In the fall of 2025, Professor Rebecca Kobrin led a class focusing on the history of Jews in New York – and specifically, at Columbia – throughout history. We hope to feature a series of posts that resulted from the research in the class.  This post is by Sonya Saepoff, M.A. ’26.

“Menorah Societies” (described below) populated many college campuses in the early twentieth century. The original Jewish organization was founded at Harvard in 1906 by Jewish students and spread to many college campuses in the 1910s. Columbia’s Menorah Society was founded in 1911 by Jewish students who also sought to address the intellectual concerns of Jews at elite U.S. institutions. In fact, according to their Report of the Convention, the Menorah Society’s eastern preliminary conference was held on January 2, 1912 at Columbia’s campus; this was before the first national conference at University of Chicago in 1913 which established the Intercollegiate Menorah Association (“IMA”).

In 1915, the IMA established the Menorah Journal. According to IMA chancellor and Editor-in-Chief Henry Hurwitz, the journal was established to promote the Menorah idea: “promot[ing] at its college or university the [scientific] study of Jewish history and culture and contemporary Jewish problems.” The Journal was published from 1915 until 1962. Since then, there have been many secondary historiographies written about the Journal and the IMA—(e.g., Wolosky, Fried, Friedmann, Korelitz, Greene, Alter, Strauss, Krupnick, Pappas, Wald, and even a book from Greene).

In Greene’s book, he posits that the IMA and the Journal hosted the early debates on Hebraism (which they defined as the academic—non-religious/non-ritualistic—study of Jewish history, culture and identity) and cultural pluralism (a concept proposed by Harvard philosopher Horace Kallen). Interestingly, Columbia had a loose early connection to cultural pluralism as well. Columbia was uniquely founded with its charter requiring representatives from all “respective religious denominations in [New York] State.” In a 1915 Columbia Spectator article, the author describes many of the Columbia Menorah Society’s goals, which correlated with the IMA’s goals of contributing to the college’s intellectual life by advancing the study of Hebraism and providing an academic setting for debates on modern Jewish problems and Jewish ideals.

However, even before Columbia’s Menorah Society was founded, there was active Jewish life on campus. For instance, Columbia’s Semitic Language Department was established in the late nineteenth century, led by Professor Richard James Horatio Gottheil (who also contributed in the early years of the Menorah Journal). The Menorah Society was not the first Jewish student group on the campus; before the IMA, Zeta Beta Tau (Fig. 1) was founded in 1898 as a “Zionist youth society” before becoming a fraternity. Additionally, a Jewish sorority was founded at Barnard College in 1909, and a Jewish professional pharmacist fraternity (Fig. 2) was established in 1910. However, none of these organizations provided the academic non-religious non-fraternal ideals which the students and the IMA were seeking. Thus, the Menorah Society filled this particular niche as the other Jewish student organizations fulfilled the students’ fraternal and/or religious needs.

The Columbia Spectator archives hold a series of past articles outlining the history of Columbia’s Menorah Society and how it merged with other societies. An article from 1922 describes a meeting where it was proposed that three Jewish student organizations—the Menorah Society, the Zionist Society, and the Jewish Forum of Teachers College—all merge into one Jewish Forum. Another article from 1956 outlines the chronology of Jewish student organizations on Columbia’s campus, noting that Barnard had a Menorah Society by 1942 and that the Jewish Forum would later become the Jewish Students Society (Fig. 3) in 1929—and would later be renamed again as the Seixas Society (Fig. 4) (named after an original Columbia Trustee and pronounced “Seishas”).

In later years, Barnard’s Menorah Society and Columbia’s Seixas Society would merge to become the Seixas-Menorah Society. Notably, Columbia’s original Menorah Society was established before Columbia’s Earl Hall hired a Jewish counselor for students in 1925 (Fig. 5).

Despite the decrease in membership for Columbia’s Menorah Society in the 1920s and resulting combinations with other Jewish student groups—arguably due to Ivy League restrictions on Jewish student admittance—the Menorah idea remained influential on campus intellectual life. The IMA initiated a short-lived Intervarsity Menorah Society which combined Menorah Societies from nearby colleges: NYU, CCNY, Rutgers and Columbia. The IMA even hosted another national convention at Columbia’s campus in December 1929. Additionally, the IMA and Seixas-Menorah Society continued to host lectures by Menorah Journal contributors on topics including, but not limited to: “The Future of Jewish Culture,” “The Jew in the Post-War World,” “Jewish History in US,” “Proposed Solutions to the Jewish Problems,” “Hellenism, Hebraism and Culture,” “Ancient Faiths in a Changing World,” “Minority Groups in Democratic Cultures,” and “The Ultimate Religion.”

Within the archives at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript library, the Menorah Society folder is thin and does not contain many historical items. However, one of the few items it does contain is an article from an undated and unspecified Menorah Society publication which describes Columbia’s Menorah Society at the time and its future goals (Figs. 6-8). One of the key issues discussed in this article concerns local synagogues not being able to “satisfy the academic [Hebraic] mind of the college student” and proposing that “the college itself must afford such instruction.” The text further suggests that Columbia’s Semitics Department is “devoted entirely to graduate work[,]” thus its authors—inspired by Leopold Zunz’s Wissenschaft des Judentums—propose that the University should have a “Department of Jewish Learning” which would teach “courses in the history, the literature, and the problems of the Jewish people[.]” This proposition of a “Department of Jewish Learning,” according to Greene, would eventually become Jewish studies departments at many universities—and specifically for Columbia—its “Center of Israelic Studies” with Professor Salo Baron as its first chair. Later, this department would become the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

As previously mentioned, even after Columbia’s original Menorah Society dissolved/merged, the Journal continued to have an impact on Columbia’s Jewish students. The Jewish counselor at Earl Hall—Rabbi Hoffman—mentioned how the art featured in the Journal was inspiring his students to seek more instances of Jewish visual art. Incidentally, this was the same I. B. Hoffman who won a Menorah Journal essay contest when he was a Columbia student. As many historiographers note, in the 1920s a cohort of Columbia students were recruited by Elliot Cohen (Yale, 1917) to write and edit for the Journal. Among these contributors were writers such as: Clifton Fadiman, Mortimer Adler, Meyer Schapiro, Herbert Solow, Anita Brenner, Tess Slesinger, Albert Halper, Felix Morrow, Henry Rosenthal, and Lionel Trilling. Columbia professors also contributed to the Journal in the 1920s and ‘30s such as Professors Salo Baron and Irwin Edman—the latter who wrote a series of stories on cultural pluralism which, according to Greene, were highly influenced by his time at Columbia.

In sum, there were a multitude of connections between the IMA and Columbia in the early twentieth century—arguably due to Columbia’s significant Jewish student population (Fig. 9) despite the aforementioned admissions restrictions. For more information on the IMA and the Menorah Journal, read the scholarship listed above and Greene’s book: The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism.

Thank you to Michelle Margolis and Jocelyn Wilk for answering questions and helping with archival organization.