Antisemitism in Elite College Admission: A Brief History

Thursday, Mar 14, 2024

Thursday, March 14
4:00 PM EDT Program Start
Livestream on Zoom
FREE | Registration Required

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For more events in this series, Antisemitism in Focus: Looking Deeper Before and After 10/7, click here.

The talk will discuss the origins of Jewish quotas in Ivy League universities and their evolution until they were finally eliminated in the 1960s. It will conclude with a discussion of why Jewish enrollments have declined sharply over the course of the past half century at all of the Ivy League institutions.

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About the Speaker
Jerome Karabel is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of the award-winning The Chosen: A Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among other books.

About the series “Jews and the University: Antisemitism, Admissions, Academic Freedom”
The integration of Jews into the university is one of the great success stories of modern American culture and Jewish life. Penn was at the forefront of this success story, with the first Jewish Students’ Association formed here in 1924. But recent events at Penn and at other campuses have led to accusations that the university has been too tolerant of antisemitism and become less welcoming to Jews. This series of free online lectures is an effort to share insights from history, sociology, education studies, and other fields that can help put the present moment into context and provide understanding far deeper than what social media conveys.


This program was made possible by a grant from the Goldhirsh-Yellin Foundation. Presented in partnership with the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Klatt family and the Harry Stern Family Foundation.