Avian angst
“Birds in Ballgowns” (encaustic, collage), one of several paintings by Nancy Whitcomb at the 120th Annual Little Pictures Show & Sale at the Providence Art Club through Dec. 22. As works are sold, as this one was, they are taken away and replaced.
120th Annual Little Pictures Show & Sale at the Providence Art Club. Over 700 works by 130 artists. As works sell they are taken home and then replaced. The show changes daily until it ends December 22. Open daily, 12-5.
Calvin Coolidge: ‘Not to selfishness’
Calvin Coolidge in 1919.
Date: Jan. 7, 1914
Calvin Coolidge, later Massachusetts governor (I919-1921) and U.S. president (1923-1929) here accepts his election as president of the Massachusetts Senate with gratitude and an overview of the values of the senate and country and the work that is to be done in his famous “Have Faith in Massachusetts’’ speech.
(See video on Coolidge below.)
Honorable Senators:
I thank you – with gratitude for the high honor given, with appreciation for the solemn obligations assumed – I thank you.
The commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man’s dividends is the suspension of another man’s pay envelope.
Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of laws. The latest, most modern, and nearest perfect system that statesmanship has devised is representative government. Its weakness is the weakness of us imperfect human beings who administer it. Its strength is that even such administration secures to the people more blessings than any other system ever produced. No nation has discarded it and retained liberty. Representative government must be preserved.
Courts are established, not to determine the popularity of a cause, but to adjudicate and enforce rights. No litigant should be required to submit his case to the hazard and expense of a political campaign. No judge should be required to seek or receive political rewards. The courts of Massachusetts are known and honored wherever men love justice. Let their glory suffer no diminution at our hands. The electorate and judiciary cannot combine. A hearing means a hearing. When the trial of causes goes outside the court room, Anglo Saxon constitutional government ends.
The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.
Man is born into the universe with a personality that is his own. He has a right that is founded upon the constitution of the universe to have property that is his own. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated. Each man is entitled to his rights and the rewards of his service be they never so large or never so small.
History reveals no civilized people among whom there were not a highly educated class, and large aggregations of wealth, represented usually by the clergy and the nobility. Inspiration has always come from above. Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school – the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education.
It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people. Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service; in no land will the work of a day bring so large a reward in material and spiritual welfare.
Have faith in Massachusetts. In some unimportant detail some other States may surpass her, but in the general results, there is no place on earth where the people secure, in a larger measure, the blessings of organized government, and nowhere can those functions more properly be termed self-government.
Do the day’s work. If it be to protect the rights of the weak, whoever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful corporation better to serve the people, whatever the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a stand-patter, but don’t be a stand-patter. Expect to be called a demagogue, but don’t be a demagogue. Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don’t hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation.
We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people – a faith that men desire to do right, that the Commonwealth is founded upon a righteousness which will endure, a reconstructed faith that the final approval of the people is given not to demagogues, slavishly pandering to their selfishness, merchandising with the clamor of the hour, but to statesmen, ministering to their welfare, representing their deep, silent, abiding convictions.
Statutes must appeal to more than material welfare. Wages won’t satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor lands; nor coupons, though they fall thick as the leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature. Touch it, and it must respond as the magnet responds to the pole. To that, not to selfishness, let the laws of the Commonwealth appeal. Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the recognition of his manhood, the recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted, the recognition that all work is glorified. Such is the path to equality before the law. Such is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such is the sublime revelation of man’s relation to man – Democracy.
Our very own wildfire hazards
Firefighters put out a recent brush fire in the Highbridge Park section of northwest Manhattan.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
How weird it has seemed to watch planes drop water and other fire retardants on big brush and woods fires in New England and other parts of the Northeast the past few weeks, recalling California.
We’ll be seeing more dramatic cycles of floods, droughts and fires.
Scientists see man-caused global warming as behind the extreme shifts between wet and dry periods we’ve been experiencing. This means bursts of rapidly growing thick vegetation, which then dries out in droughts, providing fuel for fires of the sort that Northeast has experienced during the past few months.
Even climate-change deniers might decide soon not to live in fire-prone areas around here.
You might find this interesting.
But this fall’s weather has been so golden!
I wish you the best for Thanksgiving, including that you don’t have to travel.
Laugh or else
“Stickers,’’ by Ileana Doble Hernandez, in her show “My Dear Americans, It’s Not Enough,’’ at the Danforth Art Museum, Framingham, Mass., through Jan. 26.
