A leading authority on American ethnic problems, former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan, warned last night against the trend to ethnic quotas in efforts to establish job and educational opportunities for disadvantaged minorities and charged that there was “a whiff of anti-Semitism” in many of the demands for quotas being made today.
Mr. Moynihan, speaking at the commencement exercises of the New School for Social Research here, warned that “if ethnic quotas are to be imposed on American universities and similarly quasi-public institutions, the Jews will almost certainly be driven out. They are not three percent of the population. This would be a misfortune to them, but a disaster to the nation. And I very much fear that there is a whiff of anti-Semitism in many of these demands.”
He deplored the fact that in universities, “the cry has risen for racial quotas roughly representative of population proportions” and said he greatly feared that “if we begin to become formal about quotas for this or that group, we will very quickly come to realize that these are instantly translated into quotas against.” He noted that employers were being given “quotas of the minority group employes they will hire” and said this contravened the anti-discrimination provisions of the Federal Civil Rights Act.
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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.
