Jewish basketball players in the Ivy League, by Arieh Sclar

In the early 1920s, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, a proponent of immigration restriction, expressed the opinion that his university had a Jewish problem.  He proposed a solution that would limit Jewish enrollment to 15%, which he believed had become necessary because “the anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.  If their number should become 40% of the student body, the race feeling would become intense.”[1]  Lowell discussed the rude and crude manners of Harvard’s Jewish students and believed the quota would help them assimilate.  He declared that Jewish students did not “fit in” to Harvard’s social environment due to their interest in academic achievement rather than athletic participation.[2]

As other elite colleges followed Harvard’s lead in establishing Jewish quotas, American Jews celebrated college sports as reflective of Jewish modernity and integration.  American Jews believed college provided a gateway toward greater social opportunity and acceptance.  University of Michigan quarterback Benny Friedman became a Jewish race hero for his athletic and academic success and Harold Rigelman, a leader of the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau (ZBT), proposed the idea of ‘Pro-Semitism.’ Jews would “continuously and persistently, by their sportsmanship on the athletic field,” illustrate their “race appreciation” and positive contribution to society.[3]

The idea that athletic success could encourage acceptance and facilitate integration gained credence due to a controversy over Jewish basketball at Yale, which occurred at the same time that Harvard’s Lowell began publicly arguing for quotas.  After the Yale basketball team finished last in the Ivy League during the 1922 season, Yale alumni demanded an end to discriminatory practices against Jewish basketball players in order to field a winning team.  The school’s final defeat of the season occurred against the Atlas Athletic Club of New Haven, a Jewish club, as a fundraiser for the Jewish War Relief Campaign.[4]  Games between colleges and community teams occurred frequently in the early 1920s and some independent clubs proved superior to colleges who placed little emphasis on basketball.[5]  Yale’s marginal commitment to basketball proved disastrous when Sam Pite, a former Atlas player who had starred for both the New Haven and Hartford YMHA’s quit the Yale team during the 1922 season because he believed he had been “frozen out” by the anti-Semitic coach.  Rumors of this situation had existed for years, but Yale alumni did not oppose such behavior until the basketball team finished in last place in the Ivy League.[6]

Pite played the central role in both Yale’s decline in 1922 and its triumph in 1923.  Prior to the 1922-1923 season, Yale hired a new coach, Joe Fogarty, who told newspapers: “It makes no difference to me whether a player is black or white, Jew or Gentile, so long as he can play basketball.”  Fogarty’s tolerance directly contrasted his predecessor’s intolerance, but elite Jewish players like Pite did not depend on the whims of coaches.  “Basketball followers” considered Pite one of the “best players in the state,” while others “went farther” and called him “the best of the lot.”  Pite initially stated he would not return to the Yale team despite the coaching change.  He eventually did, and along with other Jewish players, led Yale to the conference championship in 1923.[7]

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[1] “Lowell Tells Jews Limit at College Might Help Them,” New York Times, June 17, 1922, 3.

[2] On the quota controversy, see Feingold, A Time for Searching, 16-22; Marcia Graham Synnot, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900-1970 (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1979). Harvard’s Jewish population increased from approximately 7% in 1900 to 21% in 1922.  See Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 86-109.  The result of the quota was the introduction of non-academic requirements, including ‘character.’  Harvard, Yale, and Princeton pushed for the use of standardized tests. 

[3] Marianne R. Sanua, “Here’s to Our Fraternity”: One Hundred Years if Zeta Beta Tau, 1898-1998 (Hanover, NH: Zeta Beta Tau Foundation, 1998), 70-72; Quote from Sanua, Going Greek, 144-145.

[4] “Yale Alumni Assail Heads of Athletics,” New York Times, June 17, 1922. On the Atlas-Yale game, see House Notes, Community News, March 1922. Also see Oren, Joining the Club, 78.  Oren explained that the game attracted three thousand fans, the largest basketball crowd in New Haven up to that point.  On other athletic clubs, such as the Brooklyn Dux, see Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbet’s Field, 30-34.  On the Brownsville Boys Club, see Gerald Sorin, The Nurturing Neighborhood: The Brownsville Boys Club and Jewish Community in Urban America, 1940-1990 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 

[5] The Connecticut Hebrew Record relished the prominent role of three former YMHA stars in Yale’s title in 1922.  See “Yale: Joseph and his Brethren,” Connecticut Hebrew Record, April 6, 1923. The New Haven YM-YWHA simply published the American Hebrew’s article with no additional commentary, see Community News 4, no. 8 (August 1922); “Round the Town,” Community News 4, no. 11 (November 1922).

[6] Quote on ‘frozen out’ from “Sam Pite Decides to Play for Yale,” Hartford Courant, November 10, 1922; On Jewish basketball at Yale prior to the controversy, see Oren, Joining the Club, 79-80.

[7] “Nutmeg Boys May Star,” Hartford Courant, December 19, 1922. Fogarty played with Jewish professionals in the 1910s; Oren, Joining the Club, 78-80.