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Sylvia Frank was captain of the women’s basketball team at the University in the early 1900s. She is seated at the far left in a picture with her teammates in the 1906 Gopher annual. Images courtesy of University Archives

In the early years of the 20th century, the University of Minnesota maintained a reputation for civility and open-mindedness within the Jewish community that would continue through World War I and into the 1920s. In contrast to the growing anti-Semitism that emerged later, particularly in Minneapolis, there was, in the words of one faculty member, a “striking difference between the attitude of the University of Minnesota and the city in which it was located. The lack of prejudice, the fairmindedness, the really democratic spirit of the university are so outstanding as to merit special recognition.”

That isn’t to say that Jews were always welcomed at the University with warmth and consideration; nor is it to say that prejudice and exclusion did not exist. But in the years surrounding 1900, the number of Jewish students at the University was small enough to make them a nonthreatening group on campus.

As their numbers grew in the 1920s, this dynamic would change and the U would be accused of placing subtle restrictions on the Jewish population of the campus, most often in the form of quotas. At the same time, Jewish students formed a stronger, more confident and assertive presence at the U.

In the earliest years of the University, Jews and Jewish matters were often viewed as foreign concerns: issues that had more to do with Europe and Russia than Minnesota or its state university. An 1891 essay titled “Jews in Russia,” published in the campus journal the Ariel, captures a sense of how gentile students at the U thought about Jewish issues. “I say Russia has no right to persecute the Jews!” thunders Effie Ames Rochford. But after this bold statement of liberal support, she then gives credence to grotesque Jewish stereotypes: “It is claimed the Jews are rapacious and mean; they make cheap goods, undersell the Russian peasant and by trickery and fraud quickly become rich. . . . These accusations may all be true but Russia herself is to blame for this condition.”

A more open-minded attitude existed as well. “Justice for the Jew,” written by Estelle Sinsheimer in the Ariel in 1892, was eloquent in describing Judaism to the many Christians who often misinterpreted it: “There is an entire ignorance or misunderstanding of the Jewish religion,” wrote Sinsheimer, “it is supposed to be tribal while it is in truth the most liberal of all faiths; it is supposed to be material while its very foundation is a belief so spiritual that its followers are in the minority; it is supposed to be formal while in its essence it is the most simple of faiths.”

The history of Jewish students at the University of Minnesota stretches back at least into the 1880s. Just who the first Jewish graduate of the U of M might have been, no one can say with certainty. What is known is that the number of Jewish students at the U grew dramatically after the turn of the 20th century, from around 10 or 12, to nearly 500 by the late 1920s.

The growth coincided with a general increase of the Jewish population in the state of Minnesota and the nation as a whole. While Jews were present, particularly in the Twin Cities, from the earliest days of the territory, the greatest boost in population came between the 1880s and

Fanny Fligelman, pictured in the 1906 Gopher annual, would one day become president of the National Council of Jewish Women.

1920. During those years, Jews from Russia and nations within its pale became subject to persecution and immigrated in dense waves to the United States.

The Jewish population in the Twin Cities increased from hundreds, early in that span, to nearly 10,000 at the turn of the 20th century. Similarly, the numbers of Jewish students at the University began to rise. A 1907 history of the Jewish communities of St. Paul and Minneapolis took pride in noting the increasing numbers of Jews on campus and highlighted standout Jewish students from the area. It also profiled two Jewish faculty members, both of whom were themselves graduates of the U.

Sylvia Frank, a Minneapolis Central High grad, was a three-year starting guard and captain of the University of Minnesota women’s basketball team. Jacob Wilk was an outstanding drama student, and Robert Weiskoff was a gifted student of oratory. Nathan Cohen was in engineering and a member of the engineering fraternity, Sigma Xi. He would later become a patent lawyer.

Sigmund Harris was without doubt the most well-known Jewish figure on campus. A halfback for the powerful football teams of Dr. Henry Williams in 1902, ’03, and ’04, Harris was a plucky 145-pound blocking back who received some all–Western Conference attention as a junior and a senior. He also played a critical role in the famed Little Brown Jug game between Minnesota and Michigan in 1903. Harris keyed on Michigan’s all-American running back Willie Heston, making a number of crucial tackles through the course of the game, which ended in a 6–6 tie.

“Sigy” Harris would subsequently become a fixture around the Gopher football program deep into the 20th century. He even served as a substitute head coach for a game in 1922 when Coach Williams suddenly took ill. Harris also was called upon by Coach Bernie Bierman to give locker room pep talks to the Golden Gophers before Michigan games during the 1930s, reminding the boys of the importance of the Little Brown Jug.

