The April 2024 issue of The Atlantic featured a lengthy article by Franklin Foer titled “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” The article argues that the golden era of safety, prosperity, and political influence experienced by Jews since the end of World War II was being replaced by an era of “conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament.” America’s Jews have been the proverbial canary in the coal mine, and “what’s bad for Jews … is bad for America.” The surge of anti-Semitism “is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism.” If the country persists in its current course, Foer predicted, “it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.”
While Foer’s article addressed Jews’ erosion of status in Hollywood, politics, and public opinion, America’s universities occupy a prominent place in Foer’s indictment.1 The article itself was prompted by the shocking scenes of anti-Israel and pro-Hamas rallies and encampments on various American college campuses following Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Particularly disturbing for critics of the protests was the failure of administrators at some of America’s leading academic institutions to condemn the rallies and encampments and to discipline those harassing Jews on campus. This perception of administrative appeasement metastasized with the responses of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when asked at a televised congressional hearing on December 5, 2023 how they would react to calls on their campus for the killing of Jews. The three answered in harmony that it would depend on the “context,” leaving many to wonder what context would render such calls acceptable, or if the same responses would have been given if the subject involved a different minority group.
This episode resulted in a sharp political backlash that included Jewish and non-Jewish patrons of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Harvard, and other institutions withholding financial support. Combined with other problems during their tenures, backlash pressure ultimately led the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign.
While Jewish intellectuals responded in markedly different ways—Shoshana Bryen of the Jewish Policy Center, for instance, warned that universities had become “dangerous places for Jews,” whereas Harvard emerita Ruth Wisse argued that American Jews were living in “the best circumstance we have ever enjoyed”—the unease many Jews felt toward the most turbulent campuses was palpable.
Jewish day schools, which had prided themselves on the fact that their students were admitted to Ivy League colleges, now encouraged them to look elsewhere. The Ramaz School, a tony Jewish day school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, reported in August 2024 that for the first time in over two decades, not one of its students would be enrolling in Columbia College, Columbia University’s undergraduate college, though many of its students were so qualified.
In the wake of the Oct. 7 protests and anemic responses, universities in the south—such as Tulane in New Orleans, Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, Vanderbilt in Nashville, and the University of Florida in Gainesville—became more attractive to Jewish applicants. Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution in New York City, has been inundated by applications since Oct. 7, 2023. Ari Berman, Yeshiva’s president, stated in May 2024, “We are packed. Our enrollment is full. We don’t even have the ability to fit everyone who wants, who is qualified.”2
Past Is Not Prologue
This is in marked contrast with the experience of Jews in the modern era. At least since the mass immigrations of the 1880-1920s, Jews looked to the university, and especially to the selective ones, as a pathway to economic and social mobility. Jews attended college and entered the learned professions earlier than other similarly situated immigrant groups. As early as 1922 over a fifth of the students at Harvard College were Jews, prompting Harvard’s president A. Lawrence Lowell to propose limitations on Jewish enrollment. There was little public protest over this proposal and other colleges and universities such as Amherst and Princeton also adopted limits on both Jewish enrollment and personnel.3
The quotas on Jewish students and faculty were repealed after World War II, as America’s universities strove to become world-class institutions of intellectual distinction and secularism. This occurred simultaneously with a sharp decline in antisemitism within the United States.4 Unsurprisingly, Jewish enrollments jumped, and it was common beginning in the 1950s for Jews to comprise over twenty percent of undergraduate enrollment and faculty at many elite institutions, even though the percentage of Jews in the general population never exceeded three percent. At Columbia, Foer notes, the student body was forty percent Jewish in the late 1960s.
The centrality of higher education in the life of America’s Jews was reflected in the funding by Jewish philanthropists of university chairs and programs in Jewish subjects. Courses in Hebrew, Yiddish, sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and Bible were being offered by hundreds of American universities, and it became a status symbol among wealthy Jews to have their names adorn academic chairs. In 1969, Samuel Sandmel, a professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College, went so far as to call the establishment of these academic chairs “the most significant development in modern American Judaism.”5 While some critics expressed concern that the advent of separate “Jewish Studies” departments would substitute ethnic affirmation for scholarly rigor, such departments—for better or worse—entered the academic mainstream by the end of the twentieth century.6
The heightened Jewish presence in higher education was also seen in university administrative offices. While the theologian Richard E. Rubinstein said in 1965 that it was “almost impossible for a Jew to be appointed to an administrative position at any university not sponsored by Jews,”7 he couldn’t have been more wrong. In 1968 Edward H. Levi was named president of the University of Chicago, and in 1988 Harold T. Shapiro became Princeton’s president. By then, considerations of religion and ethnicity had become so irrelevant that the New York Times article on Shapiro’s selection omitted any mention of them. As of this writing, seven of the eight Ivy League schools have had at least one Jewish president.
