Dartmouth's Anti-Semitism

When he was president of Dartmouth, James O. Freedman visited the Hillel Jewish Students Association once a year for Friday night services. On his February 2, 1996 visit, he endeavored to explain why Jewish enrollment at Dartmouth is consistently the lowest among Ivy League schools. He mentioned Dartmouth's “reputation for anti-Semitism.” He emphasized that Jews are “urban people,” and less attracted to rural environments.

Freedman was known for grandstanding on Jewish issues. Despite his various rationalizations, however, there is a more obvious reason why Jewish students don't attend Dartmouth: they can't practice Judaism here.

For starters, they wouldn't be able to eat anything. Dartmouth remains the only Ivy League school without a kosher dining hall.

To be sure, there are a few sandwiches available in Food Court. But to keep kosher, students would have to commit to eating either a turkey or pastrami sandwich every day—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—for four years. Recently, Dartmouth Dining Services started to provide microwavable TV dinners for kosher students; the meals are, to say the least, unappealing. To date, there are no dairy products offered for sale at Dartmouth that Jewish students who keep kosher can eat.

Even if they could eat, though, Jewish students would not be able to pray. There are no religious services anywhere in Hanover during the week. Even on the Sabbath, there are no services for Conservative or Orthodox Jews.

President Freedman made speeches about recruiting Jewish students and faculty, he gave interviews, wrote articles—even an introduction to his book—about his own Jewish identity. But Freedman's Dartmouth never took Judaism itself seriously.

Even the Roth Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth, completed last year, acts primarily as a cultural, rather than religious, center for Jewish students. The Roth Center sanctuary doesn't even conform to basic requirements for such a structure, like that it should face east toward Jerusalem.

Certainly, there's no discrimination against Jewish students at Dartmouth. Dartmouth is, however, hostile to religious expression. There is little accommodation for religion at Dartmouth, and improvements in the situation aren't forthcoming.

The only efforts to make Jewish students more welcome at the College have been rather juvenile and oppressive attempts to inhibit the expression of Christianity.

In 1997, before the lighting of the Christmas tree on the Hanover Green, Olivia Chapman, Assistant College Director of Public Programs, informed the Glee Club that Dartmouth would not allow the Club to sing Christmas carols at the tree-lighting ceremony, as it traditionally had in the past. The College “does not want the bulk of the offering to be traditional `Christian' Christmas carols,” she wrote. Dartmouth had an “interest in eliminating or at least reducing the proportion of religious music in the program in favor of secular music of the season.” Without time to learn new songs, the Glee Club cancelled its program. In its place, a campus a cappella group sang “Frosty the Snowman.”

The following year, in response to student outcry, Dartmouth again permitted Christmas carols at the tree-lighting. A different controversy ensued, however, over the placement of the Christmas tree in the center of the Green. Then, after Campus Crusade for Christ, a student organization, purchased copies of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis as a Christmas gift for freshman students, Dean Scott Brown of the Tucker Foundation forbade distribution of the books via campus mail. “Our hope,” explained Brown, “was that we could minimize the offense that some of our non-Christian minorities might feel from such an action.”

The College clings to the infantile notion that the expression of Christian faith somehow threatens non-Christians. So, in lieu of actually accommodating minority religions, the College suppresses the majority religion.

Meanwhile, Jewish students find at Dartmouth an environment in which they cannot practice Judaism. So they don't come here.

“I have just been seething over the years that Dartmouth is seen as anti-Semitic,” Freedman told The Los Angeles Times in a February 11, 1998 interview.

He may have been seething, but he never did much to improve the situation.

— Steven Menashi
Executive Editor