Elliott Kaufman is the Letters Editor at the Wall Street Journal. In this column, he highlights some issues the school has had with Jewish people:
If Stanford Owes You an Apology, Get in LineIsaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer, once described his fellow Jews as “a people who can’t sleep and won’t let anybody else sleep, either.” But of all the speculations, complaints and laments rifling through my yiddishe kop, I confess that one possibility for last week went uncontemplated: an apology from Stanford University, my alma mater, for restricting the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s.“Who asked for it?” another Jewish alum remarked to me. If Jewish parents were to compile their top 20 issues with U.S. colleges, the lack of apologies for old quotas wouldn’t make the list. First would be the same issue everyone has: outrageous tuition, for which college presidents and administrators might feel ashamed if they weren’t so convinced of their moral superiority.Next on the list would come the treatment of Israel. Why is the dissemination of Soviet-vintage anti-Zionist propaganda the perennial preoccupation of student activists, egged on by radical professors? In my freshman year, the Students of Color Coalition, the dominant campus political machine, organized a broad coalition of student groups in favor of divestment from Israel. Alongside the old calumnies, it hyped to Hispanic students that U.S. Border Patrol uses some Israeli technology. To black students it played up minor training sessions that some U.S. police receive in “apartheid Israel,” as if that’s why we have police shootings. It’s called intersectionality: Each group is given its own reason to blame the Jews.Nineteen student groups were arrayed against Israel, and only Jews and conservatives defended it. Liberal Jews, throughout their time at Stanford, were pressured to choose: Turn your back on Israel and the Jewish people, or lose your standing as progressives. Jewish parents worry about that dynamic.
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