Antisemitism in Admissions in Higher Education

A virtual event presentation by Professor Ari Kelman

Event Co-Hosted by Hebrew Education Alliance

About the Event:

The place of American Jews in higher education is a complicated story.  It is at once a story that is central to American Jewish class mobility, yet it is also undercut by evidence of antisemitism at some of the United States’ most revered institutions.  The story of antisemitic exclusion at many of the Ivy League schools in the early decades of the 20th century has been well-documented.  What is less known is the story of other schools which also engaged in exclusionary practices in the decades following World War II.  In this presentation, Professor Kelman will examine one such instance of systematic exclusion in admissions.  It is a story of administration, admissions, and antisemitism.

About the Speaker:

Professor Kelman’s research focuses on the forms and practices of religious knowledge transmission. He holds a specific research interest in American Jewry and writes broadly about the American Jewish experience.  Recently, his focus has landed on questions of how American Jews come to understand themselves as a distinct community, and how social science methods reveal and conceal dimensions of American Jewish life including, most significantly, the racial and ethnic identities of American Jews.

He is the author of Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU 2018) and Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (California, 2009). He is also the co-editor (with Jon Levisohn) of Beyond Jewish Identity (2019: Academic Studies Press), the editor of Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Comic Reader (NYU, 2010), co-author of Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary (Alban Institute, 2011). Together with research partners at Stanford and elsewhere, he maintains an active research agenda and publishes regularly in venues both scholarly and popular.  He serves as the chairperson of the Network for Research in Jewish Education.  He is also an editor of Jewish Social Studies and serves on the executive board of the Association for Jewish Studies.