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Edward Nicholson (pictured in 1928), the first dean of students at the University, kept notes on leftist organizations and students, most of them Jewish, and reported on their activities to the FBI and right-wing strategists. Photographs courtesy of University Archives

This is the second in a two-part history.

Despite the global turmoil in the years prior to World War II, the University of Minnesota provided most of its Jewish students the opportunity to lead a pleasurable college life, leaving ample room for some of the more placid traditions of being a student. Such as taking a moment to suggest to an overly concerned parent that she butt out of your social life. “You asked who Ann Wenzel was, was she Jewish, and why didn’t I take Edna Friedman’s friend,” Donald Frankel (B.S. ’39) writes with a hint of peevishness to his mother, Irene Page Frankel. “I answered in the last letter that Ann is not Jewish and that she is Friedman’s friend.”

Donald was the son of Hiram Frankel (J.D. ’05) of St. Paul, one of the first Jews to graduate from the University of Minnesota’s College of Law, a past president of the Law School Alumni Association, and the first Jewish member of the board of directors of the General Alumni Association. Hiram had passed away by the time his son enrolled as a student at the U in the mid-1930s, but the young man’s mother kept close tabs on Donald, who would soon become an aeronautical engineer and serve in England at the start of World War II as an inspector of Curtiss aircraft. Some of the correspondence between mother and son is in the Minnesota Historical Society’s collection.

Donald Frankel’s letters suggest a level of comfort and ease with his place at the U, befitting a second-generation Minnesota student. They also reveal the importance of his Jewish identity and give a sense of its day-to-day meaning. For Jewish students at the U, the crisis in Europe, assimilation pressures versus traditional Jewish values, and seders at the Menorah Society all mixed with term papers, money issues, and watching Golden Gopher football on Saturday afternoons.

There were distinctions, however. In another letter to his mother, Frankel makes reference to a local murder case, which is rumored to involve the Minneapolis gangster Kid Cann. “My coach did say something about Kid Cann,” Frankel writes. “He said, ‘I don’t understand why men like Kid Cann and Leopold and Loeb are that way as most Jewish families are very fine and bring their children up very well.’ ”

Moments of casual anti-Semitism were familiar to Jewish students at the U; so, too, was institutional prejudice. Though Frankel had a pretty full life on campus, with opportunities to join University organizations and affiliated groups, including a growing number of Jewish fraternities, the Greek system at the U was largely segregated by race and religion and would remain so into the 1950s. In fact, a survey conducted by the U in the late 1940s found that more than 30 fraternities and sororities banned “Hebrews” from acceptance. The University was reluctant to enforce change without a consensus approach that included other colleges and universities across the nation, which were beset by the same practices.

No meaningful challenge to anti-Semitism was common practice at the U. For example, until the late 1940s, whenmore University housing was made available on campus, Jewish students were limited by anti- Semitic boarding policies practiced by individual homeowners. Never mind that the University kept lists of approved boarding houses for its students and could have put the screws to discriminatory boarders by simply taking their names off the list.

Quota systems restricting Jewish students and faculty seemed to govern certain colleges and departments within the University, and Jews were discouraged from other educational opportunities by suggestions that their expertise in those fields wouldn’t be welcome in the world. But the idea that the University might be complicit in societal anti-Semitism was a hard notion for the administration to grasp. A 1939 note from the director of the University’s employment bureau, which oversaw campus jobs and career opportunities, to University Dean Malcolm Willey described why “the agency is not in a position to dictate when certain qualifications are established by the employer. There are certain departments in the University that have set up definite racial qualifications for candidates for their jobs,” wrote Dorothy Johnson. “Many more employers outside the University have done so. The Jewish problem has always been a difficult one in the Employment Bureau, and we have made every effort to place these people, even to the extent many times of personally soliciting jobs for them.”

