Yale’s Senior Societies never tapped a single Jew in seventy-three years

Evidence

In the seventy-three years that the Senior Societies had been in existence they had never tapped a single Jew. And whatever the feelings of Bella’s boy about whether he was or was not Jewish, there were no doubts in the minds of his classmates. In his memoir of life at Yale, poet Leonard Bacon, an ‘09er, would begin a description of Moses with the words “I saw…a most attractive Jew.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 164

“The competition that counted at Yale was the competition to get to the top of that pyramid,” Moses’ classmate says. “If you weren’t in at least a Junior Fraternity, you were a nobody.” But the competition was not open; it was largely based on family background, social connections and prep-school associations. And to no one was it closed more tightly than to Jews, of whom there were five in Moses’ class—listed as “Hebrews” in the Freshman Blue Book and lumped with the class’s eighteen Roman Catholics under “Miscellaneous Denominations.” In the seventy-three years that the Senior Societies had been in existence they had never tapped a single Jew. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ interest in how ruling-class markers encode exclusion, and to sumptuary-style status signaling. — connects to: Closed social systems drive excluded strivers to build parallel worlds of their own power — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 204; Excluded Yale strivers found relief in Oxford’s inherited, effortless elitism — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 213
• CANDY: “Seventy-three years without tapping one Jew” is an elevator-conversation fact most people find striking.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 164