Selma Hedlund: Denmark’s forced-assimilation approach
Along Nyhavn - a canal in Copenhagen.
BOSTON
History is full of examples of governments using forced segregation against ethnic minorities.
From settler colonialists coercing Indigenous peoples into reservations, Nazis forcing Jews into ghettos or the United States segregating Black Americans through redlining and zoning policies, displacement and housing have long been at the heart of institutional racism.
But in today’s Europe, an inverted trend of coercive assimilation is emerging in northern nations grappling with high levels of immigration. As a part of what has been described as both “ethnic engineering” and among the “harshest immigration policies” in the world, Denmark is forcibly uprooting people from neighborhoods they call “ghettos” and redirecting them to alternative housing.
In neighboring Sweden, politicians have expressed a desire to pursue similar plans.
The uprooting of whole communities is controversial. This winter, Europe’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, is set to determine whether Denmark is violating the civil and human rights of those being rehoused. As an expert in displacement and immigrant incorporation, I believe that the court’s decision and the progression of Denmark’s program have great implications for the future of Europe’s immigrants and the true meaning of European citizenship for its people of color.
Denmark’s ‘ghetto package’
Denmark’s radical housing policy is years in the making. In 2010, the country’s authorities began compiling lists of “non-Western,” immigrant-majority neighborhoods that were failing to live up to set standards on lawfulness, employment, income and education levels. Areas that fell short in two of the four of these criteria were officially labeled “ghettos,” or “tough ghettos” if they fell short of more than two criteria.
While these neighborhoods are home to people with a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds, they are marked by having more than half of residents with backgrounds in non-Western nations, including Syria, Iraq and Somalia.
Areas with “Western” majorities that failed the same standards were labeled “vulnerable areas” in contrast to the “non-Western” ghettos.
A man offers free travel to Denmark for Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In 2018, the social-democratic Danish government launched the “Ghetto Package,” a legislative program aimed at breaking up the “ghetto” neighborhoods – and the social fabrics that sustain them. The package did not entail the same measures for “vulnerable areas.”
Proposals to this end consisted of reducing public housing to no more than 40 percent of total housing in the neighborhoods and measures to encourage white, wealthier residents to move in.
As a result of the initiative, thousands of people have been displaced and removed from their family homes through sales, demolitions and forced evictions. Some of the homes were renovated while awaiting new tenants, while others were sold to private investors who planned on raising rents by more than 50%. Evicted residents are typically offered alternative accommodation in public housing in other parts of the city or region, but with no control over location or cost.
Denmark’s assimilation program does not stop at the breaking up of low-income, predominantly immigrant neighborhoods. Children born into “non-Western” families in state-designated ghettos must attend special programs for a minimum of 25 hours per week beginning at the age of 1, designed to immerse them in “Danish values,” including Christian holidays and Danish language education. Parents are not allowed to accompany them.
In addition, the program also wants to turn “ghettos” into “harsh penalty zones” in which crimes can be penalized twice as severely.
Residents and other critics of the package of measures argue that the designation of “non-Western” in practice means “nonwhite” or “Muslim,” pointing out the fact that non-Europeans such as Australians and New Zealanders are excluded from the criteria, and that Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion in 2022 were permitted to move into social housing that “non-Westerners” had been forced to leave.
Moreover, being a naturalized Danish citizen or Danish-born does not count as being Western for people of color; nonwhite, second-generation immigrants are formally considered non-Western under the program, implying a race-based criteria of belonging.
In response to the law, a dozen residents facing eviction from Mjølnerparken, a residential area categorized as a “tough ghetto” in Copenhagen, filed a case against Denmark’s Ministry of Social Affairs in 2020. In September 2024, the European Court of Justice held an initial hearing to determine whether the government’s Ghetto Package is discriminatory under Danish law, European Union law and the European Convention on Human Rights. Deliberations are underway.
Pending a verdict, the United Nations has urged Denmark to suspend the sale of homes in affected areas, but to no avail.
Ghettos, ethnic enclaves and parallel societies
Immigrants congregating in the same residential neighborhoods is nothing new.
In American social science, the term “ethnic enclave” is a relatively neutral concept that refers to a community dominated by a certain ethnic group or population. Prominent examples include Little Havana in Miami, Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco, or Boston and New York’s Little Italy.
