Suggests Jewish University in U.S. to Be Named for Louis Marshall

A Jewish University in America to be named for Louis Marshall, which would provide an outlet for Jewish scholars and students now the object of discrimination in many universities is suggested by Dr. S. M. Melamed writing in the current issue of “The Reflex.”

American society, which controls American academic life, discriminates against the Jews in the universities, Dr. Melamed asserts. There are not more than twenty full-fledged Jewish professors in American universities, while there are 35,000 Jewish students at American colleges and universities. The result is that the young savant either denies his Judaism, or gives up his career, if his career does not give him up.

The one remedy for this situation, according to Dr. Melamed, is a Jewish University. The Jews have the same rights as other racial groups in the United States to maintain their own university and “sooner or later they will have to do it,” the article declares. “Some of the de-Judaized Jews will protest and cry out vehemently-‘Ghetto,’ and the average Jew will be terror-stricken at the very idea of a Jewish university and will say if there is going to be a Jewish university, all the other universities will exclude the Jews, as they will have a good reason for so doing.

“But on second thought,” the writer continues, “they will come to the realization that they are free American citizens and that they have the same right to maintain a university as other religious groups and that other American universities, seeing the Jew making academic efforts of his own, will not (Continued on Page 4)

“My argument is that even without academic anti-Semitism in America, we ought to have a Jewish University in America,” Dr. Melamed writes, “because only when there will be a Jewish University in America, equipped with the best Jewish talent we will be able to demonstrate what our contribution is to American science and letters. Only a Jewish university in America will create for us a credit page in the ledger; at present there is only a debit page.

“Not only American Jewry as a whole,” he declares, “but one major Jewish community in America-Philadelphia, Chicago, New York-is strong enough to establish a university on a sound financial basis.

“There is one man in American Jewry who could translate this idea into reality-Louis Marshall,” he says: “He is its uncontested leader and may be described as the father of American Jewry. In the course of forty years of hard work and untiring efforts, he cemented and organized it and transformed innumerable heterogeneous efforts into one whole. He is the most powerful factor in American Jewish life-and if he were to undertake this task as a crowing effort of his long service in the cause of our people in America, he would create the greatest monument to American Jewry and would go down to posterity as its Jochanan ben Zakkai, and then it would naturally be a Louis Marshall University,” Dr. Melamed concludes.