Sapir Journal, Volume Six Summer 2022
“The lecture halls in our law schools are now filled with professors and students who believe these things. In their view, the profession is no longer an essential gatekeeper of the rule of law, a key component of the American founding. Instead, it’s a part of the problem: a white, racist, oppressive clique that uses its claims of fairness to mask its oppression of the powerless.”
It may seem strange to look back nostalgically at the mid- and even late-20th century as a time when the mainstream of the legal profession offered a warm and welcoming place for Jewish students. Harvard and Yale, among other elite schools, engaged in overt discrimination until the 1960s. Jewish students generally attended less prestigious law schools, often working during the day and going to class at night. The large prestigious law firms were reserved for white Anglo-Saxon lawyers with the right connections.
Jewish lawyers were forced to strike out on their own, hanging a shingle or joining a small firm. Even after Jews started gaining admission to the top schools, they were excluded from positions of power and socially ostracized. Hardly a heyday.
And yet the current climate at law schools, if not always as systemically hostile, may be even harder for Jewish students to navigate.