Fanny Fligelman arrived in Minneapolis from Romania at 3 months old in 1884. She graduated from South High and became a stellar student at the University, earning a Phi Beta Kappa key along with a second-place prize in the Pillsbury contest for an essay on anti-Semitism in Russia, titled “Russian Bureaucracy and the Jews.” She became Fanny Fligelman Brin after her marriage to local businessman Arthur Brin and, as Fanny Brin, she would become one of the most powerful and well-known Jewish women in the country.

In the early 1920s, Brin joined the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and, in short order, was elected president of its Minneapolis section. She would serve as national president from 1932 to 1938. After the horrors of World War I, Brin had developed an interest in promoting world peace. Her position at the NCJW offered a platform for that cause and, through it, she supported national and international efforts at making a permanent peace in the world, including a League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was a mutual agreement between the United States and France to work

Sigmund Harris, an outstanding football halfback, was pictured in the 1905 Gopher annual.

toward outlawing war.

During the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, this once-impoverished immigrant from Romania rubbed elbows and swapped ideas with the doyennes of American feminism, including Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt.

As for the faculty members listed in that 1907 history:

Lillian Cohen, a graduate of Central High in Minneapolis, was another brilliant student at the U, who, like Fligelman Brin, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in chemistry in 1900. She took a master’s degree (’01), and then her Ph.D. (’13) at the University, with studies at Bryn Mawr and in Zurich, Switzerland, in between. Cohen wound up as an associate professor at the U, teaching in the chemistry department for more than 40 years.

Faculty member Robert Kolliner was certainly one of the earliest Jewish graduates of the University of Minnesota. A native of Baraboo, Wisconsin, he took a degree from the U’s department of law in 1890 and joined the College of Law faculty in 1896. He served there for many years, as well as maintaining a Minneapolis law practice, Hall & Kolliner.

The law school at the U of M was quick to open its doors to Jewish students (as it did to African American students in the same era). A St. Paul attorney named Hiram Frankel graduated from the U law school in 1905, after receiving his bachelor’s degree from the U a couple of years earlier.

Frankel also happened to be the author of the St. Paul section of the 1907 history of Twin Cities Jews. In it, he lists a number of Jewish lawyers practicing in St. Paul with a U of M law degree, including his brother, Louis Frankel, who was the first Jew to serve as city attorney in St. Paul, Benjamin Calmenson, and Gustavous Loevinger.

Hiram Frankel was very active in St. Paul civic and cultural affairs in the first 25 years of the century, and was also one of the outstanding leaders in the early history of the University’s General Alumni Association (GAA). Frankel served as the president of the Law School Alumni Association and as a member of the board of directors for the GAA.

Other Jewish members of the student body in this era include Leah Fligelman (Fanny’s sister), Harry Davis of Duluth, and Moses Barron. Barron would eventually get his medical degree from the University and serve for many years on the medical school faculty at the U. He also wound up marrying Leah Fligelman.

While these pioneering Jewish students undoubtedly faced moments of anti-Semitic exclusion and prejudice, the particulars of those incidents remain unrecorded in University archives. No doubt Jewish students were often made to feel out of place and alien. Even a popular campus figure like Sigy Harris was singled out in the caption next to his football photo in the 1905 Gopher annual. “Harris has overcome his religious scruples enough to mix up with the insidious pigskin,” read the copy. (The same writer called the lone African American member of the team, star end Bobby Marshall, a “lank-limbed child of sunny Ethiopia.”)

As the numbers of Jewish students and faculty increased on campus,

Robert Kolliner, pictured on the cover of a 1910 Minnesota Alumni Weekly, was one of the first Jewish graduates of the University. He also served on the faculty, joining the law school in 1896.

they began to form associations. Leah and Fannie Fligelman, Harry Davis, Moses Barron, and Jacob Wilk were the founding members of the 1904 Jewish Literary Society, which was the first Jewish cultural organization on campus. The Literary Society was the forerunner to the Menorah Society, established seven years later, and instantly became the largest and most central Jewish organization on campus, a post it would hold until the advent of Hillel in the 1940s.

Menorah societies were created with the idea of advancing Jewish culture and ideals among college students at universities across the country, and groups were formed at the City College of New York, Brown University, Hunter College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Manitoba, and Northwestern University, as well as the University of Minnesota.

