<p>My favorite line - "At age 22, a year before he earned his Ph.D., Kemeny became Albert Einstein's mathematical assistant. I once asked him why Dr. Einstein, of all people, needed a mathematician. With that gentle, mustached smile, John said, "Einstein wasn't very good at math.""</p>
<p>I went to Dartmouth because of Kemeny and Rassias (LSA was the only way I was ever going to fulfill the language requirement) I didn't even know Kemeny was jewish until yesterday.</p>
<p>One of my mother's cousins-in-law, a man I have known all my life, is a Jew who graduated from Dartmouth some time in the early 50s. So the doors were open to at least some Jews even then. (His older brother, whom my mother dated when she was in college, had gone to Princeton and graduated around 1950.)</p>
<p>For reasons that should be pretty obvious, a lot of doors opened around that time. Isidore Dyen was the first Jew to be hired as a tenure-track professor at Yale College, and that was in the late 1940s. (There had been Jewish faculty at the Law School, at least, long before that.) Harold Bloom, still very much with us, was the first Jew to receive tenure in the Yale English Department (something that is still a little hard to believe). Change, once it started, happened pretty quickly.</p>
<p>Just wanted to note that UChicago also has an very active AEPi chapter, which provides a really good place for Jewish students to meet one another and socialize. Alpha</a> Epsilon Pi - Welcome!</p>
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I can't speak confidently about Cornell
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<p>Cornell is a huge place where being Jewish is completely mainstream. The necessary facilities (such as a kosher dining hall) are available for those who want to be observant, but of course that group makes up only a small portion of the Jewish population. </p>
<p>Cornell may be out in the sticks, but it's not Dartmouth.</p>
<p>So I hope it's OK to ask this question: Getting back to the OP, does this mean that Jewish applicants will get preference at some schools? For instance, Vanderbilt? Or are they just recruiting, and then the applicant is on his own?</p>
<p>I think the Jews might get a little tip at the schools trying to up their numbers. My daughter is a pretty observant Jew, though, and she'll only consider colleges with an existing Jewish community where keeping Shabbas and kosher food are no big deal. It might be hard to convince a professor at a school with few Jews that you can't take an exam on, for example, Shavuot (a holiday in May).</p>
<p>Agree that religion will be a small tip factor at those schools with extremely low Jewish populations that are courting Jews. But even a student who is not religiously observant needs to be certain he/she will be comfortable at a school where he/she will almost certainly be one of only a tiny handful of Jews on campus. (The same assessment must be made by ANY student who is considering a school where he/she will be part of a small cultural/ethnic/racial/religious minority.) Some kids will thrive on a campus where they're outside the mainstream. Others will not. </p>