Martin Eisenstadt’s Blog

The Dartmouth Review responds. Turns out that “reformed” conservative, fomer Nixon speechwriter and now Obama supporter Jeffrey Hart (an “Obamacon”) was a student of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and wrote a long piece about it in the DR (or ‘TDR’ as apparently they like to call it). Don’t know why no one noticed it sooner.

It’s an odd piece, and I’m not entirely sure I get his point, but in addition to reminiscing about “Christian existentialist” Rosenstock-Huessy (who was born Jewish, converted to Christianity and fled the Nazis to Dartmouth) and his book The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun, Hart has this to say about Jews:

I had come to Dartmouth from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, which, though a public school, required an entrance exam. It was 85 percent Jewish and it seemed to me most of the students had their eyes on Harvard and usually its medical school. The intellectual culture was intense and exhilarating. The faculty to day [sic] would be university professors, but most were Jewish too, and excluded from the desirable. During the 1930s Harry Levin had trouble getting tenure at Harvard, so did Lionel Trilling at Columbia, because they were Jews…..

But where have all the Jews gone, now that Stuyvesant is mostly Asian? What about Harvard? What about medical school? Are the Jews settling for William and Mary? Rollins? Say it ain’t so.

Jeffrey, it ain’t so.

In any case, it’s now clear that Hart DID take classes from E R-H, though he apparently dropped out of Dartmouth and finished his degree at Columbia (because there were more Jewish professors there?).  I’ll leave it to others to decipher Hart.

As for Callahan, it’s still intriguing to think that the future King Abdullah II of Jordan spent his salad days kicking back with the Phi Delts singing “Louie, Louie” and smashing beer cans on his head. It’s no wonder he’s one of America’s biggest allies in the Middle East. And given that he’s surrounded by Iraq, Syria and Israel, I suspect there’s more than a few times that King Abdullah wishes he was back at Dartmouth. On the other hand, Abdullah’s mother was a secretarial assistant on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, so maybe he was just channeling Peter O’Toole.