American Jews and Higher Education: Past is Prologue

“American Jews and Higher Education:
This series will explore the experience of American Jews in higher education, and consider some of the challenges raised in recent years by shifting campus culture and changes in law and policies around admissions, discrimination, and free speech on campus. As a school committed to the “”grand conversation between Torah and the world””, the majority of whose graduates continue on to secular college, how are we thinking about some of these issues, and what work do we need to do to prepare our graduates to engage them?

Past is Prologue
In this episode, Rabbi Shmuel Hain interviews Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz about the history of Jews’ experiences on American college campuses, from the arrival of waves of Eastern European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, through decades of exclusions and quotas through greater acceptance on campuses after World War II. How was higher education once seen as an essential component of American Jews’ “”making it””? And how has shifting campus culture, and shifting cultural and educational norms, in the last part of the 20th and early 21st century, affected that acceptance, and Jewish students’ comfort on campuses? “