Jewish Problems: Eastern and Western Jewish Identities In Conflict At the University of Wisconsin, 1919-1941

Jews in the South and West, who often suffer less discrimination in their communities, often resent the East Side Jew. . ."New York Jew" on the outside is no term of flattery. ¹

In September, 1929, Mildred Gordon, a Chicagoan beginning her junior year at the University of Wisconsin, appeared at the Langdon private residence hall at the start of the fall semester, only to be told that the lease she had signed had been cancelled. The building manager apologized, offering to pay Gordon's hotel bill while she searched for a new place to live, but the apartment management company admitted that they only took Jewish renters when not enough Gentiles applied; because of last-minute Gentile applications, Gordon was bumped. It is not clear where Gordon lived during the fall semester, but in January, Gordon sued the Langdon and the case made the national Jewish media. ²

Incidents like the above were fairly routine in the era of legal residential restriction, especially before colleges housed most of their students in dormitories. The Hillel chapter at the UW even maintained a list of local properties that were not "restricted," i.e. that would allow Jews to rent apartments. But the Mildred Gordon case made the national Jewish press because of Wisconsin's reputation as a school that stood above the widespread numerus clausus quotas that had taken root at Eastern colleges, universities, and professional schools. Although families on the East Coast saw Wisconsin as a beacon of tolerance and progressivism, the university community in fact exhibited mixed reactions to the Jewish migration to its campus in the years between the World Wars. As was the case in most of the United States, antisemitism was actually commonplace at Wisconsin.

What makes Wisconsin a fascinating case study for American antisemitism is not its Jewish community's response to it, but the regionally-based concepts of Jewishness that split the community in the face of prejudice. As hundreds of Jewish students from New York and other cities of the East Coast came to Madison to pursue higher education, their Midwestern Jewish cohorts welcomed them with a mixture of fellowship and fear. Under the pressure of antisemitism from outside the community, friendly jokes and stereotypes about manners, accents, and attitude acquired a sharper edge that has characterized regional differences among American Jews on college campuses to the present day.

Jewish Madison in the 1930s

Jewish students who came to the University of Wisconsin from eastern cities entered a self-contained Jewish community, largely separated from Madison's small community of first-and second-generation Jewish settlers. Only a few of Madison's Jews had any affiliation with the University; those who did generally had little to do with the three Orthodox congregations, B'nai B'rith lodge, or Workmen's Circle chapter that constituted organized Jewish life in that city. Even though the Greenbush neighborhood where most Jews lived was less than ten small blocks from the heart of the University, the tracks of the Illinois Central and Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroads served as a clear boundary between these two worlds. In the words of historian Tim Messer-Kruse, a "culture of intolerance" existed in Madison during this time; Ku Klux Klan chapters at the university and in the city at large appeared in the early 1920s, with their main target the Italian grocers and contraband liquor dealers who lived in the same Greenbush neighborhood as most Madison Jews. ³

Yet prospective students saw the University of Wisconsin, especially compared to its Eastern counterparts, as a beacon of tolerance and progress. Jewish students saw the university's lack of quotas as compensation for venturing a thousand miles westward to attend college. Jewish academics like Horace Kallen, Lionel Trilling, and Ludwig Lewisohn wrote fondly of their visiting professorships at Wisconsin. ⁴ The small...