May, 1955
Named for the late Jewish jurist who combined a mighty zeal for Zionism with his Supreme Court duties, Brandeis is the first “non-sectarian” college to be organized, owned, and operated by American Jewry. There are, of course, other universities which the Jews control, but they have got these only by arduous years of shoving and scrambling their way to the top; and they hold their places of power in the worried, anxious manner of usurpers whose underlings are plotting to overthrow them.
At Brandeis, it is different. There, the Jews can throw their weight around without restriction, and at the same time be as free from phobias as it is possible for Jews to be. For Brandeis is their handiwork and their domain — from its garish, glass-fronted classrooms down to the last kosher frankfurter in its dietary kitchen. It means to the Jews scholastically what the state of Israel means to them politically. No longer will their influence on American education have to be exerted by inhabitation and control of other peoples’ colleges. Now they have an abode, a rallying point, a center of operations — now they have a college of their own.
As with all peculiarly Jewish things, some aspects of Brandeis are farcically funny, others are terrifyingly grim. The first derive, in the present case, from the Jews’ frantic efforts to build a successful university, and the inevitable frustration of those efforts by the habits and traits ingrained in their race.
The initial, most vivid evidence of this clash appears with the Jews’ maneuverings to lure Christian students to Brandeis. For, it should be noted, the college authorities would rather not have a preponderance of their own Semitic sort in attendance there. They do not want this promising project of theirs to come off in the American mind as just a slightly more assimilated version of the Hebrew National College. If Brandeis is going to bring other schools around to its way of thinking, quickly and painlessly, it must appear as one of them — solidly, reliably, indigenously American. And to have a student body that looks like the clientele of a Bronx delicatessen adds nothing to that illusion.
The rulers of the Brandeis roost have, accordingly, spared no effort, and very little expense, in order to surround themselves with bright, wholesome, un-Semitic faces. The Dean of Admissions estimates that at present 25 to 30 per cent of the total enrollment is composed of Gentiles (“Of course, we can’t be absolutely sure, because we don’t ask such questions”). A drive through the Brandeis campus, however, emphatically reveals this figure to be nothing but promotional propaganda.
The principal reason why, despite the attractive come-ons, most non-Jews have steered clear of Brandeis is a simple and compelling one: the place is plainly, overpoweringly, irremediably Jewish. To choose it as one’s college is comparable to choosing the beach at Tel Aviv as one’s vacation-spot.
With their fanatic, stupefying absorption in themselves, the Jews are either oblivious to how flagrant is the character of Brandeis, or else they hope gullible Gentiles will not notice it. For the college abounds in distinctively Jewish touches, like the reiterated, shrill insistence of the Brandeis catalog that “the University has no doctrinal slant”; and the listing in the same catalog, without explanation or apology, of the names of the Brandeis teaching Professors — all of whom, save one possible Swede, turn out to be Jews.
Since first opening its doors in 1948, Brandeis has been able to secure the support, monetary and otherwise, of a varied group of “patrons.” These, quite at random, include:
Joseph N. Proskauer, Brandeis Trustee and powerful leader in the American Jewish Committee, whose magazine, Commentary, highly approves of Brandeis, finds fault with other things. Sample: “The division of the divinity into ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ splits the divine essence; it was and is regarded by the synagogue quite simply as blasphemy.”
The Widow Roosevelt, the Gentile member of the Board of Trustees. To aging Mrs. R., Brandeis is yet another “fascinating group of young people.” Her previous groups have been notably ill-fated, most of them having ended up on the black-list of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Most Reverend Bernard Sheil, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, who gave Brandeis a $50,000 CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) scholarship fund. We are pleased to report, however, that as part of Bishop Sheil’s general demise (some call it silencing) this grant to Brandeis has now been “withdrawn.”
Although they are reliable indicators of just which way Brandeis is heading, the foregoing peripheral people are not the ultimate formulators of Brandeis policy, and not the sustained indoctrinators of Brandeis students.
The university’s policy and doctrine were determined by its initial and deliberate employment of three men. With the selection of these three, Brandeis committed itself to an atmosphere which the current university catalog archly describes as the Brandeis “climate.” This localized inclemency can be best studied by making an appraisal, out in the open Christian air, of the trio who are responsible for it. Their names, in ascending importance, are Abram Sachar, Max Lerner, and Ludwig Lewisohn; and their respective contributions to the “climate” of Brandeis are herewith set in order.
Abram Sachar is the President of Brandeis, who came to the job after twenty successful years as chief agent for Jewish Masonry’s “Hillel House” program. A capable strategist, Dr. Sachar early saw the proselytizing possibilities of the Hillel movement, which is ostensibly a social, devotional, and loan-granting agency for Jewish students at secular universities. Thus it happened that in 1943, Dr. Sachar was prominently cited on “the impact he had made on Christian students ... who had been influenced by his Hillel courses.”
This propensity for Judaizing young Gentiles was one of Dr. Sachar’s principal recommendations for the Brandeis presidency. The other was a repeated declaration, following necessarily from his Zionist loyalty, that America is not a “melting pot,” and that Jews must not only stick to being Jews, they must even rejoice in their Jewishness.
