“The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education, 1920-1955,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56, no. 2 (2001): 140-141.

Halperin wrote: “Twentieth-century United States quotas restricting the access of Jewish students and physicians to medical school and postgraduate training were a response to the massive wave of Russian Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century and the interest of these immigrants and their children in medical education. From 1880 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, two million Russian Jews immigrated to the United States, joining about 400,000 Jews already in the country. Following World War I and the Red Scare, the United States saw a rise in nativist feeling and a growth in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan that targeted population groups with foreign roots. Overt anti-Jewish prejudice in the academic community in the United States reached its zenith when the children of these eastern European Jewish immigrants began to enter college in large numbers.”

Read the above description and answer the following question:

a. Explain this quotation fully.

b. Why did schools adopt a quota to limit the number of Jewish medical students around 1900? What were the general trends in immigration that contributed to this development? Give another example of anti-immigrant policy from the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.

c. Briefly describe some of the ways that Jews responded to the obvious discrimination against Jewish medical school applicants.

d. Why did the quotas at medical schools begin to disappear after World War II? How did this reflect general trends in the U.S.?