The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Jerome Karabel

By F. Dobbin. 2006

The Chosen is a dispiriting book for a college professor to read, not only because it recounts a history of anti-Semitism that was blatant, deliberate, and well known, not only because so many intellectual leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not merely complicit in discrimination, but architects of it, but perhaps most of all, because so much of the system originally designed to keep Jews out of Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale is still in place, at those Ivy League schools and across the country. The Chosen does not make me proud to have taught for nearly 20 years at Princeton and Harvard, schools that have yet to foreswear admissions practices originally designed to keep Jews out. But The Chosen does make me proud to share a discipline with its author.