+       =  

When the Jewish population of the city began to grow, the young Jews decided to aspire to a better life than the life they were forced to live in the ghettos.  Many young people worked hard and were accepted into some of the most prestigious universities.  However, world war one caused the city of New York to hold an immense hatred for the Jewish faith and those who lived by it.  The second generation of young men and women of the Jewish faith were not accepted into the same prestigious universities as they had been in the previous years.  They were given many reasons for the rejections, some elaborately designed to keeps Jews out and some blatantly denying people based on their religion.  This prejudice and the lack of money due to the depression caused a very large number of Jews to shy away from expensive, Ivy League schools and focus on continuing their education at more affordable schools that were close to home. 

City College of New York was the perfect place to achieve their goals.  The school’s population was overwhelmingly Jewish and the classroom aura was the perfect environment to use the competitive nature they gained living in the ghettos.  City College was close to home for the Jewish Immigrants and was a place where they were accepted.  Does this remind you of some place?  While reading Alexander Bloom’s Prodigal Sons, I couldn’t help but realize that there were many similarities between City College in the 1920s and Baruch College in the twenty-first century.  Most of Baruch’s students live only a train ride away and the school has the most diverse population in the city. 

I chose to depict this reading with a few photographs found on Google.  I used the first photograph to depict the Jewish culture and the immigrants of the early 1900s.  The second photograph is used to depict the war that brought such a negative bias to the Jewish immigrants.  Added together, these two photographs equal the rejection of Jews in prestigious universities, being denied an education and a diploma. 

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