with emblematic indignity: “We need to demand a wholesale change. And if we can’t find it in the places we used to love, then we need to walk away.”

Reforming higher education will be difficult, yet, for Jews, disengaging from the universities might prove even harder. Among the values that attracted Jews to twentieth-century liberalism — such as the separation of church and state, civic and racial equality, and free speech — none are as closely linked to Jewish welfare as the values of universal education and merit-based advancement. American Jews, particularly those who descend from immigrants from Eastern Europe, where severe occupational restrictions were the rule, have been especially enamored of living in a country where rewards and penalties are distributed based on demonstrations of character and competence.

In America, Jews readily embraced the liberal view that education is the great equalizer among people born to different circumstances — especially regarding higher education, which is seen as meritocracy’s gatekeeper. Jews utilized both public schools and higher education to catapult themselves into the professional middle class and, eventually, a seat at the table of America’s most vaunted institutions. As sociologist Stephen Steinberg has written, “While the Jewish passion for education is easily romanticized, the fact is that Jewish immigrants did place high value on education and sent their children to college in disproportionate numbers.”

Most Jews from Eastern Europe lacked a formal education when they arrived in the United States by the millions between 1880 and 1925. But by 1950, when only 10 percent of adult males in the US had a college degree, more than 25 percent of Jewish men had completed four or more years of college. By 2000, 75 percent of Jewish men and 62 percent of Jewish women were college graduates — roughly double the rate of their non-Jewish counterparts.

As Charles Silberman documented in his 1985 book A Certain People, the vast expansion of American higher education after World War II was driven not only by a flood of federal funding but also by Jewish students and faculty. By the 1950s and ’60s, Jews, who never accounted for more than 3 percent of the US population, constituted about one-third of Ivy League enrollments. By 1975, they made up 10 percent of all college faculty and 20 percent of faculty members at elite universities. At elite law schools, Jews made up 38 percent of faculty.

Even as larger numbers of Jews intermarry with the non-Jewish population and fall away from their ethnic mores, the Jewish veneration of higher education seems to persist. Political scientist Samuel J. Abrams found in 2022 that fully 80 percent of Jewish adults reported growing up in households where they “were expected to pursue a degree at a four-year school.” This is roughly twice the national average.

Given the centrality of education to Jewish life, it is not surprising that some of their most significant political conflicts have involved educational institutions. One notable example occurred in New York in 1968 when the longest teachers strike on record was precipitated by a clash between blacks in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district — who were attempting to wrest control over hiring and curriculum — and the predominantly Jewish United Federation of Teachers.

In higher education, Jews were at the forefront of the battle over admissions. In the 1920s, as second-generation Jews sought access to prestigious universities, Harvard University and other Ivy League schools infamously imposed restrictive quotas and capped Jewish enrollment at around 10 percent of their student bodies.

The immediate result of Ivy League quotas was that public colleges and universities, which previously attracted large numbers of poor Jews, became even more Jewish, with enrollments at City College and Hunter College in New York becoming 80 and 90 percent Jewish, respectively, in the 1920s.

This set the stage for yet another crisis, one that would presage today’s difficulties. In 1969, black and Puerto Rican students commandeered classrooms across the City University of New York (CUNY) system and demanded “open admissions” and the establishment of black studies programs. Riots and beatings ensued. CUNY then capitulated to the radicals’ demands and effectively eliminated academic screening from the university system’s four-year campuses. Consequently, the Jewish presence at CUNY rapidly dissipated, falling from an absolute majority to 37 percent by 1971.

The demand for open admissions, which later morphed into broader demands for affirmative action in college admissions, should have given Jews a clue that American higher education was heading in a direction hostile to the equal opportunity liberalism upon which Jewish social mobility was secured.

Postwar liberalism peaked with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then, however, a significant shift occurred. President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a speech indicating that it was not enough to liberate blacks through “equality of opportunity.” Instead, Johnson stated, the ultimate goal must be “equality as a result.”

