Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895-1945 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895-1945 Lila Corwin Berman Marianne Rachel Sanua . Going Greek: Jewish College Fraternities in the United States, 1895-1945. American Jewish Civilization Series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Pp. 446. When I was an undergraduate, I spent two summers living in MIT's Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house. Situated on the Boston side of the Charles, the AEPi house was in actuality two brownstones, and although they had been subdivided and re-subdivided to accommodate larger pledge classes, their ornate moldings, grand staircase, and marble fireplaces were reminders of past opulence. The summer folks were a smattering of brothers, house friends, and near-strangers, like myself, happy to find cheap rent in Boston. In the waning weeks of the summer, however, all the fraternity brothers would return for pre-rush meetings, and I recall distinctly serious conversations about how to tell if potential pledges were Jewish. AEPi, as I learned in Marianne Sanua's thorough study of fraternity and sorority life from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, was founded in 1913 by a group of Jewish men who commuted daily to attend evening classes at New York University's School of Commerce. Like other Jewish fraternities throughout the twentieth century, AEPi was constantly questioning and redefining what it meant to be a Jewish fraternity. Did each member have to be Jewish, and if so, what were the costs of drawing that sectarian line? Going Greek is, in the broadest sense, a study of the myriad ways Jews have constructed their identities to make sense of internal and external pressures in the United States. Sanua explains that American fraternal organizations followed the arc of university expansion after the Civil War. As higher education became a possibility for more and more Americans—as well as an avenue toward financial stability in a rapidly shifting industrial economy—the demand for college-level social clubs that also provided room and board increased. Fraternities, which had antecedents in the European university system, had slowly made inroads into the United States starting during the early Republic. By the 1930s, the standard reference work, Baird's Manual of American College Fraternities, could proudly assert that almost every United States president and vice-president born after 1825 had been in a fraternity. If attending college was already a mark of prestige, belonging to a fraternity drew status distinctions among college goers. Unsurprisingly, [End Page 400] very few religious and racial minorities were given entrance to fraternities. As Sanua explains, "Joining a fraternity theoretically meant joining an extended family," and the family metaphor for most fraternities precluded racial, ethnic, and religious mixing (p. 39). By the 1870s and 1880s, when greater numbers of non-Protestant and some non-white young people gained access to higher education, fraternities started to include restrictive and sectarian clauses in their bylaws. Exclusion from social channels was nothing new for many Jews. Historians of European Jewry, such as Jacob Katz and David Sorkin, have argued that Jews often created organizations and institutions that paralleled the mainstream from which they were excluded.1 Through these parallel associations, including social clubs, economic networks, and political movements, Jews integrated modern ideologies and beliefs into their worldview while maintaining a sense of Jewish cohesion. Historians who study American Catholics, African Americans, Latinos, and various Asian groups have similarly observed that associational life is often a tool for minorities to deal with exclusion without renouncing the structures of mainstream American life. Sanua only briefly touches on these themes in historiography. Yet the historical development of Jewish fraternal life, much like development of the American Jewish mutual aid societies and immigrant associations that Daniel Soyer traces, participated in the same historical dynamic.2 Some Jews may have been turned off because of their exclusion from fraternities. Others, however, were compelled by that same exclusion to find ways to replicate fraternal life. In 1895, students at Yale organized the first Jewish fraternity, although calling it a Jewish fraternity dismisses their own self-consciousness. The three German-Jewish men who established Pi Lambda Phi were so disgusted by the reigning fixation on social barriers...