Hillel at Michigan, 1926/27-1945: Struggles of Jewish Identity in a Pivotal Era

Introduction

There is something very telling in the fact that Hillel emanated from the country’s Midwest and its great public universities rather than from the East Coast, which has consistently embodied the core of Jewish life in the history of the United States. It was not at the College of the City of New York (CCNY), where, in 1918–­19, the student body comprised 78.7 percent Jews; nor at neighboring New York University with its student body consisting of 47.5 percent Jews; and not even at fancy Columbia University, where 21.2 percent of students were Jewish at this time. It wasn’t at Harvard (10 percent Jews), Johns Hopkins (16.2 percent Jews), Boston University (9.9 percent Jews), University of Pennsylvania (14.5 percent Jews), or the University of Chicago (18.5 percent Jews). Rather, it was in the Midwest’s public university powerhouses—the University of Illinois, with 4.2 percent of the student body being Jewish right after World War I; the University of Wisconsin, with 4.1 percent of the students identified as Jewish; Ohio State University, with 4.5 percent of the students being Jewish; and the University of Michigan, with 4.0 percent—that Hillel organizations were established in 1923, 1924, 1925, and 1926, respectively.[1]

We see two reasons for this development: The first, of course, has to do with the fact that various Jewish organizations preceded Hillel, mainly at East Coast universities, due to the large number of Jewish students there. The first among these was the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity founded under the Hebrew name (Zion Be-mishpat Tip-padeh; “Zion shall be redeemed by justice” [Isaiah 1:27]) in New York City in 1898 “to encourage the study of Jewish history and culture among Jewish students, but shortly afterwards converted into a Greek-letter fraternity.”[2] The transition from Hebrew to Greek letters signaled to the world very clearly that the young men who had created this organization were at least as interested in its social aspects as they were in its Jewish ones. By switching from Hebrew to Greek, this fraternity conformed fully to the prevailing mode. It was a Jewish entity that embraced the cultural codes of the dominant Gentile world around it. Other similar Jewish organizations followed rapidly: “The first professional fraternities, Sigma Epsilon Delta for dental students in 1901, and Phi Delta Epsilon for medical students in 1904. The first sorority, Iota Alpha Pi, came in 1903, as the Jewish girls began to follow their brothers into the collegiate world.”[3]

There were other organizations as well, such as Zionist societies at CCNY in 1902; at Harvard and Columbia in 1905; “the University Jewish Literary Society at Minnesota in 1903; Menorah societies at Harvard in 1906 [the first one of its kind] and at Missouri in 1907; the Ivrim at the University of Illinois and the Society for the Study of Jewish Literature at the University of Texas in 1907; the Hebraic Club at Yale in 1909; and the Calipha club for the Study of Jewish Culture and Questions at the University of California in 1910.”[4] Most of these organizations merged into the growing Menorah movement founded at Harvard by Henry Hurwitz in 1908, who sought “to build an organization that would promote the serious academic study of Jewish culture in the university and serve as a platform for the nonpartisan discussion of Jewish problems. Hurwitz aimed to liberate the Jewish college student from the feeling that his Judaism diminished his American identity.” This was a conflict-laden issue that, as we will see repeatedly in our study, remained central to the lives of Jewish students—indeed, American Jews (or is it Jewish Americans?)—at Michigan and elsewhere throughout much of the twentieth century.[5] “Menorah’s primary purpose was intellectual—the study of the history and culture of the Jewish people, so conceived that nothing Jewish should be alien to it. It was to be a nonpartisan and nonsectarian open forum. Nonactivist, as well, it would neither sponsor purely social functions nor engage in philanthropic or social-service activities. Its energies were to be concentrated upon its cultural purpose.”[6] There were other Jewish student organizations besides those in Menorah, among which, perhaps, the Zionist outfit Avukah, founded in Washington, DC, in 1925, became the most prominent. Closely associated with the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Hadassah, this organization—just like Menorah—proliferated among Jewish students on America’s campuses, Michigan’s included, as we will see. All these organizations shared one important thing: they were almost exclusively student-run and student-dominated institutions with virtually no connection to the Jewish community off campus. Despite Avukah’s affiliation with ZOA, the former ran its own affairs completely independent of the latter and indulged in major ideological conflicts between Revisionists and Labor Zionists that was to split Avukah in 1934 and lead to its demise in 1942.