In New York City, Chinatown and Little Italy rub up to each other. AP Photo
Historically, these communities formed their own social support systems, networks and economies in lieu of government support and have become important cultural centers.
But amid high levels of immigration in recent years, many European countries have become less accepting of the idea of immigrant-majority neighborhoods.
In those cases, integration is increasingly being seen as the cornerstone of sustainable immigration policy, even as state policies can be drivers of segregation between ethnic Europeans and immigrant communities.
Indeed, accusations of failed integration are a common political response to rising rates in crime and gang violence in Scandinavia, and Europe more broadly, and are the reasons cited for more restrictive immigration policy. Built into this notion is the assumption that immigrants of non-Western backgrounds are a bad influence on each other – and, in turn, on Europe.
In many European countries, the term “parallel societies” has cropped up. It is used to signal a development in which immigrant communities – predominately Muslim or from the Middle East and North Africa – are deemed not just a threat to local European culture and values but also to public safety.
To some politicians – initially just those on the right, but increasingly in political mainstreams – parallel societies such as those on Denmark’s list are potential breeding grounds for antidemocratic values, delinquency and violence.
Targeting the community
Proponents of Denmark’s current immigrant policy say they want to avoid the rise of gang violence seen in some areas of Sweden and promote a more integrated society.
But opponents of the “ghetto” policy say there is little evidence linking the culture of immigrant communities to problems of public safety. Instead, they point to the seductive techniques of predatory gangs, often online and with leadership based abroad, that target the young, disillusioned or impressionable.
Others say Denmark’s program is an excuse for gentrifying up-and-coming urban areas. Mjølnerparken is part of Nørrebro, selected “the world’s coolest neighborhood” by Time Out for 2021, thanks to its multiculturalism and vibrancy.
While the “Ghetto package” claims to promote integration, it risks alienation. For immigrant communities and critics of the current policy in Denmark, the program raises the question of who is considered part of a national community and identity and who is considered an inherent outsider or threat to it.
“I felt Danish until recently,” an immigrant Danish resident told Al Jazeera in 2020. “The politicians created their ‘parallel society,’ with the bad reputation they’ve given Mjølnerparken so that ethnic Danes don’t want to live here.”
It is a feeling increasingly shared by immigrant groups across the continent. In recent years, European leaders have proposed and implemented anti-immigrant policies that would have been inconceivable in many political mainstreams just a few years ago – even as border crossings into Europe have decreased dramatically.
The Danish experience shows that this new wave of radical anti-immigrant sentiment is not targeting just incoming migrants but settled ones as well.
Selma Hedlund is a post-doctoral associate at the Center for Forced Displacement at Boston University.
Chris Powell: Conn.’s arrogant immigration-law nullifiers
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Upon his inauguration as governor of darkest Alabama in January 1963, George Wallace famously proclaimed his defiance of the federal government on the steps of the state Capitol in Montgomery: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
At a rally on the steps of Connecticut's Capitol this week the state's attorney general, William Tong, struck a similar pose of defiance. He pledged that Connecticut would never distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and would strive to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law.
"This is the sovereign state of Connecticut," Tong declared. "We delegated limited powers to the federal government, but beyond those powers, Connecticut gets to decide how Connecticut wants to live."
But immigration law is entirely within the authority of the federal government. Connecticut has no sovereignty there. Connecticut doesn't get to decide to live outside federal immigration law any more than Alabama and the other nullification states of the segregationist South got to decide to live outside federal civil rights law.
That the federal government under the administration of Tong's political party lately has failed to enforce immigration law hasn't changed the law, and the recent national election has prompted a change of administrations largely because most voters -- even, it seems, most members of Tong's own party -- want immigration law enforced again. Most people object to the anarchic admission of more than 10 million or more immigrants without normal review and preparations for their housing, schooling, medical care, and policing — a policy failure inflicting much expense and social distress.
The mayors of Hartford, New Haven, Stamford, and Norwalk joined the attorney general at the Capitol, in Hartford, in pledging to defend all immigrants in their cities, legal and illegal alike. "Going after hardworking immigrants in our communities is not going to keep us safe," Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said. "It's going to lead to more fear and uncertainty."
How do Arulampalam and the other mayors know that every illegal immigrant in Connecticut would never do wrong and never become a public charge? How do they know that any criminals, spies, and terrorists who have entered the country illegally are staying outside the state?
