support from the rest of the college, now that the
prejudice had abated. And since they could not join any of the other
fraternities, why should they not have one of their own?

I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be fair to myself as well as to
them. That same old repugnance of being identified with a distinctly
Jewish propaganda troubled me and made me turn from them. And yet it
wasn't only that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew that,
according to my point of view, theirs was not the proper solution. Fire
can fight fire, perhaps--in proverbs, anyhow--but discrimination is not
to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men
objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that
fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those
fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and
founding a fraternity of their own--a brotherhood which should be open
only to Jews?

That is what I thought. I may have been wrong--and the excellent records
of the Jewish fraternity chapters in various colleges and universities
do perhaps prove me wrong--but I could not bring myself to join them. I
was heartily glad the whole heated question of race and race prejudice
was abated. I asked, for myself, only that I be given something of the
fair-play that other men had. I was working hard for the college. I was
doing all that my talents enabled me to do and I was sure that, sooner
or later, there would be the reward.

This reward did come, definitely. It came at the end of May when, at
the height of the reaction against the whole year of prejudice, I was
chosen for the college senior society. It was a public election, held on
the afternoon of one of the most important baseball games. There were
crowds to watch the ceremony--students and graduates, young girls and
parents ... so that the memory of the green campus and the banks of
pretty gowns and parasols, the sunshine and the cheering will be with me
till I die. I remember that there were tears in my eyes as I was chosen
... and that there came to me, with all the cool freshness of the spring
winds, the thought that this was the end, the salvation from out of all
the year's mean, squalid troubles. Here was I, a Jew, raised above all
the other Jews who had ever entered this college ... raised among the
highest, to be a power in the land, to be the champion of all those who
had suffered, the winner th