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Nov

23

Where the Jews are


In college anyway. And why I didn’t go to Brandeis:

A survey in the Reform Judaism Magazine’s Fall College Guide reported that New York University had the largest population of Jewish students of any private American university, numbering 4,000, accounting for more than 20% of all undergraduates.

However, as a percentage of the student body, Yeshiva University (93%) and Brandeis University (61%) far eclipsed NYU. The University of Florida, with 5,500 Jewish students, took top place among public American universities.

Most recently, I read that Georgetown has about five percent Jews – but I wonder if that’s undergrad only.

Oberlin and OSU are the only Ohio colleges on the lists. The population of Jews at Oberlin is 800 or 26.7% while OSU is home to 3000 Jews, just 1000 less than NYU, but that population only makes up 6.7% of undergrad population there.

More information is here in the fall ‘07 issue of Reform Judaism where I found these links (both charts are on the same pdf, I’m not really sure why there are two links).

College Choices 060: The Top 60 Schools Jews Choose (PDF)

College Choices 020: The Top 20 Schools by Percentage of Jews (PDF)

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 10:57 am November 23rd, 2007 in Education, Jewish, Ohio, Religion 

Comments

4 Responses to “Where the Jews are”

  1. 1 Bill Callahan on November 24th, 2007 10:44 am

    39% of the students at Brandeis are goyim? Huh. That’s a lot more than when I was there in the late ’60s.

  2. 2 Jill Miller Zimon on November 24th, 2007 11:00 am

    I know! Bill – I was talking with my father-in-law who is in Boston about this just last night and he said that yes, in the 50s and 60s it was well-known that there were NOT many Jews at Brandeis, or not as many as one might think or hope there’d be, depending on who you were.

    He’s Harvard/Harvard (M.D.) in the 1950s, but he says that Brandeis’ alumni were very unhappy with the trend away from a more Jewish undergrad population and weren’t giving money. Soooo, no surprise, the school started to change what it was doing with recruitment.

    You know, Bellefaire has had similar issues over the years – having been this big time Jewish orphanage and then changing over to a treatment facility but having an all Jewish board. I don’t know what’s going on with all that there, but I would guess that any entity that seeks to serve or appear to be secular, but at its core is connected to a religion, faces this kind of thing cyclically, no?

  3. 3 Bill Callahan on November 24th, 2007 12:43 pm

    Jill,

    I heard the same story as your father about the alumni-driven push for more Jewishness, but the supposed stimulus was the Six Day War. When I started there in ‘65 the school was still in its initial secular/ecumenical phase (after all it was just seventeen years old at that point — Abram Sachar was stll running the place). But I could have sworn the student body at that point was at least 80% Jewish, by ethnic identity if not by religious practice.

  4. 4 Jill Miller Zimon on November 24th, 2007 9:44 pm

    Well – you raise what I know you know is a good point: saying you are ethnically and culturally Jewish can be very separate from affiliating with the religion. I don’t know how the college numbers reflect that at all – I don’t know what they ask on student questionnaires etc. I can tell you that when I filled out my app for GU, I checked “other” – I didn’t want to be counted as a Jew or get stuff from the Jewish student group. I wouldn’t be surprised if other Jews there felt the same – so that 5% number might have been under also – or over, if those Jews were more ethnic/cultural than religious.

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