Columbia University, the 1920s and 2020s: Not a great place for Jews

For the second time in Columbia University’s storied 275-year history, the presence of Jews on the university campus has disrupted the university’s core mission of providing a high-quality environment for higher education.

The word that cannot be escaped in describing what happened both times: antisemitism.

Let’s start with 1928, when Columbia decided, in effect, to segregate Jewish students at an isolated so-called college founded by Columbia, but located 11 miles and 30 minutes south of the main campus. It did so for the explicit purpose of reducing the concentration of Jewish students on the main campus in a belief that the Jewish students were “lesser people.”

After being virtually forgotten for almost a century, the story of this era at Columbia was unearthed in 2016 in a remarkable piece of journalistic research by Leeza Hirt of The Current, a student-run journal of politics, culture, and Jewish affairs, at Columbia.

Like many facets of Judaism in the United States, the story has its roots in Russia, one of the world’s largest centers of Jewish residency and ongoing antisemitism for hundreds of years into the late 19^th century. When the Jews finally had had enough, and when crossing the Atlantic Ocean for a new life in a new, distant country of opportunity finally became a realistic choice, the Jews left.

Most of them arrived in New York City – and settled there. Between 1881, when the immigration wave from Russia began, and 1917, when World War I abruptly interrupted it, 2 million Jews immigrated to America, and half of them settled where they landed, in New York City.

Overall, the Jewish population of New York City thus grew from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.5 million in 1920. In percentages, the Jewish population of New York City soared from 4 percent in 1880 to more than 25 percent in 1920.

Columbia’s roots are in Christianity

Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College. Situated on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan, the property was owned by the Episcopal Diocese of New York. There were only nine other colleges/universities in the entire country, including four of what would become known as the Ivy League colleges. King’s College, named for the British monarchy, became Columbia College in 1784 after the Revolutionary War severed the American colonies’ ties to Great Britain.

During these early years, a college education was available only to the children of wealthy families. That began to change after the Civil War, but it was not until roughly World War I that large numbers of children of middle-class families began to pursue college educations.

Because Columbia was positioned in the midst of what would rapidly become the most Jewish city in America, it soon became the most Jewish college in the Ivy League. In the early 1900s, the lyrics of a popular Ivy League college song went like this:

“Oh, Harvard’s run by millionaires,

And Yale is run by booze,

Cornell is run by farmers’ sons,

Columbia’s run by Jews.” *

* There is a second verse to this song. It is so disgustingly antisemitic and hateful that I have chosen not to include it here.

Based on research by Leeza Hirt, Columbia had begun worrying about Jewish enrollment becoming a problem for the university as early as 1909. College Dean, Frederick Keppel, wrote an internal note to the College President, Nicholas Butler, that year stating as follows:

“The particular trouble at this time is that a number of ill-prepared and uncultured Jews are trying to obtain a cheap College degree by transferring, usually in February, from the City College, which they entered after only a three-year high school course.”

Columbia University, 1909, Low Library, center, named for former president Seth Low, more about him below, Public domain.

At about the same time, while Columbia’s acceptance rate for incoming freshmen was running at about 50 percent, its acceptance rate among Jewish applicants was in the range of 5 percent.

Hirt’s research also turned up another statement from the college, in 1914: “Most of these [Jewish students] are excellent and desirable students, but the danger of their prepondering* over the students of the older American stocks is not an imaginary one. This has already happened at NYU and CCNY”.

* Sic; the correct word would be preponderating as in exceeding their numbers in power and importance.

Still, by 1917, Columbia’s enrollment was 25 percent Jewish. Not surprising, given that New York’s high schools were more than 30 percent Jewish.

The university struggled to find various ways to limit Jewish enrollment, but nothing worked until 1928. The name attached to the ultimate solution was Seth Low.

Seth Low grew up in a wealthy New York family, enriched by a tea and silk import business. He graduated from Columbia as valedictorian in 1870 and became its president in 1890. He served until 1901 when he was elected mayor of New York. He died in 1916 at age 66.

It is not known who within the Columbia organization came up with the idea of creating a separate campus and college for Jews, but such a college opened its doors in rented space in the Brooklyn Law School building in the fall of 1928. Columbia, by this time with 40 percent of its students being Jewish, began telling Jewish applicants that they did not meet Columbia’s standards for entrance and should apply instead at the new Seth Low Junior College, owned and operated by Columbia.

