“While overt manifestations of anti-Semitism have declined, anti-Semitism in the United States is just as hard to cope with because it has gone underground and its practices are more subtle and concealed,” Benjamin R. Epstein, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith told 1,500 delegates at a B’nai B’rith convention at the Concord Hotel here.
“We are making progress in fighting anti-Semitism but there is still little likelihood of reaching its end.” Mr. Epstein reported. He said that patterns of social, educational and job discrimination are “more devious than ever even though anti-Semitism is now somewhat out of fashion publicly.” As an example, he cited employment as a field in which discrimination against Jews is not as widespread as before the war but in which it is still practiced, particularly in the areas of promotion and upgrading of employees where discrimination is most difficult to prove and to root out.
Social discrimination in suburban life is “a most pressing concern of the Anti-Defamation League,” he said. “Unchecked, it can conceivably bring about a new type of segregation marked by sycamore-laned ghettoes and ‘For Christians only’ communities. There is little basic change in people’s intergroup attitudes just because they travel on trains instead of the subway. The trend toward suburbanization — coupled with the persistence of all the patterns of prejudice and social discrimination that bedevil the country — can have the effect of driving Christians and Jews even further apart, without even the nodding relationships they once had when meeting in their apartment house elevators.”
“ASTONISHING DECLINE” IN COLLEGE FRATERNITY BIAS NOTED
An “astonishing decline” in college fraternity discrimination in recent years was reported by Arnold Forster, national civil rights director of the Anti-Defamation League. Mr. Forster said that while a few decades ago “a large majority of the 61 national groups included in the National Interfraternity Conference carried restrictive clauses in their constitutions, in 1948 twenty-five of the total still retained such discriminatory provisions. By 1955 this number had dropped to a total of ten social fraternities.”
Mr. Forster said that “the current movement against fraternity discrimination” has been centered in the student body, with “undergraduate members of local chapters taking the lead in the struggle for a non-discriminatory policy, challenging and defying the leadership of their national bodies.”
“All over the country, campus sentiment is on the rise against the hallmark of exclusiveness which has shu, out a section of the student body from equal participation in college life,” Mr. Forster said. He attributed much of the change to the tremendous growth of student enrollment since the war which has brought “something of a revolution in social attitudes.” This change, he said, has been marked by “an increasingly critical view” taken by both faculty and students toward “fraternities and sororities which set up racial and religious barriers to membership.
Tied to the question of fraternity discrimination, Mr. Forster added, “is the problem of housing. At many universities, there are inadequate college-owned dormitories and the choicest campus facilities are often the fraternity houses. Thus, fraternity discrimination is in direct conflict with the university’s efforts to make housing facilities available to all students on an equal basis.”
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.
