Letters to the Editor: What Stanford’s anti-Jewish bias looked like on campus in the 1950s
For more than a month, many of us have been waiting to see how much damage the new anti-anti-Semitism (AA) movement is capable of inflicting on the Jewish community.
Somehow, we need to make up our minds about what that damage might look like.
Let’s look back at how this has all happened over the past 50 years.
In 1954, Stanford University issued a report on Jews at Stanford. The report was written and published under the auspices of the Committee on the Status of Affairs of the Jews in Stanford.
The report was largely written by the Stanford community itself.
The committee was instructed to explore the “extent, nature, causes, and character (of anti-Semitism) in the various communities and organizations in our community,” including the “organization of the university” (p.10).
The committee wrote: “Many of the problems in our society can be traced to anti-Semitism. But we realize that at this point in his development, the anti-Semitism which we consider to be the most serious in this country is the same kind whose origin and roots are in our own Jewish community.”
The committee concluded: “It is therefore our moral duty to combat this evil today, so that it may never again spread throughout our community.”
What is this “evil”? It’s very simple.
Anti-Semitism has killed millions of Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere.
Many are dead, but hundreds have been wounded in the line of duty, and many were maimed by the Nazis, including my grandfather, Joseph Leiber. In the Soviet Union, as in the United States, Jews were also murdered and tortured.
But, to what degree is the problem anti-Semitism and how