Seth Low opened that fall with 385 students, mostly Jewish, but with a strong Italian minority. Columbia’s enrollment that fall was 1,942. Tuition was the same at both places, $380 a year, the equivalent of about $7,000 today. But Seth Low was a two-year college that did not offer a degree, had no campus environment or residential facilities for students, and had a far less accomplished faculty.

Students who completed two years at Seth Low could enroll at Columbia as “university undergraduates,” not as “Columbia students.” They would be candidates for bachelor of science degrees, not the more prestigious bachelor of arts degrees.

One of the Jewish Columbia applicants who was pushed over to Seth Low was Isaac Asimov, the novelist, biochemist, and science fiction author who won numerous national and international awards for his books and short stories. Asimov said years later that he would remember the day he was rejected by Columbia for the rest of his life. After service in World War II, however, he did, finally, enroll at Columbia, where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1948.

The Depression running through the 1930s created difficult times for colleges everywhere. At Seth Low, the economic problems were exacerbated by the opening of Brooklyn College, a public institution of higher education, in 1930. Seth Low Junior College closed in 1937.

A century after Seth Low Junior College

Today, Columbia’s relationship with Jews has produced another set of unfortunate circumstances for the university, and once again the problem is rooted in antisemitism.

Columbia University, 2014, Wikimedia Commons.

The current trouble started with the university’s failure to act swiftly to protect Jewish students and faculty from ongoing threats of violence by pro-Palestinian forces in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the resulting Hamas-Israeli war.

By early 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of them completely unaffiliated with Columbia in any way, were harassing Jewish students and calling for the destruction of Israel in a chant that called for Palestinian control in the Mideast “from the river to the sea.”

Ultimately, President Trump stepped in to force the university to act in accordance with his own wishes. He ordered the withdrawal of $400 million in federal aid because of the university’s tolerance of “antisemitic violence and harassment.” However, he also took aim at some educational programs at Columbia that he simply did not like, in particular, the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.

So now, in negotiations with the federal government to get Columbia’s critical federal funding for research restored, the university not only will have to deal with the security of Jewish students and faculty but may have to let the federal government make decisions about what courses it can and cannot offer. It is a degrading and inappropriate situation for any American university, let alone for a prestigious Ivy League university.

Columbia also faces the challenge of not tipping the scale for security of Jewish students and faculty so far that it restricts freedom of speech for pro-Palestinian protesters.

Specifically, the university has agreed to:

• Create a new, 36-member internal security police force that will have greater powers than the existing campus police, including the powers to remove people from campus and to make arrests.

• Ban face masks on campus for the purpose of concealing one’s identity during disruptions. Exceptions will be allowed only for religious or health reasons.

• Adopt a formal definition of antisemitism. Sample language that could be considered might be a phrase such as “targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them.”

Almost certainly a more controversial concession being offered by the university is to remove the faculty of the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department from control of the department. The university said it would name a senior vice provost from outside the department to “review the educational programs to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.” This person would have decision-making power in hiring non-tenured staff and making curriculum changes.

Thus far, the Trump administration has said only that Columbia is on the right track with its recent proposals.

The irony in all of this antisemitic history is that during the decades that separated these two instances at Columbia, the university had worked hard to build an environment that was supportive of Jews.

Change came slowly at first. Jewish students were not given excused absences from class for the three Jewish high holidays until 1950. These are the most religious days of the year for Jews, often celebrated by attending religious services that last for much of the day.

Still, the seeds of antisemitism planted by the Palestinian movement in America over the past several decades resulted in a quick pro-Palestinian/antisemitic response after Israel and Hamas went to war.

Columbia, unfortunately, with a large minority Jewish student population while being situated in a city that also had a large pro-Palestinian population, had a perfect location and an ideal environment for these protests.

Most recently, the protests involving Columbia have included the disruption of a History of Modern Israel class as well as incidents of vandalizing university property.

The ghost of Seth Low Junior College casts a long shadow.

Sources for this newsletter include but are not limited to: Nearly a Century Ago, Coluhmbia’s Jewish Applicants Were Sent to Brooklyn, Claudia Gohn, Columbia Daily Spectator, April 15, 2019; Columbia for Jews? The Untold Story of Seth Low Junior College, Leeza Hirt, Fall 2016, columbia.current.org; Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped, Troy Clossen, March 21, 2025, nytimes.com; Colleges Are Getting in Line, Molly Olmstead, March 24, 2025, slate.com; Seth Low, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, revised and updated, Adam Augustyn, britannica.com; Isaac Asimov, Erik Gregerson, britannica.com; Columbia University agrees to Trump demands in effort to restore federal funding, Matt Lavietes, March 21, 2025, nbcnews.com;

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