We would be remiss not to mention Marianne R. Sanua’s pioneering work on Jewish fraternities and sororities at this juncture, since, as she so convincingly shows, they were most certainly the main places at America’s universities at a time when Jewish students could congregate and socialize as Jews unencumbered by a hostile world whose fraternities and sororities, more often than not, remained closed to them.[7] These organizations became crucial places for Jewish students to find a home away from home during their years in college. Moreover, they played a decisive role in the Jewish marriage market, since it was through these fraternities and sororities that young Jewish students had a chance to meet each other. Fraternities and sororities replaced the famed matchmaker of yore for many Jewish students certainly until the end of World War II, which also forms the end of our project. But fraternities and sororities never had the comprehensively cultural, decidedly intellectual, and broadly inclusive social mission and self-understanding that Hillel was to assume. They were closed entities that chose their membership according to certain criteria that—by definition—emphasized some exclusivity, some special characteristic, some particularity that remained incompatible with an all-purpose, big-tent organization of Hillel’s model. Moreover, as we will see throughout our study, fraternities and sororities constructed, experienced, and practiced their Jewishness very differently from how Hillel envisioned its, leading to tensions between Hillel on the one hand and the fraternities and sororities on the other throughout the entire period comprising the study.

The second reason for Hillel’s Midwestern roots has something to do with Jews’ position in society—and society’s reaction to Jews—being different in the Midwest from the East Coast. Being fewer in numbers, the fear of Jews losing their Jewish identity—be that mainly of an ethnic, religious, or cultural variety or, as was frequently the case, an undefinable mixture of all three—was more pronounced in the Midwest than on the East Coast. Jewish students at Midwestern universities, virtually all of whom hailed from this region in the early 1920s, had to remain more closely associated with their larger communities outside the walls of academia if they were to continue their active Jewish identity. So a town-gown separation that emerged on the East Coast would have been less viable in the Midwest. But there was another major difference between the Midwest and the East Coast: the role of their respective institutions of higher learning. Whereas private institutions (with few exceptions, most notably CCNY) dominated the East Coast, it was—again, with some exceptions (University of Chicago and Northwestern University)—the large state institutions that characterized higher education in the Midwest. As creations of the Northwest Ordinance (as in the cases of the University of Michigan and Indiana Seminary, later to become Indiana University in Bloomington), but mainly, of course, of the Morrill Land-Grant Act (as in the cases of Michigan State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ohio State University), these Midwestern universities developed a completely different relation to the public trust than their East Coast counterparts. As a result, they featured a much greater sense of obligation to the community whose intellectual and cultural guardianship they assumed. Put differently, the cultural and institutional boundaries that these universities had vis-à-vis the publics of their respective states were much less rigid and formidable than those denoting the identities of private East Coast institutions, especially of the elite variety, which were later to form the Ivy League. Thus, not surprisingly, it was a non-Jewish professor of biblical literature at the University of Illinois named Edward Chauncey Baldwin “who, troubled by the attrition of Jewish knowledge and loyalty which he observed among his Jewish students, pleaded with rabbinical and lay leaders in Illinois to develop”[8] a college program that was to cast a wide net in which Jewishness—however vaguely defined—was to flourish on campus with the active help of the larger American Jewish community. Baldwin asked Rabbi Louis Mann, a prominent leader of the Chicago Jewish community, “ ‘Don’t you think the time has come when a Jewish student might educate his mind without losing his soul?’ ”[9]

