Black on White

Eminent Jewish representatives of both the medical and legal professions have just agreed, in public addresses, that the quota system for Jewish students in professional schools is not only just but desirable. Dr. Samuel J. Kopetszky and Max D. Steuer, speaking at the Congregation B’Nai Jeshurun, justified the limitation of Jewish entrants in institutions of learning and urged Jewry to accept and encourage such arbitrary limitations.

To ordinary Americans of the Jewish faith this viewpoint, I believe, will come as a shock. Jewish quotas are associated in the public mind, and particularly the Jewish mind, with the Russian educational quotas for Jews under Tsarism. However carefully the idea may be swathed in statistical tables and sanctimonious disclaimers of discrimination, it remains discrimination of the rawest fibre.

If quotas are, as Mr. Steuer claims, necessary and legitimate in the legal field, they are equally justifiable in engineering, banking, theatrical producing or horticulture. If Jewish quotas are acceptable in medicine, by what logic are we to exclude them in the manufacture of clothing, journalism, literature, the fine arts or ditch digging?

A SURRENDER TO HITLER

The spurious logic which would apportion professions, ambitions, talents, trades and businesses according to race or creed cannot limit itself to law or medicine. It admits the principle upon which Hitlerism, in large part, climbed to power over Jewish bodies. It was not Jewish eminence in one or two fields but in the whole domain of intellectual achievement that bothered the German anti-Semites.

Mr. Steuer is too brilliant a lawyer to overlook the absurdity of a mathematical test for educational and professional opportunities. To say that a medical school will permit onl# two per cent Jewish students and only ninety-eight per cent non-Jews sounds perfectly fair. It sounds as fair, indeed, as the good old law that the rich, like the poor, are forbidden to sleep on park benches on cold winter nights. Its literal application, however, would very likely have prevented Mr. Steuer from becoming a lawyer and Dr. Kopetszky from becoming a physician.

It is quite true that Frenchmen have more than their mathematical share of the business of cookery. The number of French chefs is unquestionably out of all proportion to the French population in New York. That same spurious logic would apportion Frenchmen 1,04603 per cent of chefing and drive the others into law or medicine, where room would have been artificially created by eliminating Jews.

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM

As for Italian opera stars, Greek confectioners, Scandinavian Follies girls, Presbyterian college professors and other racial or denominational specializations, the Bureau of Weights and Standards would decide their quotas as well.

The attempt to apportion professions and life careers arithmetically rather than in accordance with innate ability is arrant nonsense. No matter how thin it is sliced it is still anti-Semitic baloney.

Doubtless too many young Jews are drawn to law and medicine. From the purely economic standpoint many of them might be well advised to consider other fields of endeavor. But to put the whole question on a quota basis, to admit that Jews beyond a certain limited number may not cure disease or chase ambulances or write novels or produce plays or enter Congress is complete and indefensible capitulation to race hatred. It is to admit that Jews are a pariah class, aliens, interlopers.

SOMETHING TO BEAR IN MIND

It behooves those who so glibly sign away fundamental human rights to remember that discrimination and persecution make themselves manifest not only through their mass application but through their privileged exception. The few Jews allowed by grace of the Romanoff autocrats to reside outside the pale were the most glaring proof of discrimination. The few Negroes allowed because of their wealth or intellectual achievements to enter where Negroes are normally excluded are an additional insult to that race. By the same token the percentage of Jews admitted into a “restricted” school like the few Jews admitted into a “restricted” residential district or apartment house would be additional confirmation of that discrimination.

The Steuer-Kopetszky formula, if it gains currency, must of necessity be carried to its bitter consequences. To begin with, two out of nine Jewish judges in the United States Supreme Court is shriekingly disproportionate. In fact, all we are entitled to is about three-tenths of one judge. A hundred per cent of the Governors of New York State is clearly out of line, as is 100 per cent of the Mayors of New York City for the Italians or Catholic political quota. Come to think of it, the proportion of brilliant Jewish lawyers in our American population is all askew. The least we can ask is that they dim their lights.