Yet now Jews are a clearly diminished presence on Ivy League campuses. Foer attended Columbia University during the 1990s when Jews comprised over a third of its student body. Today it is perhaps half that. Foer notes that Jewish enrollment at Yale has declined from twenty percent to ten percent, at the University of Pennsylvania from one-third to sixteen percent. With these enrollment declines, Foer’s comments take on added resonance: the testimony of the three university presidents to Congress—that the proper response to antisemitism depended on “the context”—“carried the sting of rejection.”
Left unexplored by Foer, however, are the reasons why the three presidents answered in such a manner, and why seemingly irrational campus protests erupted in the first place. Why did student activists who hold themselves up as humanitarian watchdogs praise attacks resulting in the murder of infants, the rapes of women, and the butchering of civilians? How does one explain feminists and gays backing Hamas—a movement that would execute them if they lived under its rule?
At least part of the answer seems related to the decision of universities over the last few decades to admit more foreign students, who now make up a large percentage of student bodies. Harvard recently reported that 27 percent of its students were foreign, and the figure was even higher for Columbia (40 percent), New York University (37 percent), University of Chicago (30 percent), and MIT (29 percent). Not only does the influx of foreign students reduce the number of slots open to qualified American citizens, but some foreign students bring with them religious views, geopolitical commitments, and social attitudes that stand outside the American mainstream. At the very least, more foreign students on American campuses have coincided with record numbers of antisemitic incidents.8
But the presence of foreign students is likely a small component of campus antisemitism. Neither the three presidents who testified to Congress nor a majority of the students participating in the protests were foreign-born. The bigger problem appears to be something that Foer only vaguely alludes to: the social justice fog—the ideological miasma that began in the humanities and social sciences but now blankets the entire university, where large, well-funded bureaucracies thrive on perpetuating approved narratives.
Under the dictates of theories such as “Intersectionality,” “Critical Race Theory,” and “Settler Colonialism,” it would seem impossible for students to consider Hamas as anything other than a progressive anti-colonial movement fighting the Western imperialism embodied by the state of Israel. The indigeneity of Jews to the land, Arab aggression toward Israel, or the chronology of historic events are of no importance in these conceptual schemes. These are closed systems. As the British scholar Nigel Biggar writes, “that universities have given safe lodging to ‘settler colonialism’ and allowed it to spread its poison, is a sign of their intellectual corruption and moral vacuousness. Students publicly celebrating the sadistic massacre of the innocents of 7 October 2023 is the appalling result.”9
The influence of just these three theories—there are others—go a long way toward explaining the hostility of students and staff toward Israel and its supporters. It might be worth noting the absence of large-scale campus protests against Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine, a war of many more deaths and much more destruction than in Gaza. The war in Ukraine, the Chinese government’s colonization of Tibet and oppression of its Muslim citizens, and the various conflicts in Central Africa simply do not fit these “woke” models of understanding and are thus unimportant to the academic bien pensant.
If Foer is right that the decline of Jewish safety and influence mirrors a broader national decay, then universities are both the symptom and the cause. The crisis now unfolding on campus reveals a deeper institutional rot—the abandonment of the university’s historic mission to pursue truth through reasoned inquiry and open debate. When moral outrage replaces moral reasoning, and activism supplants scholarship, the very conditions that once allowed Jews—and Americans generally—to flourish intellectually are surely eroded.
Recovering the health of American universities will therefore require more than improved administrative messaging or stricter codes of conduct; it will demand a reassertion of the liberal principles that once defined higher learning—intellectual humility, rigorous skepticism, and a commitment to the equal dignity of every human being. Only when the university breaks free from the captivity of postmodern dogma will antisemitism abate.
The golden age that Foer laments may indeed be ending—but this may not be the last word. The same institutions that once excluded Jews later opened their doors to them, and in doing so elevated the moral and intellectual life of the nation. A similar renewal is still possible if universities summon the courage to recover their first principles and resist the ideologies that have clouded their judgment. Whether they still possess the will to do so will determine not only the future of America’s Jews, but of the American university itself.
Edward S. Shapiro is professor emeritus of history at Seton Hall University; edshapiro07052@yahoo.com. He is the author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (1992), Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (2006), A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History (2022) and is the editor of Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War (1995). Shapiro appeared in our Fall 2025 issue with “The Tarnished Arches of the Hamburger King,” a review of Franchise: The Golden Arches of Black America by Marcia Chatelain.
1 Franklin Foer, “The End of the Golden Age,” The Atlantic (April, 2004), 25, 35.
2Lawrence Grossman, Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945-2025 Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2025), 366.
3Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1985);Marcia G. Synott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970 (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1979).
4 George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 11.
5 Sandmel quoted in Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 79.
6 Jacob Neusner, “The New Setting for Jewish Learning,” Rhode Island Herald, Jan. 9, 1976, https://rijha.org/wp-content/uploads/voiceandherald/1973/1976-1-9.pdf?utm_source.
7 Rubinstein quoted in Charles A. Silberman, A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today (New York: Summit, 1985), 180.
8 Haley Cohen, “ADL: New record for antisemitic incidents set in 2024, with most connected to Israel,” eJewishPhilanthropy.com, April 22, 2025.
9 Nigel Biggar review of Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideological, Violence, and Justice, in Society, 62 (August, 2025), 55-56.
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