… We launched our campaign for Jewish studies at [the University of Michigan] the same time the African-American students demanded that the history department hire a black professor to teach African-American history. The department responded that they would be happy to do so, but they could not find a qualified black academic to fill the post. However, the black students reacted to this rejection much differently than we did in our campaign. First, they locked all the office doors in the history department. Then they and their white student allies invaded history lectures and disrupted the classes by shouting and banging on pots and pans. After three or four days of tumult, the history department announced that they had found a “qualified” black instructor. They hired Harold Cruse, who authored the book, The Crises of the Negro Intellectual (1967). What we activist Jewish students learned from this was that a little militancy could pay off.

When we first approached the Detroit Jewish Federation for money to fund a Jewish studies program at Michigan, we got the same answer the professors gave: “It’s not a credible academic field.” But now, rather than meekly go away, we decided to act. We chained ourselves to the doors of the federation building and invited the Jewish and non-Jewish press to the event. The adverse publicity created a stir in the Jewish community and moved the federation to eventually provide seed money to fund a position in Jewish history at Michigan. In 1972, Jehuda Reinharz became the first professor of Jewish history at the University of Michigan.  He later became president of Brandeis University.

As I reflect on those years, I now appreciate why all the hesitation to openly express one’s Jewish identity: the concern about anti-Semitism. In the city of Detroit in the 1960s, the Detroit Athletic Club barred Jews from membership. Private golf courses restricted their membership to non-Jews. Certain neighborhoods, such as the affluent suburb of Grosse Pointe, maintained “gentlemen’s agreements,” of not selling homes to Jews. And the Detroit Edison company and other firms did not hire Jews.

I personally experienced the Detroit Edison company’s policy when I was an undergraduate. I had received a Detroit Edison scholarship and was assured that I was the top candidate for their summer internship. That is, until I had to fill out an employee-occupations form “purely as a formality.” One of the questions on the form asked what church I attended. When I wrote “Congregation B’nai David” I can still visualize the reaction of the interviewer. As he read this line, his head abruptly jerked back. Afterward, I did not hear from the Edison company for two weeks. When I called them about it, they told me they were sorry, but another candidate had been chosen. I immediately contacted the local Anti-Defamation League (ADL) office and told them what happened. They informed me that the Detroit Edison company’s no-Jews policy had existed for years. The ADL had been fighting against it for some time, but without success.

During the 1960s my parents’ and teachers’ generation still remembered the virulent anti-Semitism that existed in America during the 1920s and 1930s. This was especially true in Detroit, where, in the early 1920s, Henry Ford conducted an anti-Semitic campaign titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. This campaign led Jews to boycott Ford automobiles till after Henry died. In the 1930s, the Detroit radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, vilified Jews and the “Jewish Bolsheviks” in his newspaper, Social Justice, and on his weekly Sunday night radio broadcasts, which attracted millions of listeners. Father Coughlin blamed Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution, and characterized President Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.”

But the memories of hard-core anti-Semitism, however scary, did not adequately account for the hesitancy to express any Jewish identity on the part of my Jewish peers and Jewish faculty members at the university. Abandoning or hiding from your heritage in order to be accepted has never worked. It did not work in Europe and it does not work in America. ...