Why are Small Southern Colleges Suddenly Attracting Jews in Record Numbers?
Sam Ginsberg doesn’t feel like the only Jew in town any longer. Back when he was a Freshman at Hendrix College, the five or six students he saw at Hillel meetings composed the majority of the school’s Jewish student population. A Methodist college of 1,200 in Conway, Ark., Hendrix had never attracted many Jews. Ginsberg grew up in a large Jewish community in Memphis and arrived at Hendrix eager to engage in whatever meager Jewish life he could find there. During his four years at the school, something funny happened: freshman classes began to have Jews in them. Now a senior, Ginsberg says Hillel meetings draw an average of 25 Jews. Meanwhile, Hendrix is constructing a Jewish Cultural Center, the first of its kind in the state.
Hendrix College is not the only small Southern school experiencing an influx of Jews. At a time when Jewish communities in small towns across the South are disappearing as younger Jews move into large cities, Jewish student life on small Southern campuses is experiencing an unexpected boom. While large Southern colleges like Emory, Tulane, and the University of Texas at Austin have long been popular choices for Jewish students, small schools beneath the Mason-Dixon have traditionally been devoid of a significant Jewish presence. Now, thanks to a mix of administrative initiatives and organic student efforts, Jewish populations at schools like Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and Elon University in Elon, North Carolina, among others, are experiencing rapid growth.
The influx of Jewish students began in 2002 at Vanderbilt, when the school opened a new Center for Jewish Life in a bald-faced play to attract young Jews. Vanderbilt had just taken on a new chancellor, a former Brown University president named Gordon Gee. Gee saw Jews as a means to increase Vanderbilt’s prestige and wasn’t shy about saying so. According to a 2002 Wall Street Journal article, “Something else is driving the quest for more Jews…about which Vanderbilt is unusually forthright. It wants them to raise its academic standing.” According to Stuart Rockoff, director of the History Department at the Goldring / Woldenberg Institute for Southern Jewish Life, “These schools are obsessed with their ranking. Their thought is that if you are attracting Jewish kids you are attracting better kids.”
Within six years, the Jewish population at Vanderbilt has ballooned from 4 percent of the student body to 13 percent. Today, the international Hillel website refers to a “Jewish renaissance taking place at Vanderbilt University.” Chabad emissaries also have set up shop.
While top-down administrative efforts like those at Vanderbilt play a part in the growth of Jewish student life at many of these campuses, some of the increased Jewish activity has been a product of initiatives led by students and individual faculty members who say that they are trying to approximate their hometown Jewish communities.
At Millsaps College, a tiny Methodist school, religious studies professor James Bowley has led an effort to attract more young Jews by placing ads in Deep South Jewish Voice, meeting with Jewish leaders, and helping distribute scholarships. Millsaps had just four Jewish students in 2002. As a result of Bowley’s efforts, the population has increased to around 25. Bowley hopes that it will hit 80 in the near future.
At other schools, students and administrators have worked together to bring more Jews to campus. At Elon University, students wrote the initial grants that led to the development of a Jewish communal infrastructure on campus. At Hendrix, students led the effort to expand the school’s Hillel.
The Jewish communities that these students have built are uniquely adapted to their Southern milieu. Ari Dubin, the executive director of the Vanderbilt Hillel, is careful to make sure his Hillel fits into the life of the campus. Non-Jewish students are encouraged to use the facilities. “The Kosher vegetarian cafe [at the Center for Jewish Life] was very popular,” said Merisa Gilman, a 2006 Vanderbilt graduate. “[Non-Jewish] students knew they were in the Schulman Center, but not that it was necessarily a Jewish space.”
“It needs to be a comfortable space for all students, or Jewish students feel like walking in the door is making a statement,” Dubin said.
Ginsberg said that at Hendrix, Hillel activities are often geared towards attracting non-Jews. “If we choose to cater only to our own, that is a sure way to ensure that we do not last much longer,” he said. At Elon, Hillel student president Susan Esrock says that most of her group’s events have an educational component, during which they answer non-Jew’s questions and explain Jewish customs.
While Northern Jews often assume that the Bible Belt is a homogenous and xenophobic place, no students, advisers, or administrators noted any increased anti-Semitism on campus in response to the growing Jewish populations. “[Elon] is in the South so people think that there are harsh feelings toward Jews, but it’s totally not the case,” said Esrock. According to Ginsberg, “Even though we are in the minority here I’ve never felt like the minority. I think it’s a very welcoming campus.”
In fact, small Southern schools have a history of welcoming Jews. Through the 1940s, when both covert and overt quotas limited Jewish populations at elite Northeastern schools, Southern colleges remained open to Jews. While the large Southern public universities had the largest Jewish populations, there was also some presence at the smaller private schools as well. When the quota system officially ended in the late 1940s, Northern Jews flocked to Northeastern universities, establishing a large and steady presence at many elite institutions. Meanwhile, the Jewish populations at the small Southern schools withered.
Today, these communities are being slowly resurrected. Students and faculty alike described a fascination with Jewish customs among non-Jewish students. This, leaders say, is healthy, a strong motivator for the community to increase its exposure. One of the most popular programs at each of these schools is the annual construction of a sukkah, which Jewish and non-Jewish students both visit. On this new frontier of Jewish student settlement, encounters like these speak to an experience that goes beyond administrative concerns about school rankings.