If it was not at Baldwin’s behest, then it was certainly in cooperation with him and as a consequence of his intellectual influence that Baldwin’s University of Illinois colleague Benjamin Frankel, familiar with the three hundred Jewish students at that institution and their often tenuous relationship to Judaism, came to develop at this university in 1923 what was to become the very first Hillel in the world. By all accounts, Rabbi Frankel was the ideal person to found such an all-encompassing organization whose mission it was to include all Jewish students—regardless of political ideology, religious proficiency, or any other intellectual disposition or ability—in things Jewish, broadly conceived and implemented. Of warm disposition and respected as a man of great intellect and learning—thus, for example, Abram Sachar credited the birth of this organization to Frankel’s “ ‘remarkably expansive, lovable personality, his genius for friendship, his courageous idealism and love for a great cultural heritage’ ”[10]—Frankel envisioned a place on campus that was to offer Jewish students an emotional home, a social haven, and an intellectual resource during their four years at college. Above all, this structure was to provide a crucial bridge between the university and the outside world, not least in the funding of the former by the latter. For that purpose, Frankel constituted a board of lay leaders from outside the university who were to assist him in his endeavors right from the beginning. Moreover, Frankel included his University of Illinois colleague, the esteemed historian Abram L. Sachar, who would later—upon Frankel’s untimely death in 1927 at the age of thirty—become Frankel’s successor as the leader of this organization at the University of Illinois in 1928, the first full-time director of such an organization in the country and, in many ways, Hillel’s most important national figure of all time. By any measure, Sachar must be seen as one of American Jewry’s foremost leaders and most prominent public figures. He had been graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington University in St. Louis, received a PhD from Cambridge University, and began his teaching career at the University of Illinois in 1923. In addition to his directorship of the Hillel Foundation at the University of Illinois, Sachar became Hillel’s first national director in 1932. As is well known, Sachar became Brandeis University’s founding president in 1948, leading it to a world-class research university in his twenty-year tenure. After his retirement as president of Brandeis University in 1968, Sachar continued his active involvement with this institution first as its chancellor and later as its chancellor emeritus. In our research for this book, we also encountered two additional names of people who seem to have been very influential in the founding and initial formation of Hillel: Alfred M. Cohen and Boris D. Bogen. According to the University of Michigan’s publication The Hillel News of October 24, 1929, Alfred M. Cohen, Boris D. Bogen, and Rabbi Ben Frankel were “the three men who made the Hillel Foundation a reality.”[11]

Benjamin Frankel decided to name this new entity Hillel: “ ‘It was a felicitous choice. Hillel is a symbol of the quest for higher learning. It was a beautiful name, too. It appeared to the Christian fellowship that pioneered the foundation, since Hillel was virtually a contemporary of Jesus. In those days the Jewish community still felt the need for the Christian imprimatur.’ ”[12] Perhaps most crucially, Frankel and Sachar succeeded in having B’nai B’rith adopt Hillel at the University of Illinois, thus opening the door for a construct in which a nonuniversity-based charitable institution was to fund a good portion of a university-centered entity’s activities and existence. Frankel was instrumental in opening the second Hillel at the University of Wisconsin in 1924, with Ohio State’s and Michigan’s to follow in 1925 and 1926, respectively. It was not until 1939 that Hillel opened its first facility on the East Coast by establishing the Brooklyn College Hillel, which, with an enrollment of eight thousand Jewish students, presented a hitherto unprecedented challenge that Abram Sachar personally oversaw.[13]

Five decisive principles guided the establishment and maintenance of Hillel student organizations. First, bespeaking the seriousness of Frankel’s institutional commitment and his acute awareness of the inadequacy of previous amateurish efforts on the organizational firmament of Jewish student life, Frankel insisted that Hillel be run by a permanent professional staff: “Every Foundation operates under the guidance of a Hillel Director, usually a rabbi who combines Jewish academic competence with experience in youth work. Hillel Counselorships—Hillel’s extension service units—are served by a rabbi in the community near the campus, an educator or group worker, or a Hillel Director from a nearby Foundation.”[14]