Of course they don't. This is just an article of political faith among the woke. If challenged, some of them may sputter that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than the native-born, as if that excuses all crimes by illegal immigrants and excuses admitting anyone without rudimentary vetting.
But the attorney general, the mayors, Gov. Ned Lamont, and state legislators needn't worry about having to make distinctions between legal and illegal immigration; after all, many news organizations won’t ask them to.
Indeed, serious journalists would have asked them by now to comment about the immigration-fraud racket reported the other week by the New Haven Independent -- the marriage broker business operated out of New Haven and Bridgeport city halls by the vice chairwoman of the Bridgeport Democratic City Committee, ballot-harvester extraordinaire Wanda Geter-Pataky, who has been arranging marriages between young U.S. citizens and much older foreigners seeking the right to stay in the country, marriages of people who appear not even to know each other.
The immigration-fraud story was retold by other newspapers in the state, and the attorney general, the mayors, the governor, and state legislators almost certainly saw it, but only a few Republicans expressed concern about it. Presumably the others condone what is happening.
While the attorney general and the mayors were assuring Connecticut that unlimited, unvetted immigration -- open-borders policy -- is nothing to worry about, the police chief of Berlin, Germany, was warning Jews and homosexuals to avoid Arab neighborhoods because, as a result of Germany's open-borders policy, the culture there now threatens them.
That's how uncontrolled immigration has transported Europe back to medieval times. But in Connecticut the attorney general and the city mayors want the federal government to do nothing to restrict the entry of people who might undermine the country's democratic and secular nature. To the attorney general and the mayors, the threat to democracy is President-elect Donald Trump, who would restore ordinary controls on immigration.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
For breakfast?
“As I wait’’ (chromogenic print), by Merik Goma, in the show “Reflection: Remy Sosa & Merik Goma,’’ through Jan. 10 at ECOCA gallery, New Haven, Conn.
Accepting the floods
Northampton scene from the mid 19th Century.
“It is a wonder that Norwood was every allowed to venture so near to the low grounds of the Connecticut {River}; for it was early settled, not far from thirty years after the Pilgrims’ landing. How the temptation to build upon the top of the hill was resisted, we know not.’’
— Henry Ward Beecher on Northampton {“Norwood”), Mass., in Norwood; Or, Village Life in New England, 1868
He died but conspiracy theories seem immortal
The John F Kennedy Library, in Boston. It was designed by I. M. Pei.
Fcb981 photo
Kennedy was assassinated on this date in 1963. I (Robert Whitcomb) remember it well. I was in a high school biology lab cutting open a dead rat when a kid came rushing in saying that “some John Bircher (far righter) shot Kennedy.’’ As it turns out, it was a Communist — unless some exciting conspiracy theories are true. They’ll never die.
Irony helps
Historical marker in Ipswich, Mass., where John Updike lived for a while with his family. His and others’ extramarital adventures in North Shore towns provided some juicy material for his columns.
“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.’’
— John Updike (1932-2009), American literary giant. Raised in Pennsylvania, he spent most of his adult life in towns along the Massachusetts North Shore.
Holiday kitsch
“Back Alley Frosty”(digital print), by Eric Hess, in the show “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,’’ Dec. 7-28, at Atlantic Works Gallery, in gentrifying East Boston.
Don’t suffer ‘a den of thieves’
In this painting by John Trumbull, “The Declaration of Independence,’’ JohnHancock, as presiding officer, is seated on the right as the drafting committee presents their work.
“Surely you never will tamely suffer this country to be a den of thieves. Remember, my friends, from whom you sprang. Let not a meanness of spirit, unknown to those whom you boast of as your fathers, excite a thought to the dishonor of your mothers I conjure you, by all that is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that ye pray, but that ye act; that, if necessary, ye fight, and even die, for the prosperity of our Jerusalem. Break in sunder, with noble disdain, the bonds with which the Philistines have bound you. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed, by the soft arts of luxury and effeminacy, into the pit digged for your destruction. Despise the glare of wealth. That people who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.’’
— John Hancock (1737-1793), a U.S. Founding Father and Massachusetts politician and merchant
Pets became family members and children worked in mills
“Portrait of Hippodale at Six Years Old,’’ (circa 1910), by Mariette Leslie Cotton, in the show “Wild Imagination: Art and Animals in the Gilded Age (1865-1915)’’ at the Rosecliff mansion in Newport, R.I, through Jan. 12.
