A tale of two mothers: Shame in my New Haven
I was born in the 1940s Ivy League city of New Haven, where Yale University administrators had been quietly thinking “Jews will not replace us” for decades, the same ugly words which the Charlottesville white supremacists would later loudly chant in 2017.
But the “us” were the white Protestant elites of New England’s unspoken country club aristocracy which reigned during my childhood of the 1940s and 1950s, not the white supremacists in blue jeans who would march in Charlottesville:
“Harvard wasn’t alone in this [system of limiting Jews] ... Its Ivy brethren also sought to limit the presence of Jewish students on campus.
“Dartmouth College attacked the problem head-on by establishing Jewish quotas in the early 1930s. Columbia sought to repel what its leaders called the ‘ Jewish invasion,’ when its Jewish population had grown to 40 percent of its student body by the early 1920s. Yale instituted an explicit quota of 10 percent to stem the ‘infiltration.’ And Princeton cut its Jewish enrollment in half during the mid-1920s,” according to an 2021 article in bestcolleges.com
In the 1960s, just when Yale was beginning to phase out its version of that Ivy League Jewish quota system, antiSemitism was about to stab a knife through my teenage heart as a 16-year-old white boy who had been raised in the shadow of Yale.
I grew up attending Mt. Carmel Congregational Church, which prided itself on receiving its charter from the King of England in 1757. Two hundred years later in 1961, as a sophomore at Hamden High School, this Protestant white kid would invite Liz Cohen to attend a formal dance.
She turned me down We were in the drama club production together at Hamden High, Liz playing the part of Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and I playing the part of Dr. Rank.
Liz and I were also neighbors. She lived three houses away from me on Still Hill Road in Mt. Carmel with her widowed mother, who was head of Hamden school systems’ psychological testing program.
Her father had died a few years before at age 49. He was a psychiatrist at Yale Medical School and author of a famous book used in murder trials entitled “Murder, Madness and the Law.”
Liz turned my dance invitation down over the phone and it was a big blow to the ego of a 16-year-old boy. Here is what she said:
“The dance is held at the country club and they are anti-Semitic. My mother won’t allow me to go.” Bummed out, I hung up the phone and told my mother I had been turned down because the country club was anti-Semitic.
“What is ‘anti-Semitic?’” I asked.
My mother explained as best she could, “It means they don’t allow Jewish people to be members.”
“Why?”
“Because they are prejudiced against Jewish people.”
“Why?” I asked again even though I didn’t know what the word “prejudiced” meant.
“Because they have a different religion,” my mother replied.
I could tell from my mother’s voice that whatever “prejudiced” did mean, she didn’t want me to have it or “catch it” like poison ivy. Prejudice was bad. That was her vibe and I got it.
This was too complicated for a 16-year-old. “Who cares what religion people have” was percolating in my skull but I didn’t know how to express that thought in words. The whole thing was just the kind of circular reasoning adults always used.
So I dropped it. But I never forgot it. That was 1961, over 62 years ago.
I still don’t understand in 2023 what anti-Semitism is, even though I spent four years as a student at Yale Divinity School, graduating in 1980.
What you believe is a personal matter, isn’t it? (at least in America which guarantees freedom of thought and religion in its Constitution).
“That’s personal” was enough to shut down an intrusive inquiry when I was growing up. It was like a “foul” in basketball, only you didn’t get a penalty shot. You just started the conversation over.
Today in 2023, it seems people want their life on display. I am not sure anyone thinks they are entitled to a personal life with private thoughts and ideas off limits to the public. People seem eager to have a microphone shoved in their face, or a selfie taken for public consumption. And anti-Semitism? Sixty-two years have passed since Liz turned me down over anti-Semitism and I still don’t know why anyone wanted to limit Jewish faces. It seems irrational — and it is. Fear is irrational.
But what were they afraid of ? Religion? Culture? Heredity? Liz Cohen taught me to ask those questions for the last six decades.
Or actually it was the two mothers who taught me: The mother who said you can’t go. And the mother who tried to explain to me why.
It is a tale of two mothers — a tale of shame in my birthplace.
Sixty-two years have passed since Liz turned me down over anti-Semitism and I still don’t know why anyone wanted to limit Jewish faces. It seems irrational — and it is.