With these words, liberalism changed its focus from equal treatment to “affirmative action.” It thus staked its claim to power on what would later be called the “woke” assumption of universal black disadvantage and white privilege. This ideology posits that all whites unjustly benefit from racial advantage and that standards should be reduced for blacks due to their shared experience of oppression. “The liberal community became willing to violate liberal principles to maintain solidarity and meaning,” political scientist Eric Kaufmann wrote, “while “retaining the ‘liberal’ label.”

Jewish organizations fought valiantly, and ultimately successfully, against Ivy League quotas in the 1920s. However, they followed the Democratic Party over the affirmative action cliff by choosing to forsake the principle of equal treatment in order to remain part of what was still calling itself the postwar “liberal” coalition. Jews then continued to vote at an overwhelming rate of 75 percent for Democratic presidential candidates.

Before the Supreme Court ruled in the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University — and found racial preferences in college admissions to be unconstitutional — the leading Jewish defense agency, the Anti-Defamation League, filed an amicus brief in defense of Harvard’s racial discrimination. A more blatant dereliction of duty in the annals of ethnic group advocacy would be hard to find.

Nevertheless, the most serious danger for Jews is not the academic or occupational displacement that the racial preferences regime brings about, though this is considerable. Rather, the greatest threat lies in the ideology that arose to justify this betrayal of basic American notions of fairness. After a critical threshold of affirmative action–selected students, faculty members, and administrators took their places in university departments and newly spawned bureaucracies, ideologies that viewed traditional notions of merit, such as SAT scores, as symbols of white supremacy took hold. The presupposition of critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — that racial discrimination is the only reason whites prosper more than nonwhites — has profound implications for Jews.

With CRT and DEI, the educational and occupational achievements of Jews were suddenly no longer the just rewards of hard work. Instead, they were the result of a system of status and resource allocation that is deeply rigged to favor whites.

In the woke mind, if white success is the result of racism and Jews are the most prosperous whites, then Jews must be the worst oppressors who are guilty of the most severe acts of racial prejudice. In the Left’s desperation to square this reductive worldview with reality, the woke deconstruct Jewish history so that Jews are seen not as a persecuted minority but, rather, as the most privileged and powerful of all whites.

Thus, we get the common tropes: Jews didn’t just own slaves; they ran the slave trade. Jews didn’t just contribute to white racism; they invented black stereotypes in Hollywood movies. Jews aren’t victims of Nazi genocide; they’re perpetrators of genocide against nonwhite Arabs. 

A small, yet distinct minority, Jews are a practical stand-in for such abstractions as “patriarchy,” “whites,” and “the West.” As Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told the Jewish news site Forward, Jewishness is seen as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

If the woke racial binary is to be sustained, then the Jewish experience with persecution — and the lives Jews live today — must be extinguished and delegitimized. Israel’s necessary military response to the unprecedented Hamas attacks on October 7 provided the perfect opportunity for the Left to portray Jews as powerful oppressors. Even before Israel began military operations, woke campuses exploded with calls for a worldwide “intifada” and chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The eliminationist antisemitism inherent in these slogans is a reflection not only of how corrupt and unworthy the woke believe the West to be, but also of how angry they are at Jews for thriving in it.

Liberalism and civil rights activism was, in effect, an accommodation secular Jews made within American life. It provided a way for Jews to shed their ethnicity and, without reverting to religious orthodoxy, signify they were culturally different from the American mainstream.

But is it too much to ask for liberal Jews to finally acknowledge that this mode of cultural identity vanished the instant when civil rights became mainstream and liberalism moved from focusing on the individual citizen alone to seeing only powerful or powerless groups? At that moment, American liberalism ceased being a guarantor of Jewish acceptance and difference, of Jewish safety and advance. “American liberalism, our civic religion, has turned on us,” Jacob Savage asserted in Tablet magazine. “This … should tell you just how much power Jews in America still have.”

The harshest truth is that the anguish many Jews now feel is, in part, a consequence of having recklessly joined Jewish meaning to the precarious uncertainty of political ideology in the first place.

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