At Minnesota, the Menorah Society held meetings twice a month, at which papers were read and discussions were held on topics of the day. There were also three big social events held annually: a fall welcome to the campus, a winter dance, and a picnic each spring. A photograph of the 1912 members of the Menorah Society marks the first image of a Jewish organization ever found in a Gopher annual.

In 1914, about half of the Jewish students on campus were members of the Society—50 out of about 100. “The attitude toward the Minnesota Menorah Society of the governing officers of the University and of the non-Jewish members of the faculty is strongly encouraging,” read a Society report of the day. Regarding the rest of the university, it added:  “The non-Jewish men are either ignorant of the existence of the Society or they are entirely indifferent.”

The U of M Menorah Society had grown to such strength by 1916 that it was chosen to host a national convention of Menorah societies in Minneapolis. Nor was it any longer the sole Jewish organization on campus: two Jewish fraternities, Sigma Alpha Mu and Phi Epsilon Pi, were now affiliated at the U; and a group for women called the Scroll & Key was also organized. Jewish graduates of the University had similarly formed their own club called the Gymal Doled (named after two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in Greek style), which would one day become the Standard Club, a long-running Jewish social and service club in Minneapolis.

By the mid- to late 1920s, Jewish students were found in virtually every campus activity. The Menorah Society noted the presence of Jews in extracurricular forensic and dramatic clubs; on athletic teams, including men’s football, cross-country, track, boxing, and tennis; and in women’s field hockey, basketball, volleyball, and golf. Two Jewish sororities, Beta Iota Alpha and Alpha Sigma, were established in the mid-1920s. There were Jewish students on the staff of the Minnesota Daily, Ski-U-Mah, and the Minnesota Law Review; as well as in the University band. While Jews were rarely invited to join gentile-dominated Greek fraternities and sororities, they were members of a number of professional organizations, including law, journalism, and engineering fraternities.

But even as Jewish students became a stronger and more obvious presence on campus, there were signs of growing anti-Semitism, both at the U and, of course, in the wider world. Dangerous reactionary forces were gathering in Europe. They found expression in the United

A photograph of the Menorah Society in 1913 was the first time an image of a Jewish organization appeared in a Gopher annual.

States in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and nativist sentiment that led, among other things, to the closing of immigration to East Europeans Jews.

At the University of Minnesota, anti-Semitism came in subtler forms. In the 1959 book The Jews in Minnesota: The First 75 Years, by Gunther Plaut, Dr. Moses Barron would later recall that there was little discrimination at the U of M through World War I.However, he reported, “a peculiar numerus clausus developed at the Medical School. Many Jewish boys would apply but only a portion would be admitted. We discussed this with the administration; and some of them admitted quite frankly to the practice and gave a number of rationalizations. . . . But up to about 1921 the situation was very good.” The U was also accused of maintaining similar quota systems in regard to its housing policies in the 1920s and in its hiring practices at the Mayo Foundation.

Still, in contrast to the growing anti-Semitism faced by Jews outside the academy, the University remained a relatively safe harbor for Jewish community and expression. Jewish students at the U had reached a level of proud and somewhat defiant comfort as members of the University. Irene Levine expressed the feeling in a poem, “From Jew to Gentile,” published in the 1927 Menorah Society annual:

I used to fear you, how I feared you then!

You with your rose-leaf skin and azure eye—

I loved the flaxen lightness of your hair,

And dropped my darker lids when you went by.

I copied every gesture, every gown,

I trembled in the shadow of your frown,

My spirit groveled in the dust you trod—

Although I walked erect, and cold, and proud,

And passed it by—your condescending nod.

But a change comes over Levine:

Now it is different. You are you to me,

And I am I, and we are nothing more . . .

Our difference seems to be

Not in the melody but in the tone . . .

As the 1920s shifted into the 1930s, the condescension felt by Levine was about to change into far more virulent forms of anti-Semitism. New challenges awaited the Jewish student body at the University of Minnesota, as the open and ugly anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany found local adherents and apologists. It was in the era to come that journalist Carey McWilliams would find enough anti-Jewish sentiment in the area to famously label Minneapolis “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.” The University of Minnesota was not left untouched by those sentiments.

Tim Brady is a frequent contributor to Minnesota. The second part of this history will appear in the March–April issue. Sources for this article include: The Jews in Minnesota: The First 75 Years by Gunther Plaut (American Jewish Historical Society, 1959), Jews in Minnesota by Hyman Berman and Linda Mack Schloff (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002), and the 1927 Menorah Society annual. Additional research was conducted through the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives at the University of Minnesota Archives.