Edited from curator’s remarks:
“During the Gilded Age (1865–1914), Americans’ relationship with animals was transformed in lasting ways. ‘Wild Imagination’ explores how this … era shaped our modern attitudes towards animals, from pampered pups to wondrous sea creatures. A broad range of artworks, photographs, scientific specimens, and other objects reflect vital period developments, including the dawn of the animal rights movement, the surge in pet keeping, the popularization of such natural history pursuits as birdwatching, and the golden era of zoos and circuses. They also reveal the stories and experiences of individual creatures who continue to capture our imagination.’’
Wealth in the woods
Lauder Greenway estate, in Greenwich, Conn.
“Who has connections to Connecticut?That’s where rich people go to live the rest of their lives in the woods.’’
— Patrice O’Neal (19690-2011), American comedian
Carpet of life
From “Messages from the Marsh—parts 4-6’’(video still), by Amy Kaczur, at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 1.
Nov. ‘wind to bear’
“Wind-Beaten Tree,’’ by Vincent Van Gogh.
November
Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.
A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, —
Gone Mr. Bryant's golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves.
Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.
Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!
— “November,’’ by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Amherst in 1886. Dickinson spent her life in the famous college town.
So that’s where I left them
“ISLAND #2, 2024”, (archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle fine art museum etching paper, mounted on aluminum) by Susan Mikula, at Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum & Art Center.
Jonathan Krasner: The sometimes fraught Jewish experience on college campuses
Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1923. He moved to sharply restrict Jewish enrollment at the university.
From The Conversation
BOSTON
When Eliza arrived on her West Coast college campus in the fall of 2020, building community was difficult due to the raging COVID-19 pandemic. Yet over time she forged a network of friends, anchored by her sorority.
Three years later, those relationships were severely tested by events over 7,000 miles away: the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Due to her support for Israel, she was ostracized by people she once considered close friends, including her sorority sisters. Walking around campus, she removed her Star of David necklace. To be clear, Eliza was not concerned about her physical safety. But she sensed a social penalty for being Jewish and wanted to avoid dirty looks and political confrontations.
As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, progressive campus activists, including some Jews, fervently adopted the Palestinian cause as an extension of their battles for racial and social justice. Opposition to the war has become a generational cause for earnest Zoomers, akin to the Vietnam War for baby boomers and opposition to South African apartheid for Gen Xers.
Critics contend that protesters are unfairly holding Jewish classmates accountable for the actions of the Israeli government – especially since Jewish Americans are not unified in their attitudes about the war and very few hold dual citizenship in Israel. Where protesters see manifestations of anti-Zionism – opposition to the existence of a Jewish nation state in present-day Israel – many Jewish students, staff and parents see antisemitism, pure and simple.
People attend a menorah lighting ceremony on the seventh night of Hanukkah in December 2023 in Harvard Yard. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Eliza – a pseudonym, like all the student names in this article – was one of 36 undergraduates across the country whom I spoke with as part of a study of Jewish students’ responses to the conflict and its consequences. Their views on Israel and the war ran the gamut – but regardless, most felt unsettled by the death, abductions and destruction abroad, as well as the protests outside their dorms.
Many of them were surprised to find themselves wrestling with what it means to be Jewish in the U.S. and questioning their place in American society. But for more than 100 years, college campuses have been a testing ground for Jewish identity – and Americans’ acceptance of their Jewish compatriots.
Changing fortunes
The parents of today’s students, in particular, find themselves in a state of whiplash. Most attended college in the 1980s and ’90s, at the height of a golden age of Jewish life on American campuses. They view their children’s experiences not merely as a reversal but a betrayal.
“I went to college in the 1990s, and cannot recall a single moment when I felt uncomfortable as a Jew,” Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for the Obamas, recalled soon after the Oct. 7 attack.
Hurwitz’s alma mater, Harvard University, is embroiled in a lawsuit over allegations of antisemitism. Similar lawsuits were filed against Columbia University, UCLA and other schools. Meanwhile, federal investigations proceed over both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents at dozens of colleges and universities.
Her recollections reflect many competitive colleges’ conscious efforts to welcome Jewish students in the 1980s and ’90s, such as by building new campus centers, offering an array of new Jewish studies courses and providing kosher dining options. In the 1990s, about 25 percent of undergraduates at Harvard and Yale claimed Jewish heritage. The numbers were even higher at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
The trend was not confined to the Ivy League. Similar demographic stories played out at schools such as Boston University, Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University in Chicago.
