29^th Annual Prof. Frank L. Klement Lecture

"The History of Jewish Students in American Catholic Universities"

Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024 at 5:30 p.m. in the Beaumier Suites, Raynor Library

In an era when many private colleges, universities, and professional schools enacted quotas on Jewish students,Catholic institutions remained open and indeed expanded the number of Jewish students. Particularly important were the schools under Catholic auspices which trained doctors. lawyers, pharmacists, as well as schools of business as these represented gateway institutions for the children of Jewish immigrants yearning to enter the middle class.

Nearly all extant sources including those of Jewish undergraduates reveal a welcoming environment which unlike the private schools, many founded by Protestant denominations, opened their doors for these young Jews.

Why did Catholic schools behave so differently and how did the various shareholders—faculty, administrators and the Catholic and Jewish students—experience this aberrant openness in the 1910s through the 1930s?

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Dr. Hasia Diner
Professor Emerita, New York University

Hasia Diner is professor emerita at the Department of History and the Skirball 
Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. During her unusually prolific career, Dr. Diner has authored and edited over twenty books, including Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, and Immigration: An American History with Carl Bon Tempo. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and several National Jewish Book Awards, and served in important leadership roles, including director of the Goldstein-Goren 
Center for American Jewish History and president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

Click here to register.

Sponsored by the Marquette University Department of History
For more information, call 414.288.7217

 

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The Klement Lecture brings to campus distinguished scholars in American history. Established in 1992 to honor Prof. Frank L. Klement, the lecture series was devoted originally to the history of the U.S. Civil War, but it now includes all fields of American history. Prof. Klement received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1946 and joined the history department at Marquette University in 1948. He served at Marquette for twenty-seven years before his retirement at the rank of professor emeritus, and he died in 1994 at the age of 86. Prof. Klement’s scholarship focused on the Civil War era, focusing on northern dissent. He is best remembered for his monographs The Copperheads in the Middle West (1960) and The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (1970). Earlier lectures in the Klement series can be ordered from Marquette University Press, and Kent State University Press published several lectures in the 2008 volume More than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era, edited by Kristen Foster and James Marten.

 

Previous Klement Lectures