As Yale's Jewish Population Declines to 1940s Quota Levels, University Leaders Say Jewish Community is ‘Thriving’
Plus, ousted WaPo columnist Karen Attiah to receive 'Distinguished Service Award' from journo society
Yale College’s Jewish enrollment sank to just 9.5 percent in 2024, below where it sat in the 1940s, when the Ivy League school capped the number of “alien” Jews on campus, according to data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office. Yale College dean Pericles Lewis isn’t concerned. He says the school’s diminished Jewish community is “thriving.”
Lewis’s comment came in response to a new report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance on Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League. It identified the decline in the Jewish population at Yale as particularly troubling, given that Yale has actually increased the size of its undergraduate classes in recent years and seen a decline in the number of Jewish undergraduates nonetheless. Lewis told the Yale Daily News that the numbers would be “very hard to measure,” though the Chaplain’s Office has done so for decades, with data tracing back to the 1940s.
At that time, according to the office’s “Religious Diversity at Yale” survey, 9.9 percent of undergraduates were Jewish, slightly higher than the 9.5 percent cited for the classes of 2024-2027, the lowest number in decades. That marks a 42 percent decrease from the 16.4 percent of students who identified as Jewish in the 2010s and a 52 percent decrease from the 19.9 percent of students who identified as such in the 2000s.
In the 1940s, Yale imposed ruthless quotas on the number of Jews admitted in an attempt to address what university leaders described as the “Jewish problem,” according to Dan Oren’s history of anti-Semitism at Yale, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale. The university’s former admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, imposed a quota after Jews made up 13 percent of the 1921 freshman class. Corwin wrote at the time that Jewish students lacked “attributes of refinement and honor” and did not “share the ‘ethical code’ of their peers,” according to a separate 2006 book on the topic, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admissions and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, by UC Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel. Corwin and other admissions leaders conspired thereafter to quietly keep Jewish enrollment around 10 percent. Now, roughly 100 years later, the number of Jews at Yale has dipped beneath that level and Yale’s leaders say everything is hunky-dory!
Lewis and Yale University chaplain Maytal Saltiel did not respond to a request for comment, but we did get an email from an unnamed Yale spokesman waving away the numbers, which evidently are supposed to provide “a view of the religious diversity at Yale, not to report on the exact percentage of a particular community.” So they’re good for measuring diversity, but not so good for telling us anything about the decline of the Jewish population.
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Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah lost her job after “endangering” colleagues with inflammatory posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This summer, she will receive the Distinguished Service Award from the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, our Andrew Stiles reports.
The society is a mainstream association that says it’s dedicated to the promotion of “high standards” and “ethical behavior.” Its Distinguished Service Award was designed to honor journalists whose “work and or actions have made a positive difference on our craft and on society.” Attiah, for her part, has repeatedly denounced mainstream journalism as a racist industry in which black voices are “silenced” and progressive black women are “hunted.” In the wake of Kirk’s killing, she described the United States as a “sick” country that “worships violence” and denounced the “performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.” She later responded to her firing from the Post by posing in front of the paper’s headquarters wearing a socialist ball gag and holding a flaming newspaper like a torch.
“Since leaving the Post, Attiah has posted sporadically on Substack and prolifically on Bluesky, the social media app for deranged liberals who will never be happy,” Stiles writes. “She has also launched an online school for ‘resistance’ liberals that aims to guide students through the ‘intellectual and emotional labor of building a liberated future.’ She recently announced a new course on politics and soccer—the most anti-American sport ever devised—that purports to explain how the World Cup is a ‘framework for how we move through the world.’” Congrats, Karen!
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The Supreme Court struck down a Colorado law banning so-called conversion therapy for minors—which is to say that the law banned therapists from suggesting to children that they shouldn’t undergo harmful and permanent procedures changing their gender. The High Court ruled 8-1 that the law unconstitutionally regulated speech. Naturally, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
An American journalist, Shelly Kittleson, was kidnapped in Baghdad on Tuesday after the U.S. government informed her “about a specific threat against her by the Iranian-backed paramilitary group Kata’ib Hezbollah, which was allegedly looking to kidnap or kill female journalists” and had Kittleson’s name on a list, according to CBS News.
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Hard to believe the Jewish community has not totally walked away not only from all of the Ivy League but also the entire Democratic Party. Why does the community continue to support anti-semites? What is the cheese in this mouse trap?
These schools have damaged their own reputations severely. It will take a generation of disciplined work for them to repair this, assuming that they care to do so. Personally, when I screen a new hire these days, I do a much deeper dive when I see a CV from a school that had a big anti-Israel encampment. The last mistake I need to make is to hire someone who is going to turn their office into a shrine to Hamas or something along those lines. That would ricochet right back at me in a bad way.