The U also pled innocent to charges of maintaining quotas detrimental to Jewish students. In one instance, the U implied that systems it used to count Jewish students

After graduating in 1939, Donald Frankel, the son of one of the first Jewish students to earn a law degree from the U of M, inspected aircraft in England at the beginning of World War II.

were not meant to limit numbers, but instead were designed to offer equitability. When the national offices of B’nai B’rith charged the University with putting a cap on the number of Jewishstudents accepted for internships at the Mayo Clinic, the University responded by saying the number of Jews selected for the program was dictated by a quota reflecting the percentage of Jews in Minnesota as a whole—about 2 percent. But that was a minimum level, according to the U; and the fact that the number of students accepted into the program approximated that percentage was simply a measure of the number of qualified students who applied to be Mayo interns. It was a difficult rationalization to refute in an era before standardized testing and when the quality of student applicants was being judged by the same people who claimed that any prejudice in the matter was strictly benign.

Local historian Laura Weber (B.A. ’77, M.A. ’88), writing in the spring 1991 Minnesota History, documented another instance of a University department coming to the “aid” of its Jewish students. In 1939, three young women in the U’s dental hygiene program were called into the office of the department chair and advised that they were on a fool’s errand. No one in the area hired Jewish dental hygienists, they were told. It might be best for them simply to drop out of the program and pursue something else, they were advised.

All three of the discouraged students would soon leave dental hygiene, but word of the chair’s advice spread in the local Jewish community, prompting a committee of Jewish leaders, including faculty member Dr. Moses Barron (M.D. ’11) and businessman Arthur Brin, the husband of U alumna Fanny Brin (a past president of the National Council of Jewish Women), to make inquiries of Dean Willey. The University would soon hold a conference “on the topic of the implied duty of colleges and universities to assist those they had trained to find jobs”—the first meeting of its kind in the country, according to Weber, who adds, however, that no direct link was made between the conference and the incident involving the would be hygienists.

The University, in fact, was sending many Jewish graduates into a local community, but it had little interest in employing them. The Minneapolis Public School system was notorious for rarely hiring Jews for any position. A 1947 survey, conducted for the city by Fisk University, counted a total of 13 Jewish teachers, elementary and secondary, in the entire121 schools of the Minneapolis system. The schools employed one Jewish clerk and three Jewish nurses. In addition, the survey found that 60 percent of all retailers and manufacturers in the city made it a practice of not hiring Jews. Hospitals in the city were similarly prejudiced, a fact that prompted the local Jewish community to organize and fund the creation of Mt. Sinai Hospital.

Anti-Semitism was so pervasive in Minneapolis that, in 1946, journalist Carey McWilliams, writing in the journal Common Ground, famously declared the city “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.” He noted that service clubs in Minneapolis—ranging from AAA to the Rotarians, Kiwanis, and Lions—restricted Jews; that dining and athletic clubs prohibited Jews; and that in the city’s most noteworthy industries— lumbering, milling, transportation, utilities, banking, and insurance—there was a paucity of Jewish involvement.

For a community that was on the brink of electing Hubert Humphrey as its mayor, and would soon begin a long climb toward the liberal progressivism that is ascendant in Minneapolis today, both the survey and McWilliams’ label were shocking accusations. But as historians Hy Berman and Linda Mack Schloff (B.S. ’60, B.A. ’82, M.S. ‘86, Ph.D. ’98) wrote in their 2002 book Jews in Minnesota, area Jews at the time “were not surprised, for they had long lived with discrimination, housing restriction, stereotyped views, hostility, and other manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment.”

Under these circumstances, it perhaps isn’t surprising that the University, for all of its flaws, was viewed with a higher regard than other institutions in the area by local Jews. Beyond institutional rationalizations about quotas, housing discrimination, and matters of equal employment, however, the U of M had its own elements of flagrant anti-Semitism.

The economic upheavals of the Great Depression had prompted a rise of political activism and an increasing polarization of politics in the state. Forces on both the left and the right were active throughout Minnesota and on the University campus. In this era of dangerous and dramatic politics, many on the right were quick

Within a year of arriving on the University of Minnesota campus, the Hillel Society had a membership of nearly 500 students. Primarily a center for Jewish students for religious, social, and cultural gatherings, Hillel also reached out to non-Jewish students, including with an annual seder.

to link Jews with radical elements on the left.