Jews not wanted
It was not always so.
A century ago, first- and second-generation Jewish Americans flocked to higher education, seeing a degree as a ticket into the middle class. In response, elite colleges and universities notoriously restricted Jewish enrollment.
While other schools deliberated about their “Jewish problem” in secret, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell publicly announced his university’s intention to admit fewer Jews, which made the front page of The New York Times.
Explaining the quota, Lowell essentially blamed the victims. Attributing a rise in antisemitic attitudes to Jews’ supposed “clannishness,” he argued that admitting too many Jews would impede Jewish assimilation and further heighten anti-Jewish sentiment.
Odious as his plan was, Lowell’s views were common. The “tribal twenties” was a time of widespread nativism and racism. As Harvard and other schools were instituting Jewish quotas, Congress passed a restrictive immigration law that reduced Jewish immigration to a trickle.
Antisemitism was fueled by multiple and often conflicting conspiracy theories that appealed as much to cultured elites as to the unschooled.
Genteel antisemitism
On campus, antisemitism often manifested as social snobbery. For example, Greek organizations routinely discriminated on the basis of race and religion.
Meanwhile, New York’s upper crust responded to an influx of Jewish students at Columbia by sending their sons to out-of-town institutions. Indeed, Lowell’s fear that Harvard would suffer Columbia’s fate and scare away the “Boston Brahmins” motivated his efforts to reduce his university’s Jewish presence.
Harvard students’ feelings about Jewish classmates were revealed in 1922 when a professor invited his class to share opinions about Lowell’s “race limitations” plan on their final exams. “The Jews tend to overrun the college, to spoil it for the native-born Anglo-Saxon young persons for whom it was built and whom it really wants,” one student wrote. “Jews are an unassimilable race,” concluded another, “as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to a man.”
Harvard ultimately adopted a more indirect but equally effective plan to curb Jewish enrollment that capped the number of undergraduates and emphasized geographic diversity. Specifically, it admitted fewer students from Northeastern cities with large Jewish populations, while expanding its program of legacy admissions. From 1921 to 1928, Jewish enrollment dropped from over 21% to Lowell’s original target of 10%.
Other schools followed suit. As late as the 1950s, universities were designing their own restrictive admissions policies.
Fitting in − or not
Jewish college students realized that the genteel antisemitism they experienced on the quad was a taste of the discrimination they would face on the job market. Many compensated for the prejudice around them by avidly Americanizing, even by legally changing their names. By midcentury, many Jewish teens and young women were “whitening” themselves by getting nose jobs and straightening their hair.
As much as they tried to blend in, many continued to feel disaffected. As historian Daniel Greene noted, they inhabited an in-between space: a conflicted middle ground between their American and Jewish identities, never fully at home in either world.
Others immersed themselves in Jewish life. Some were attracted to Zionism, then a relatively new movement that supported a Jewish national home in the region of Palestine, the biblical land of Israel. Many joined Jewish fraternities and sororities or campus groups. The first chapter of Hillel, presently the largest Jewish campus organization, was founded at the University of Illinois in 1923.
Jewish members of the armed forces from Columbia University prepare for a Passover Seder service at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1944. Bettmann via Getty Images
The climate for Jewish students improved in the late 1950s and ’60s, as elite schools, beginning with Harvard, adopted admissions policies that prized academic merit, reflected primarily in SAT scores. In the words of journalist Sarah Leonard, universities shed “a portion of academically mediocre bluebloods in favor of scrappier kids with impressive test scores.”
Now versus then
It is tempting to compare the contemporary experiences of Jewish students with those of a century ago. And there are similarities, to be sure. Inevitably, some students are galvanized to action, while others prefer to melt into shadows. Some turn inward and find comfort in community, while others challenge themselves to adapt to the disequilibrium.
But there are also significant differences, including that Jewish Americans wield far more political power as a group than they did in the 1920s.
The spectacle of university presidents being hauled before a U.S. congressional committee in 2023 over accusations of antisemitism on their campuses may have been a political ploy by Republicans. In part, it underscored the GOP’s alliance with evangelical Christian supporters of Israel and its desire to attack institutions of higher education as “woke.” Yet it also signaled that Jews enjoy a level of influence in the halls of government that would have baffled their great-grandparents.