In order to attract Gentile students, for processing under his experienced direction, Dr. Sachar has allowed a Newman Club and a Student Christian Association to take their places beside Brandeis University’s lively Hillel chapter. Profoundly touched by the limitless opportunities thus afforded him, Dr. Sachar has resolved upon a rededication of himself to the spirit and ideals of that Rabbi Hillel for whom the Hillel movement was named — the rabbi who, until his death in 10 A.D., was head of the Jerusalem sanhedrin and who was, as such, the chief promoter of King Herod’s “slaughter of the Holy Innocents,” the first of the Jewish attempts to get rid of Jesus.
Max Lerner is Chairman of the Brandeis Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a position for which he qualified by a career of banging out columns for papers like the Nation, New Republic, and PM. Not for an instant during his embattled years as a newspaperman did Lerner’s political complexion ever pale from its bright ruddy glow. Even during the exposures of A. Hiss and company, when mere parlor pinks were withdrawing into chastened silence, Lerner stood his ground defiantly, dismissed the trials as “a show for political neurotics by political neurotics.”
At Brandeis, Lerner has the students coming and going, teaching one course required of all freshmen, another required of all seniors. But what he teaches them is not entirely political. Besides the trick of having his own “independent opinions” always coincide with the twistings and turnings of the official Communist line, Lerner has another Jewish talent: It is his ability to spice his lectures with passing sneers at things Christian — for instance his disposal of Christmas as “the myth-laden version of the nativity of a child in the Middle East.”
Ludwig Lewisohn is Brandeis’ Jacob Kaplan Professor of Comparative Literature and, by far, its most articulate, prominent and sought-after personality. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia ’s biographical account of Dr. Lewisohn summarizes his unique achievement by declaring that he has become “the symbol of Jews preoccupied with the problem of existence and not merely with the problem of living.”
The existence problem with which Dr. Lewisohn has been most preoccupied, of course, is the problem of the co-existence of Christianity and Judaism. After a lifetime of investigating the matter, Dr. Lewisohn has come to some pointed conclusions. Among them are these.
1) Jews must never try to imitate Christian standards, culture, or traditions.
2) Jews must be steadfastly themselves, and Judaize their Christian neighbors.
3) Jews owe it to the Western world to replace Christianity with a modern presentation of Hebraism.
To bolster these principles of action, Dr. Lewisohn has prepared for his disciples some dogmatic comments, samples of which follow.
On Jesus Christ: “A teacher neither original nor important.”
On the Catholic Church: “The militant and triumphant Church, an empire with prisons and engines of war, is even amid the grandeur of Saint Peter’s a thing that evokes in me both horror and disdain — horror at its long cruelties toward those whom it still calls “perfidious Jews,” though not to be sure toward them alone, disdain at that extreme of changeless superstition which has worn away by the kisses of innumerable pilgrims the brazen feet of the gigantic statue of the Church’s tutelary saint.”
On Catholic Marriage: “A metaphysical trap.”
On Catholic love of the saints: “A happy devout polytheism.”
On the Crucifix: “That we crucified Christ is an old wives’ tale. For Christ is a myth.”
On Catholic Europe: “The history of Christendom is a history of warring sects and warring nations, of cruelty, of hatred, and of slaughter.”
On the marks of a Catholic culture: “Repression, cruelty, belligerent patriotism, darkness of mind, and corruption of heart.”
On Saint Paul: “Christian Rome hated and feared us because we could not follow the morbid Hellenizing of Paul of Tarsus nor endure the paganization of the religion he had unwittingly brought forth.”
From this summary of the three men who have made Brandeis (the one who is its president and the two who are its only notable teachers) there follows a single inevitable judgment about the university’s “climate.” It is neither, as some have claimed, a “new educational setting” nor a “novel atmosphere of learning.” It is not even a fleeting “intellectual experiment.” For what is going on at Brandeis is old. It has sprung, however awkward and unsteady, from a long, long tradition — that ubiquitous tradition which must answer for the Loyalists in Spain, the Marxists in Russia, the Carbonari in Italy, the Freemasons in France, the Illuminati in Germany; that unbroken tradition which reaches back nineteen hundred years to find its root and sustenance in a howling Jerusalem mob which cried, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!”
It is difficult to estimate just how much success Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisohn will enjoy in their bold undertaking. They are currently chuckling, however, over a victory which will be securely theirs in a very few weeks, if all goes as planned.
The ailing Archbishop of Boston, whether through ignorance (which would be culpable) or malice (which is hard to believe) has agreed to the dedication, this June, of a building which will be directly on the Brandeis campus and which will serve as a Catholic church. What is more, this proposed church will have for companions a Protestant meeting house and a Jewish synagogue — all three to be of equal capacity, and so designed that the passerby will be quite unable to tell which creed goes with which building.
In the ultimate scheme of Drs. Sachar, Lerner, and Lewisobn, the three chapels are only a beginning. But they are an eloquent one. Forcefully, in hard gray stone, these three buildings will testify that a Catholic Archbishop has been persuaded to place the One True Faith, the Mass, and the Holy Eucharist, on a par with heretical perversions and even with Jewish perfidy.
Anxiously, we ask the prayers of our readers that somehow, by some unforseeable intervention, this plan will be frustrated, and that our Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament will be spared the desecration of dwelling in sanctuary on the campus of Brandeis, as the tenant and the target of the Jews.