Assignment America: Advertising for Jews
By John Bloom
UPI Reporter at Large
From the Life & Mind Desk
Published 3/4/2003 8:51 PM
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NEW YORK, March 3 (UPI) -- Vanderbilt University, my beloved alma mater, is advertising for Jews. I'm wondering exactly how that works. Do they put up "Jews Needed" signs in the Catskills?
They want more Jewish students because they're smart. Vanderbilt is not the first school to notice that Jews -- with only 2 percent of the population -- make up 33 percent of the Ivy League and consistently score higher on College Boards (1161 against the national average of 1020), so they've decided that merit scholarships for Jews might lead to a pumping up of the school's status, or ... uh ... something.
At any rate, I have to laugh, because one of my closest friends my freshman year was a Jew from Massachusetts who toughed out two semesters and then fled home to the comforting cloisters of Brandeis. He said he just couldn't deal with "The South," whatever that means.
I think maybe he meant me.
We were roommates in old musty Barnard Hall, and after a couple weeks together -- weeks mostly spent exploring our newfound freedom at a beer-and-pizza joint called Rotier's -- he asked me, out of the blue, what I thought about Jews.
I told him he was the first Jew I'd ever met. I mean, I'm sure I'd met other Jews who didn't TELL me they were Jews, but when you grow up in Little Rock, Ark., you don't hear a lot of references to the High Holy Days. My mom assures me there's a fully functioning synagogue in Little Rock and that many of our leading Arkansas citizens are Jewish, but then my mom was always an ecumenical multi-cultural multi-ethnic sort who keeps up with things like that out of some sort of civic responsibility.
I think I can safely say that most people who grew up with me never THOUGHT about Jews, much less had any idea we should have an opinion about them. If anything, they would be in a class with, say, Canadians. We know they're up there, but they don't make much of an impression.
But my friend wasn't buying it. He thought I must think SOMETHING about Jews, and what about the Ku Klux Klan, which expressly targets Jews?
Honestly, I told him, I was so sheltered that not only had I never encountered a Jew, I had also never encountered a Klansman -- but from the popular image, I would say the Klan was more concerned with tormenting blacks than Jews. I know the Kluxers hate Jews, too, but I think Jews only score a 3 or a 4 on the 10-point bigotry scale.
He was still suspicious, thinking privately -- he told me much later, after we had bonded -- that he thought I was lying to hide my natural anti-Semitism.
At any rate, this led to lots of Jew Talk. (Undergraduates, in case you've forgotten your own college days, seem to have infinite amounts of time to talk any subject totally to death.)
He pointed out that I have a Jewish name. I said something like, "You own NAMES?" I thought the name Bloom was merely English. But he made a fairly convincing case for Blooms being more often Jewish than not, and I was especially suspect because my middle name is Irving. Perhaps I was denying my heritage? Perhaps my family was Judaically apostate?
Again, I thought Irving was just a lousy family name -- I got it from my maternal grandfather -- but he insisted it was ridiculously Jewish, even though he couldn't answer my challenge to name the Old Testament Jew named Irving. I never heard of the prophet Irving, or King Irving, or a high priest named Irving, or any notable Israelite to speak of named Irving -- but then again, we were drinking beer, not reading the Bible.
As time went on, I started introducing him as "my friend the paranoid Jew," just to needle him. The truth was, I was just as much an outsider at Vanderbilt as he was. It was a rich kids' school, and I was a full scholarship student. Our dorm was full of preppies and blueblood surnames from old Southern literary families, Tidewater Virginia aristocrats, the sons of High Church Episcopal clergy, and the relatively "new" money of Texas oil.
There were also ACTUAL VANDERBILTS -- do you know how many Vanderbilts there are out there? -- who would send their kids down from New York to study at Great-granddaddy Cornelius's university.
At any rate, I loved the school, high walls and all, because of its intellectual rigor, and he hated it because of its lack of democracy -- and because of its intellectual rigor. He was a brooder, and a little bit of a slacker when it came to the books. (He tended to give up when something was hard.) I was a "What difference does it make?" kind of guy and a library rat.
He was inevitably the butt of sophomoric jokes because he took everything so seriously. I was, too. So was everyone. But he took more than his share. I tended to think he deserved it, because he was too nervous, too sensitive, too ready to get offended. I told him, "That's the purpose of the abuse -- to get that reaction out of you. As soon as you stop reacting, they'll stop."
And then he got blackballed.
I didn't even realize that the process of blackballing involved an actual black ball, but it was explained to me later that, after my friend and I had gone through freshman rush together, and after I was hoisted aloft by the raucous brothers of Sigma Nu and carried through the frat house and plied with alcohol until I was drunk enough to pledge the fraternity, there was a meeting at which my friend was discussed. Then a jar was passed around the room, and each of the 80 members placed either a white or a black ball in the jar. There were several black ones in there. Just one black one is enough to keep you out.
Two things about this:
A meeting wasn't required in my case. There was no white ball/black ball ceremony for me because I was on some kind of list. I was "sponsored" by a member. The meeting only took place when there were friends of pledges who also wanted to pledge.
Second, the meeting for my friend was secret and the reasons for his exclusion were secret. Obviously it was not THAT secret or we wouldn't have known it took place. But because we don't know what was said, we can't say with certainty that he was excluded because he was Jewish. He could have been excluded because he was socially awkward. You can be excluded from a fraternity for a lot of reasons.
