Jewish Students Protest Mobil Oil Executives’ Effort to Hire Jews

More than 100 Jewish students at Brandeis University interrupted a presentation by four executives of Mobil Oil Company to protest Mobil’s ban on Jewish- and Israeli-made products on carriers calling at Arab ports. In a telephone report to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in New York, a leader of the campus’ Jewish Activist League of the Radical Zionist Alliance said the demonstrators attended a scheduled talk last Friday on “career opportunities” at Mobil and interrupted to challenge Mobil’s policy. The activist leader, M.J.Rosenberg, told the JTA that the executives had “tried to recruit Jews for their office in New York while they follow an anti-Semitic policy.” Most students at Brandeis are Jewish. The Mobil executives were “quite surprised” at the interruption, Rosenberg said, and the university officials present “apologized all over the place.”

When the attendees were given the opportunity to leave the room, he said, only about 10 of the approximately 125 students there remained. The demonstrators dispensed fliers reproducing articles – some by the JTA – reporting the charges against Mobil. When the demonstrators vowed to rally 1,000 students at Mobil’s scheduled on-campus recruitment drive in March, the company officials indicated that the drive would be canceled, Rosenberg said. Matthew Sgan, associate dean of students at Brandeis University, told the JTA by phone that he did not recall having formally apologized to the Mobil officials. The issue, he said, was not one of a company’s operating policy but one of “academic freedom,” that is, the executives should have been allowed to speak without hindrance. He said 10 to 20 students remained after the demonstrators left. He said the Mobil men stated they were willing to return in March, and that as of today their reappearance had not been cancelled