Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft Harold S. Wechsler (bio) Jews at Williams: Inclusion, Exclusion, and Class at a New England Liberal Arts College. by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft. Williamstown, MA.: Williams College Press, 2013. xvi + 186 pp. This history of the Jewish encounter with Williams College addresses two major themes: the policies and practices governing admission to the college and the difficulties faced by its Jewish students on a fraternity-dominated campus. Jews at Williams is a labor of (sometimes tough) love—Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, a Williams graduate, wrote the history to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the campus Jewish Religious Center. Like Dan Oren’s Joining the Club (2000) and Marcia Synnott’s Student Diversity at the Big Three (2013), Jews at Williams traces a change in institutional culture, from how Jews adjusted to the social realities of a remote New England college with [End Page 364] denominational roots to how Williams came to accommodate, even welcome, a growing Jewish clientele. For its first century, Williams educated missionaries, and periodic revivals swept the college during the nineteenth century. Often seen as conversion targets, Jews would not have felt at home at Williams. The ratio of well off to pious students tilted towards the Brooks Brothers crowd before the turn of the twentieth century, and this majority perpetuated the hegemony of fraternities over campus social life. Their concerns heightening as more Jews found their way to Williamstown—nine in the Class of 1914—these students staged an anti-Jewish student demonstration in 1910. Harry Garfield, the college president, rebuked the protest, but private administrative concern accompanied the public reprimand. Williams confronted its Jewish “problem” at the same time that Columbia and Harvard stemmed their respective increases in Jewish enrollments. Wurgaft unearthed no smoking guns. We do not learn if Williams ever adopted a Harvard-style quota, that is, if the college limited admission of Jews to a predetermined proportion of the entering class irrespective of the attributes of specific candidates. Distinguishing between quotas (illegitimate) and a “selective admissions” policy focusing on candidate “desirability” (legitimate), Williams, Wurgaft concludes, opted for the latter path in crafting a class. Other colleges believed Williams had adopted an enviable modus operandi for screening Jewish applicants: enlisting “representative” Jewish alumni to assess desirability. Edward S. Greenbaum (Williams, 1910) did offer to screen Jewish applicants, but Wurgaft found Garfield’s responses to his offer equivocal. In any case, other colleges, including Dartmouth, enlisted alumni interviewers. The proportion of Jews at Williams, Wurgaft adds, remained low for several decades, though he does not pinpoint when admissions discrimination ended. Wurgaft then turns to his second theme, the rise of fraternities to a hegemonic role in campus life, their subsequent decline, and their eventual abolition. He begins by analyzing The Seven Branched Candlestick (1917), written by Gilbert Gabriel (Williams, 1912). The novel depicts the detrimental effects of fraternity dominance, especially on Jewish students. A fraternity rejected the candidacy of the book’s central character, portrayed as a “white Jew,” to use contemporary parlance. The protagonist found redemption and a spiritual awakening through work in settlement houses, but his personal transformation left the college social structure intact. Selective admissions and the fraternity blackball, Wurgaft concludes, worked together to discourage Jewish attendance. The few Jews meeting the college’s definition of “desirability” found the standard employed by campus Greeks virtually impossible to meet. [End Page 365] After World War II, the Williams community debated the forced removal of religious and racially restrictive clauses from fraternity charters. The debate was never reducible to a battle between students and faculty on one side and alumni on the other. Both sides included members of all groups. In 1951, students at Williams rejected a proposal to offer fraternity membership to all freshmen. In response, the open-to-all Garfield Club, concluding it had become an unacceptable alternative to fraternity life, dissolved itself as an act of social self-denial. In 1954, several students established the Williams College Jewish Association. A later generation cited the WCJA’s identification as a religious group to justify construction of a Jewish Religious Center...