2024 Annual Klement Lecture

From the 1910s to the 1930s, when many private colleges, universities, and professional schools enacted quotas on Jewish students, Catholic institutions remained open and indeed expanded the number of Jewish students. Particularly important were the schools under Catholic auspices which trained doctors. lawyers, pharmacists, as well as schools of business as these represented gateway institutions for the children of Jewish immigrants yearning to enter the middle class. Nearly all extant sources including those of Jewish undergraduates reveal a welcoming environment which unlike the private schools, many founded by Protestant denominations, opened their doors for these young Jews. Why did Catholic schools behave so differently and how did the various shareholders—faculty, administrators and the Catholic and Jewish students—experience this aberrant openness in the early twentieth century?

Hasia Diner is professor emerita at the Department of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. During her unusually prolific career, Dr. Diner has authored and edited over twenty books, including Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, and Immigration: An American History with Carl Bon Tempo. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and several National Jewish Book Awards, and served in important leadership roles, including director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Host or Publisher Marquette History department