Going Greek by Sanua Marianne R.;

Author:Sanua, Marianne R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2017-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

The New York Jewish Problem

When it came to social distinctions and the elimination of “undesirables,” few Jews suffered more both at the hands of Gentiles and of other Jews than the denizens of New York City and its environs. The reluctance of the best Jewish fraternities to pledge Jews from the New York area presented a significant problem, since they represented easily one-third to one-half of the American Jewish population. However, if one feared loud, pushy, vulgar, unrefined Jews, then with few exceptions, Jews from New York were considered the epitome of loudness, pushiness, vulgarity and coarseness.71 The big city had an unfortunate tendency to breed college students with a taste for radical politics and ignorance of or disrespect for the preferred local norms of behavior.

It was also widely acknowledged that New Yorkers did not make the best fraternity material. The Greek system as a whole had never flourished in greater New York City. Its natural environment had long been the small college towns of the South, Midwest, and West, where college students were completely dependent upon it. In states and cities with a relatively small Jewish population, as in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, Jewish fraternity houses could easily become a focus of Jewish communal activity and financial contributions. In New York City, however, with its millions of Jews and thousands of Jewish institutions, fraternities were a leisure-time club at best and a curiosity at worst. Too many other attractions competed for time and attention. In addition, as in any large urban area, in New York too many students could live at home and thus avoid the communal discipline and correction that was the ideal of fraternity life. Furthermore, the price of real estate in Manhattan made maintaining a house, clubrooms, or guestrooms for out-of-towners difficult for the wealthy fraternities and impossible for those less well off.72

Consequently, although all but two of the original twenty-five Jewish national fraternities and sororities had been founded in New York State, by the late 1920s the focus of Jewish fraternity life had shifted in other directions. One might call this phenomenon the “de-Newyorkization” of the Jewish fraternities, and it was illustrated well by statistics compiled for the 1932 directory of Zeta Beta Tau. By that year, less than one quarter of the fraternity’s 4,452 living members resided in New York City. A significant number of these had not been born or raised in New York, but had migrated there after college graduation for the employment opportunities it offered.73

An additional challenge to maintaining strong fraternity organizations in New York City was also what might be called the “Alpha Problem” (“Alpha” being the first, or founding, chapter of a fraternity). In the case of the Jewish groups, this was most likely to be City College, Columbia, New York University, Barnard, or Hunter. At the turn of the twentieth century, the City College of New York still maintained an aristocratic tone, and Greek and Latin were an important part of the curriculum. Within a decade, however, the tuition-free school was becoming the proverbial “Harvard of the poor.

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