Jerusalem Report

Atonement in the Ivy League

10/31/2012 17:00 By MICHAEL WILNER

Jews are thriving at America’s top universities, but they are increasingly reluctant to come to Israel’s defense.

Photo by: MICHAEL WILNER

This past April, a diverse group of powerful people congregated outside a neoclassical building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to ring in a centennial. Banners decorated Broadway in a show of celebration and pride. But this unique event had dueling purposes: It was meant to honor a gift that led to a legacy – as well as to correct the misnaming of a building, gone untitled for 100 years because its original donor was Jewish. Columbia University was about to fix that mistake. When Joseph Pulitzer bequeathed a school of journalism to Columbia in 1912, the school’s president was Nicholas Butler, a man who made little effort to hide his anti-Semitic views. Under his leadership, Columbia enforced an admissions quota on Jews and disqualified them from board membership until the very end of his tenure. He had struggled with Jewish donors in the past, and to this day, various buildings on campus given by Jewish donors – remain effectively nameless (the main university library, however, prominently displays Butler’s name). Pulitzer’s name survived in part because his journalism prize, given out by the school, has become a huge success. But that wasn’t enough. To mark the centennial, Columbia was to carve Pulitzer into stone. “We went back and got every piece of paper regarding the naming of the school, and there was no smoking gun,” notes Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who himself is Jewish. “But it certainly felt like the right thing to do.”

Columbia has come a long way. The university’s Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, housed in a stunning new facility that cost over $10 million, counts nearly 3,000 undergraduate Jewish students at Columbia and its affiliates, and roughly 5,000 graduate students. A large percentage of Columbia’s deans and tenured faculty members are Jewish, and there are consistently at least seven Jews represented on its board of trustees.

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