Antisemitism without Quotas at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s and 1940s: Anticommunist Politics, the Surveillance of Jewish Students, and American Antisemitism

Abstract

wrote to G. R. Higgins, his counterpart at the University of Minnesota, on a matter he asked to be kept "just between us": the "big problem" of Jewish boys and girls. He sought advice about managing the use of Cornell's student union by Jewish students in the six weeks of summer session, when the building became what he described as "a Jew picnic." Although the enrollment of "Hebrews" was the same in the summer as over the rest of the school-year-about fifteen percent of the student body-he estimated that "one-hundred percent" of people using the union during the summer were "Jewish boys and girls." They used the union, he wrote, like a "country club" and travelled "in packs as is their curious custom." Coffin could not identify any "specific sin" committed by these students, but complained they "do get in our hair," and worried that they brought "unregistered" friends into the union. At Minnesota, he asked Higgins, "Do you frisk them at the gate" for their credentials? 2 1. Research for this paper was conducted, in part, for the 2017 exhibition at the University of Minnesota entitled A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930Minnesota -1942. Sarah Atwood and I served as co-curators of that exhibition. Some of the research was carried out by assistants under my direction, by Atwood, and subseqently by Patrick Wilz. In 2017, I curated the digital exhibition: Acampusdivided.umn.edu. The College of Liberal Arts and the Center for Jewish Studies of the University of Minnesota provided funding for the research.

Emerging from critique towards liberation: A Framework in leadership education

“…It is not coincidence that academic librarians are being disenfranchised because of the liberatory possibility in accessing history, documentation, and storytelling. Consider curated archival projects like A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930–1942 (Prell, 2017). This collective historical project traces some of the larger systems of oppression that have influenced the campus.…”