Employment “quotas” based on sex, race or any other standard but merit constitute “a danger stalking the Jewish community,” because under them Jews would be “reduced to second-class citizens,” a rabbinical sociologist declared today. Rabbi Bernard Lander, president of Touro College, New York, and a faculty member at Hunter College, addressed the 36th annual convention of the Rabbinical Council of America. He urged Jews to “shift” their career goals from academe to the business world, where, he said, merit and ability still prevail as employment criteria.
Rabbi Lander also assailed “open enrollment,” under which city high school graduates are automatically entitled to college entrance. Forty percent of high school graduates, he charged, do not have a junior high school knowledge of English, and thus open enrollment “is destroying the very fiber and content of American colleges, producing education that is not education, degrees that are not degrees, and increasing frustration among those involved.”
Rabbi Bernard L. Berzon, the outgoing president of the Orthodox rabbinical body, was named honorary president. He was succeeded by Rabbi Louis Bernstein of Young Israel of Windsor Park, Bayside, N.Y. The first vice president is Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld of Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, Flushing, N.Y.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