At the University, that connection was made by the dean of students, Edward E. Nicholson, whose interests in the leftist organizations on campus went far beyond his duties for the University, ultimately revealing a deep-rooted anti-Semitism. As historian Hy Berman first reported (in an article published in the journal Jewish Social Studies in 1976 titled “Political Antisemitism in Minnesota during the Great Depression”), Nicholson not only kept notes on the activities of a number of organizations, students, and faculty members; he reported on them to the FBI and a variety of right-wing stalwarts, includinga man named Ray Chase (J.D. ’17).

In the 1930s, Chase, a former Minnesota congressman, headed a research group of his own founding and design. Its main interest was ferreting out leftist activities and reporting them to the public and Chase’s conservative allies. His most notorious moment came in the 1938 gubernatorial campaign, which was marked by the most blatant instance of anti-Semitic politics in the history of Minnesota. A pamphlet of Chase’s creation, provocatively titled “Are They Communists or Catspaws?,” purported to link advisers to Democratic governor Elmer Benson to Communist party activities. The five men featured in the accusation were all Jewish. And one, Sherman Dryer, was first brought to Chase’s attention by Dean Nicholson when Dryer was a student at the U.

Nicholson corresponded with Chase beginning in the mid-1930s, offering details on various campus organizations. He also reported on individual students, and these notes were catalogued by Chase in a document titled, “Notes on Radicalism at the University of Minnesota.” They reveal a cold prejudice. Dryer, for instance, was characterized, in part, as: “Jew. Communist. Agitator and Publicist.”

Other names and descriptions sent by Nicholson to Chase include a former Minnesota Daily reporter named Arnold “Eric” Sevareid (B.A. ’35), but most were Jewish.

Robert Loevinger (B.S. ’36), the son of an early graduate of the U of M Law School, Judge Gus Loevinger (J.D. ’06) of St. Paul, was listed as: “Campus agitator and Marxist. . . . Controlled U Forum, 1936-37. Jew.”

Joe Toner (B.A. ’39) was: “Jew. Editorial Director of [Minnesota] Daily. Radical agitator. Contributed to ‘Menorah Flash,’ in which he advocates Communistic attitude of Jews. Carried on work of Sherman Dryer.”

Lester Breslow (B.A. ’35, M.D. ’38, M.P.H. ’41): “Communist leader and agitator. . . . Son of Breslow, druggist across the street from the N.W. Hospital. Russian Jew. . . .”

Chase’s research group and his red-baiting pamphlet had their desired effect. By association with his five Jewish advisers, Governor Benson was linked to the Communist party and was defeated by Harold Stassen (B.S. ’27, J.D. ’29) in the 1938 gubernatorial race. The contest was so notorious for its blatant anti-Semitism that it prompted the Jewish community in Minnesota to create the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), an organization formed to document and publicly protest anti-Semitism in Minnesota. The JCRC continues its work to this day.

Nicholson, meanwhile, also carried on, feeding information on leftist activities at the U to Chase into the 1940s as he continued to serve as dean of students.

Beyond the drama and perfidy of the era, Jewish students at the U led lives that would have been familiar to the first generation of campus Jews. The Menorah Society, thefirst Jewish group founded at the U, remained an active force, though it began to suffer by not having a permanent home on campus. In 1940, it was joined at the U by the Hillel Society, which had quickly emerged as the largest Jewish campus organization in the nation after its founding at the University of Illinois in the early 1920s. Within a year of its arrival at the U of M, Hillel had a membership of nearly 500 students, and it wound up subsuming the Menorah Society during World War II.

