ANTI-SEMITISM HAS BECOME NORMAL. I laughed at this survey of Post-War Jewish Professors in 2012 because of the high class company I was in, but it's not funny now. Listen to Trump this week. Listen to the Republican voices defending Hitler.

 

11 July 2012--The Tablet--with additions in square brackets.

           As late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they were still virtually absent from the English faculty.

          Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling [born 1905] studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin [born 1912] studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel [born 1907] wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker [born 1935] wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin [born 1915] recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.