Jessica Costescu writes for the Washington Free Beacon about disturbing developments at a major Ivy League school.
Yale College’s Jewish enrollment is down from 16.4 percent in the 2010s to just 9.5 percent in 2024, a level comparable to the 1940s, when the Ivy League school imposed quotas aimed at excluding “alien” Jews from campus, according to data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office. Yale leaders said they aren’t concerned by the figures and that the school’s diminished Jewish community is “thriving.”
The comments from Yale College dean Pericles Lewis and University Chaplain Maytal Saltiel came in wake of a new report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance titled, “A Narrowing Gate: Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and Its Peers,” that identified the decline in the Jewish population at Yale as particularly troubling, given that Yale has increased the size of its undergraduate classes in recent years and has seen a decline in the number of Jewish undergraduates nonetheless.
While Lewis told the Yale Daily News that the school has a “thriving” Jewish community, he said the numbers would be “very hard to measure”—though that’s exactly what the university Chaplain’s Office does, with data tracing back to the 1940s.
Lewis also said that “So many students—like, I’m half Jewish—a lot of people might consider themselves Jewish but not answer the question in a particular way,” though the Chaplain’s office indicates that it accounts for that. “When students cite multiple religious identities, we count each student once (i.e., if a student identifies as Methodist and Muslim, they would be counted as 1/2 of a person in each category).”
The “Religious Diversity at Yale” survey found that 9.5 percent of undergraduate students identify as Jewish, a 42 percent decrease from the 16.4 percent of students who identified as Jewish in the 2010s and a 52 percent decrease from the 19.9 percent of students who identified as such in the 2000s.