Though Hillel also lacked a permanent home its first decade and a half on campus, it nonetheless provided a center for Jewish students for religious, social, and cultural gatherings. Among Hillel activities were Friday evening services, an athletic club, and a drama group called the Hillel Players. It also sponsored a number of dances and parties through the course of the year, including a Purim Carnival, a “songfest,” and a skit night.

Hillel reached out toward the non-Jewish community on campus as well. Beginning in 1943, Hillel offered the King Gustav Scholarship to a junior student active in interreligious and intergroup activities. The scholarship

David Edelstein, denied membership in Phi Beta Kappa at the University in the 1910s because he was Jewish, would later create a foundation that dedicated funds to the study of anti-Semitism at the U.

was intended to honor the King of Sweden “for his courage and humanitarianism in sheltering Jewish refugees during the war.” Beginning in the late 1940s, Hillel hosted an annual seder for all students on the Sunday before Passover that drew capacity crowds and required reservations.

Nineteen fifty-five was the first year in which the University of Minnesota offered instruction in Hebrew. Though it was an evening course offered through University Extension, it did prompt discussions about creating a chair in Judaic studies. Those discussions would continue for almost two decades, when in 1974, a Jewish studies program was created and attached to the Department of Ancient and Near East Studies.

As in virtually all phases of campus life, the 1960s brought changes to the Jewish community at the U of M. The faculty became increasingly open to Jewish members; political activism surged as it hadn’t since the 1930s; and traditional campus organizations like fraternities and sororities suffered and sometimes fell by the wayside. Hillel, too, saw a drop in participation. A 1970 survey of Jewish students reported that three-quarters of the 400-person sample “never” or “seldom” attended Hillel.

The blatant anti-Semitism of earlier times occasionally reared its ugly head—there were swastikas painted on Hillel in a 1962 incident, for instance—but the incident that brought attention to the subject most prominently took a subtler form.

In 1974, as the Board of Regents was conducting a search for a new president for the University, a faculty advising committee accused a few of the regents, who had asked potential candidates about their religious affiliations, of oblique anti-Semitism. The regents claimed that their questions were intended to discern a “life ethic” in candidates, not ameasure of them on the basis of religion. But some members of the faculty were less certain of those intentions, since one of the finalists was Jewish and would have been the first Jew in the University’s history to become president.

When the story that regents were asking questions about religion broke, it made headlines across the state, and the controversy ultimately became the subject of committee hearings and a report from the Minnesota State Legislature. In the final analysis, the regents were found to be not guilty of anti-Semitism, though it was stated, in the report, that they had improperly questioned the candidates.

C. Peter McGrath was ultimately named president, serving until 1985, and the University has since had two Jewish presidents: Ken Keller (1985– 88) and Mark Yudof (1997–2002).

Despite this incident, it was hard not to believe that a new era had arrived in the relationship between the University of Minnesota and its Jewish community. This was still a campus serving a predominantly Protestant, white, rural/suburban population. Nonetheless it was undoubtedly more accepting of those who didn’t fall into one of its majorities.

The Jewish community of Minnesota has maintained its fondness for, and dedication to, the University through thick and thin. According to a 2004 demographic survey conducted among the St. Paul and Minneapolis Jewish communities by the United Jewish Fund and Council of St. Paul and the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, a remarkable 55 percent of Jewish households have a member who attends or attended the University.

Jewish alumni have also helped advance Jewish studies on campus. For example, Nathan (B.A. ’29) and Theresa (B.S. ’33) Berman contributed funds to create the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives, housed at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library. They also, along with their son Lyle Berman (B.S. ’64), and his wife, Janis, donated the funds to create an endowed chair for the Jewish Studies program at the U. David Edelstein (B.S. ’16) was denied membership in Phi Beta Kappa because of his Jewish origins; yet over the years the Edelstein Family Foundation, an institution of his creation, has given much to the U—some of it in the form of funds dedicated to the study of anti-Semitism.

The handful of Jewish students who first gathered at the University of Minnesota a little over a hundred years ago to form the Jewish Literary Society, the first Jewish cultural organization on campus, would no doubt be proud at what has since transpired.