When the Ivy League had no problem with Nazis

For many Americans, it has come as a shock to see numerous individuals at leading universities proclaim their hatred of Israel and echo Hamas's venomous messages.

There have been scenes of antisemitic mobs attacking Jewish students. Of demonstrators chanting "Hamas, we love you!" Some campus organizations couldn't wait to celebrate the horrific Oct. 7 massacre. At Harvard alone, more than 30 student groups greeted news of the pogrom with a declaration holding Israel "entirely responsible" for the rape and grisly killings of its civilians. It took a humiliating interrogation at a congressional hearing before some university presidents could finally bring themselves to condemn the upwelling of Jew-hatred within their institutions.

College life wasn't like this for those who matriculated in the 1970s and 1980s. Jewish students then were as welcome on campus as any others, and episodes of overt bigotry against them were virtually unheard of. Not until the beginning of this century did the far left's intellectual and political assault on Israel and Zionism become so vicious.

In a 2002 essay, professor Laurie Zoloth at San Francisco State University described how her university was becoming "a venue for hate speech and antisemitism." Lawrence Summers, Harvard's then-president, raised an alarm about the "profoundly anti-Israel views [that] are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities." In 2004, a group of Jewish students at Columbia made a film documenting the intimidation and disdain they were encountering in the school's Middle East Studies department.

Yet antisemitism in academia isn't new. Its roots run deep at some of the nation's most prestigious schools. Many people know that a century ago administrators at Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale imposed rigorous quotas to slash the number of Jewish students they admitted.

Less well known, however, is the reaction in elite academic circles to the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933. Far from being horrified by the evils of the Nazi dictatorship, especially its ferocious persecution of Germany's Jews, many American universities regarded Hitler's regime with tolerance or even admiration.

That history was uncovered by University of Oklahoma historian Stephen H. Norwood in a groundbreaking 2009 work, "The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower." An acclaimed work of scholarship, it documented in startling detail the extent to which professors, administrators, and students at some of the nation's best-known colleges not only refused to raise an outcry about the atrocities underway in Nazi Germany but in many cases rebuked or silenced those who did.

The pattern was set by James Bryant Conant, who became Harvard's president in 1933. For five years, Norwood wrote, Conant refused to speak out against Nazism when his condemnation would have carried weight. He welcomed Ernst Hanfstaengl, a high Nazi official and close Hitler confidant who was a Harvard alumnus, to take part in the university's commencement festivities in June 1934. In addition, Conant

permitted Nazi Germany's consul general in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika emblem in the university chapel. Conant sent a delegate from Harvard to the University of Heidelberg's 550th anniversary pageant in June 1936. … In providing a friendly welcome to Nazi leader Hanfstaengl, President Conant and others prominently affiliated with Harvard communicated to the Hitler government that boycotts intended to destroy Jewish businesses, the dismissal of Jews from the professions, and savage beatings of Jews were not their concern. …

President Conant remained publicly indifferent to the persecution of Jews in Europe and failed to speak out against it until after Kristallnacht, in November 1938.

Harvard's president wasn't alone in his benign regard for the Third Reich.

Joseph Gray, the chancellor of American University in Washington, D.C., traveled to Nazi Germany in 1936 and returned filled with praise. "Gray declared that Hitler had restored hope to a troubled nation," Norwood wrote. " ‘Everybody is working in Germany,' he gushed, liberal education was available, and the cities were ‘amazingly clean' without beggars."

In New York, Columbia University's renowned president, Nicholas Murray Butler, wasn't content merely to remain silent about the horrors taking place under Hitler. "On several occasions," Norwood found, "Butler lashed out viciously against Columbia students who publicly protested Nazi crimes." He waved away calls by Jewish and human rights organizations to boycott Nazi shipping. "Between 1934 and 1937, President Butler regularly booked passage for trans-Atlantic voyages on North German Lloyd liners that flew the swastika flag, and he encouraged Columbia to engage in academic exchanges with Nazi Germany." Butler did not hesitate to patronize the German ocean liners even after they dismissed all their Jewish employees.

At the elite women's colleges known as the "Seven Sisters" — Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard — there was a similarly "sanguine view of Nazi Germany," Norwood wrote. In 1937, Wellesley's president Mildred McAfee recruited a pro-Nazi professor, Lilli Burger, to join the college's German Department. A "staunch supporter of Hitler," Burger used her time on campus to extol Hitler's "great work" and assure the student newspaper that reports of anti-Jewish persecution were greatly exaggerated.

The head of Barnard also had words of praise for what was underway in Germany. Virginia Gildersleeve returned from a trip to Europe urging Americans to recognize the validity of Hitler's quest for new territories and applauding the Nazi regime for allowing "a certain proportion of Jews" to study in universities. "It did not seem to bother her that the Jewish student quota was a minuscule 1 percent," observed Norwood, perhaps because she too had "implemented procedures designed to significantly reduce Jewish admissions to Barnard."

At Smith College, organizers were eager to invite a speaker who could present, as the student paper put it, "the pro-Nazi side of the German picture neglected by the American press." That speaker, Dr. Hans Orth, told his audience that Jews had pushed Aryans out of jobs and that Germans rightly objected to being ruled by "a foreign race."

Apparently some of those who attended the event found Orth's claims unconvincing. Wrote Norwood:

The student newspaper at Smith College complained that the audience during the question period … had displayed "a singular lack of open-mindedness." The editors were annoyed that it had refused "to listen courteously to the young German's sincere vindication of the Hitler regime."

There are differences between the 1930s and the 2020s, of course. No one in academe sings the praises of Adolf Hitler anymore. Instead protesters at Columbia tell identifiably Jewish students to "go back to Poland," demonstrators at Northeastern and MIT call for a global "intifada," a Cornell professor proclaims himself "exhilarated" by the Oct. 7 butchery, a Hezbollah flag is displayed at Princeton, and a Jewish student at Yale is hit in the eye with a flagpole bearing a Palestinian flag. Despite everything that is different from 90 years ago, it is once again the case that at exalted American colleges, there is open and exuberant support for the world's most murderous Jew-haters. Some things don't change.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."