1. This letter of recommendation to Harvard in 1936 seems strange to our eyes but it follows a common form of that time used for Jewish students -- assuring the school that the applicant is the right type of Jew ("one of the outstanding products of that Race.") https://twitter.com/abrahamjoseph/status/1331275274596519945 …
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3. In a fine footnote (always read his footnotes!) Novick rightly notes the moral ambiguity of these letters. The writers wanted to help the Jewish applicants get into programs so had to address anti-Semitic concerns, but in do so replicated anti-Semitism.pic.twitter.com/SQ4nKG9eJG
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4. I don't think you can understand mid- 20th century academia without understanding it was super-WASP and very carefully exercising a gatekeeping role about admitting in people who were marginally white. Some more examples.pic.twitter.com/Lt5J0Q7Omi
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5. Anyways, the letters of recommendation from the past are very eye-opening about the actual social systems and biases that shaped hiring & the gatekeeping around ethnicity. Would be curious to know if letters of current era reveal the same.
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6. Appending this here because original tweet (with screenshot) has been deleted:https://twitter.com/abrahamjoseph/status/1331271124278267907 …
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This reminds me of Himmler's speech about how every German knows his "one splendid Jew - the rest are swine, but this one is good." I think the term "damning with faint praise" applies here.
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That’s a book I haven’t seen mentioned for quite some time. He was an interesting cat.
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I remember reading Novick’s then-new That Noble Dream in my Ph.D. seminar and thereafter viewing the somewhat forbidding Dr. Handlin with a goodly dose of rachmones over Harvard’s WASP antisemiten whenever I encountered him in Robinson Hall. (To be sure, he still intimidated me.)
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