Many parents and students are dissatisfied with campus leaders’ responses to the anti-Israel protests. But their concerns have been afforded a level of consideration that was almost entirely absent in earlier times. Consider the swiftness with which Columbia dismissed three mid-level administrators in July 2024, after images of snarky text messages trafficking in antisemitic tropes were leaked to the media.
In recent months, some students like Eliza may be downplaying their Jewishness to diffuse tense situations. But that does not mean they are rejecting their identities.
Jewish students and allies hold a Shabbat event and prayer in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University on April 26, 2024. Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
Even Jewish students who support the campus protests often frame their concern for Palestinian life in terms of their Jewish values. Ava, a student I interviewed at an East Coast university, no longer feels comfortable attending Sabbath services, due to the campus rabbi’s pro-Israel politics. Yet she finds Jewish connection through a Jewish anti-Zionist organization led by students.
Ezra, a student leader at the Hillel chapter on a particularly volatile campus, bemoaned some protesters’ excesses. He had little patience for white progressive activists spouting slogans like “Globalize the Intifada!” without understanding their meaning. But he evinced greater sympathy for Arab and Muslim demonstrators, especially those who had been personally touched by the death and devastation in Gaza.
Ezra viewed their activism as a form of “punching up.”
“We have a Hillel house – probably one of the nicest in the country – and the ear of the administration through donors and alumni,” he explained. “We’re fighting to maintain our privilege while they’re fighting for representation.”
Jonathan Krasner, is associate professor of Jewish education research at Brandeis University.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment
Design for sculpture?
“Seaver Dark Reflection” (watercolor) in Wendy Klemperer’s show “A Sculptor’s Watercolors,’’ at the Dublin School’s Putnam Gallery, Dublin, N.H., through Dec. 18.
Sculptor Klemperer shows her watercolors and drawings, offering a rare glimpse of an artist’s work across mediums.
The church and rotary in the center of Dublin, part of the Dublin Village Historic District. The town is headquarters of Yankee Magazine and its sister publication The Old Farmers Almanack.
Magicpiano photo
Two places show Boston as birthplace of the telephone
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Two different locations in Downtown Boston both claim to be the site where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Steps from City Hall, almost hidden in a courtyard between the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and Cambridge Street, a nondescript granite marker reads, BIRTHPLACE OF THE FIRST TELEPHONE.
Yet just half a mile away, embedded in the side of a building on Avenue de Lafayette, a plaque claims to mark the spot of the FIRST COMPLETE AND INTELLIGIBLE SENTENCE BY TELEPHONE.
So where in Boston was the telephone really invented? The answer, experts say, depends on how one chooses to define the term.
“I can see a convincing argument being made for either place,” said Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and one of the foremost experts on Boston’s history. “But it’s not particularly helpful that both markers are without a concrete explanation or any context at all.”
The root of these competing claims lies in Alexander Graham Bell’s paranoia that rival inventors would steal his design, according to Drummey and Vincent Valentine, director of The Telephone Museum in Waltham.
Originally from Scotland, Bell came to Boston to have his ideas prototyped by Charles Williams Jr., a manufacturer of telegraph equipment whose expertise turned Boston into a hotbed for inventors in the late nineteenth century.
Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson rented space in the attic of William’s factory at 109 Court Street, an address that no longer exists but roughly corresponds to the present day marker near City Hall. It was in that fifth floor lab that Bell and Watson were initially able to transmit sound over a wire, first a “twang” of a spring and then the indistinct sound of voices.
Concerned about prying eyes at the Court Street labs, Bell and Watson began testing their devices at night in rented rooms at a boarding house at 15 Exeter Street, or what is roughly now the Avenue de Lafayette. It was in these rented rooms on March 10 in 1876 that Bell, according to the story, called to Watson after spilling acid on his prototype and the assistant heard him clearly in the next room.
“15 Exeter is where they first got it to work,” said The Telephone Museum’s Valentine. “That’s where the first voice was transmitted.”
Both Drummey and Valentine said that any debate over which site is truly the birthplace of modern communications is a matter of semantics. However, they also said that the lack of a universally agreed upon location to commemorate the achievement played a role in why such an important moment is often left off Boston’s historical pantheon.
For a city that obsesses over its own history and takes pride in its outsized influence and innovation economy, Boston all but ignores one of the most significant achievements to have occurred here.
“People don’t know this happened in Boston,” said Valentine. “When people think of Boston, all anybody seems to care about is Paul Revere, but the telephone was invented right there downtown. And it’s the telephone. I mean, Holy Christ, everyone has one.”