The second principle pertains to the broad, indeed ecumenical, nature of Hillel’s purpose and mission. All Jewish students, regardless of their theological orientation, sophistication, or ideological predilections, are welcomed by Hillel. The organization is not to address itself to any particular intellectual segment of the campus population. It is not to favor any group or orientation over any other. Hillel “is designed to serve all Jewish students regardless of their backgrounds, Jewish ideologies or denominational preferences, and it seeks to meet student needs on the very intellectual levels on which they may exist. Nor does Hillel sponsor or endorse any partisan view of Jewish life. It is hospitable to every wholesome expression of Jewish interest or concern that may exist in the campus community. Hillel Directors respect genuine differences of conviction but seek to create a sense of community that will eschew divisiveness and relate the Jewish student to the totality of Jewish group experience in time and space.”[15]

The third principle pertains to the quality of instruction and discourse set by the organization, which, simply put, must happen on an intellectually high level commensurate with the exigencies and rigor expected at an institution of postsecondary education: “Jewish values must not remain frozen on the Sunday school level. The development of a college approach to Jewish life and experience is the raison d’être of a mature program for Jewish college students . . . The Hillel program is designed to fill the vacuum that is created when the immature childhood notions concerning religion and Judaism which many students bring along when they enter college are shattered by the intellectual challenge of the university . . . [The Hillel program] requires the use of educational methods and the development of resources which are geared to the intellectual needs of the academic community.”[16]

The fourth principle addresses the synthesis of information and knowledge on the one hand and participation and involvement on the other. While the acquisition of the former is a must in any environment of learning and forms the basis of any communal discourse, without its deployment in moral deeds and actual activities in the real world it might easily disintegrate into abstract, even futile, sterility: “Hence it is a principle of Hillel work to relate the study of Jewish values and ideas to an effort to discover the moral and Jewish basis of actions which students may want, or should be encouraged, to take on basic issues of Jewish or general concern. Discussions of past or present Jewish needs are related to a study of Jewish relief agencies and stimulate the formation of a student campaign for their support. And a study of the values of the prophetic tradition can be applied fruitfully to contemporary issues of social significance and stimulate students to express their convictions in socially responsible action.”[17]

The fifth principle demands that students run their own Hillels by electing student leadership groups that help plan and administer the program: “The Director is the guide and counselor, but the students are given the opportunity to share responsibility in Hillel’s operation and program development.”[18] Students have to staff every committee, students must write all publications, and students decide all featured programs, from dances to lectures, from excursions to socials. Students choose whom to invite as guest lecturers and what books and records they want in their Hillel’s library. In other words, even though the director and the staff lent a much-needed professionalism to this overall endeavor, Hillel never departed from being a student-centered organization, which it remains firmly to this day.

Lastly, Hillel’s financial support broke down as follows: “Seventy percent . . . came from B’nai B’rith, 20 percent from community sources (mainly federations and welfare funds), and the rest from student registration fees and activities income.”[19]

The ensuing part of our work will present Hillel at Michigan as a detailed case study. In particular, we will use relevant materials from the two available BHL-UM Hillel boxes as our sources. But, more important, we will harness a close reading of the Hillel publication The Hillel News, later renamed The B’nai B’rith Hillel News and subsequently Hillel News, as our main source to shed light on this important Jewish organization on the University of Michigan campus. While the first copy of this newspaper available to us hails from October 6, 1927, and we thus lack all information pertaining to this Hillel chapter’s first few months of existence, and while certain temporal lacunae in the availability of this publication prevented our seamless following of Hillel’s minute history during parts of the crucial 1930s and 1940s, we are reasonably certain that the close examination of 154 copies of this content-rich paper published between 1927 and 1945 allows us to gain reasonably good insights as to what issues this organization confronted and how these emanated from—and reflected—Jewish life on the campus of this Midwestern university.