"Okay," I told him, "you'll join ZBT."
Zeta Beta Tau was the Jewish fraternity.
But he didn't want to join ZBT. Every Jew joined ZBT. If you were Jewish, you were automatically admitted to ZBT. He wanted to be accepted by a non-Jewish fraternity, and now that we knew the blackballing had taken place, he was convinced it had something to do with "The South." Jews were not welcome in The South, he said. He was brooding. He was not taking it well. He was going over and over it in his mind.
I was having second thoughts about the whole fraternity thing anyway, I told him, so my plan was: I quit Sigma Nu. We both join ZBT. He said no, he didn't want any dramatic acts of self-sacrifice. But he kept brooding.
One night I dragged him to ZBT, and just to make sure we were both accepted, I wrote "Irving Bloom" on my nametag. We were there on "Jeopardy" night, which involved the entire fraternity playing the "Home Jeopardy" game, with an impressive twist -- they had constructed the whole set of the game show, complete with the huge answer board, and had an announcer who could do a perfect Don Pardo impersonation. I could already see that these guys were more fun than the Sigma Nu guys.
So we started hanging out at ZBT. He pledged. I was technically a Sigma Nu so I couldn't pledge, but I never went to the Sigma Nu house. A typical evening at ZBT would feature a hillbilly band from Kentucky -- 60-year-old banjo players who would make jokes about the Easter bunny, not realizing where they were -- followed by a lounge comic from the seedy Printer's Alley area of downtown Nashville. These guys were ENTERTAINERS. It was a festive place.
One night they hired Heaven Lee, the famous Nashville stripper, to moderate a seminar on women's rights. Now THAT was fun. Sigma Nu would have hired her to take her clothes off.
So even though we both ended up in a better place, my friend went through all these stages of anger, sadness, self-pity, gloom, and occasional sessions in which he would grill me about the South. We were TAUGHT to hate Jews, right?
Well, uh, NO.
Like I say, he was Dostoevskian in his ability to mope. And even though I thought he'd been shafted, I was angry at him. I don't like people who insist on their rights all the time, or nurse grudges, or seek the approval of people who despise them. I told him he was being a wuss. He told me I couldn't see it because I was southern.
The drama ended with an explosion. My Sigma Nu "sponsor" came calling one day. It seems that I hadn't been carrying out my various pledge duties, which involved memorizing all the names of my Sigma Nu brothers, knowing the names of their girlfriends, bringing two dates a week to the frat house, always having change for a dollar and a cigarette lighter on my person, sitting in the Sigma Nu section at football games -- I can't remember all the rules, but they were extensive.
"You know what it says here in the Sigma Nu handbook?" I said to the guy. "It says, 'Not everyone is Sigma Nu material.' You know what? I'm not Sigma Nu material. I quit."
The sponsor became immediately defensive. He said, "But you ARE Sigma Nu material." And then he asked me if it was because of the blackball.
Yes and no, I told him. "Did the word 'Jew' come up right before the blackball?"
"No," he said. "I don't know about that." Which I thought was a curious answer.
At any rate, my quitting -- actually the technical term is "de-pledging" -- resulted in WEEKS of my being visited in the middle of the night by various Sigma Nu brothers trying to talk me out of it. They pointed out that no one had de-pledged since the Depression. They pointed out they were the fraternity of William Faulkner, and I was thumbing my nose at that heritage. (They knew I was a writer.) They said all kinds of increasingly crazy things, and I told my friend, "You know what? This really BOTHERS them."
And it did. It bothered them so much that eventually I was declared a non-person. Every Sigma Nu was instructed not to speak to me, and to cross the street rather than pass me on the sidewalk. The instruction was repeated for each new class of Sigma Nu inductees, so that the silent treatment stretched over four years and included about 250 people sworn to snub me.
The only pleasure I could take in it was to speak to the Sigma Nus myself in such a way that would hopefully make them WANT to respond. The first line of the official Sigma Nu chant -- I'm not making this up -- is "Hi-rippity hoop-di-do, nothin's better than Sigma Nu."
So for four years, every time I saw one of these guys, I would say, "Hi-rippity." That's it. Just "Hi-rippity." Using their sacred words in an ambiguously mocking way. Ambiguity is always good when you're dealing with morons.
By the second semester, my Jewish friend wanted out. He applied to Brandeis and got accepted.
"That's like joining ZBT," I told him. "They have to accept you because you're a Jew."
But that's what he wanted. That summer I visited him in Boston, and he showed me the Brandeis campus. Then I stayed with his family, creating social panic because I was the first Gentile overnight guest. His mother placed a can of Budweiser next to my plate at every meal, including breakfast. It was so strange that I eventually said to my friend, "What's up with the beer?"
"She said she didn't know what Gentiles eat, and so she was asking me for weeks to tell her what your eating habits were, and all I said was, 'I don't know, he just drinks a lot of beer.'"
Obviously, I was doing my part to strengthen the image of The South in Orthodox Jewish households.
And then we lost touch, as undergraduates tend to do. He had never been a popular guy, or a particularly social guy, but after he was gone, I sometimes thought that maybe he was right. Maybe "The South" expelled him. That's the way it's done, by indirection and secrecy. Either he had to be tougher, or we had to be kinder. But the least he could have done is stick around long enough to help me fight off the Sigma Nu hordes.
And now Vanderbilt is recruiting Jews. Well, hi-rippity to that.
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John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at
joebob@upi.com or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.
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