Students protest Israel across the entrance to Yale prior to the May 2024 commencement ceremony at Yale University. (REUTERS/Michelle McLoughlin) Yale College’s Jewish enrollment sank to just 9.5 percent in 2024, below where it sat in the 1940s, when the Ivy League school capped the number of “alien” Jews on campus, according to data from the Yale Chaplain’s Office. Yale College dean Pericles Lewis isn’t concerned. He says the school’s diminished Jewish community is “thriving.” Lewis’s comment came in response to a new report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance on Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League. It identified the decline in the Jewish population at Yale as particularly troubling, given that Yale has actually increased the size of its undergraduate classes in recent years and seen a decline in the number of Jewish undergraduates nonetheless. Lewis told the Yale Daily News that the numbers would be “very hard to measure,” though the Chaplain’s Office has done so for decades, with data tracing back to the 1940s. At that time, according to the office’s “Religious Diversity at Yale” survey, 9.9 percent of undergraduates were Jewish, slightly higher than the 9.5 percent cited for the classes of 2024-2027, the lowest number in decades. That marks 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. In the 1940s, Yale imposed ruthless quotas on the number of Jews admitted in an attempt to address what university leaders described as the “Jewish problem,” according to Dan Oren’s history of anti-Semitism at Yale, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale. The university’s former admissions chairman, Robert Corwin, imposed a quota after Jews made up 13 percent of the 1921 freshman class. Corwin wrote at the time that Jewish students lacked “attributes of refinement and honor” and did not “share the ‘ethical code’ of their peers,” according to a separate 2006 book on the topic, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admissions and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, by UC Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel. Corwin and other admissions leaders conspired thereafter to quietly keep Jewish enrollment around 10 percent. Now, roughly 100 years later, the number of Jews at Yale has dipped beneath that level and Yale’s leaders say everything is hunky-dory! Lewis and Yale University chaplain Maytal Saltiel did not respond to a request for comment, but we did get an email from an unnamed Yale spokesman waving away the numbers, which evidently are supposed to provide “a view of the religious diversity at Yale, not to report on the exact percentage of a particular community.” So they’re good for measuring diversity, but not so good for telling us anything about the decline of the Jewish population. READ MORE: As Yale’s Jewish Population Declines to 1940s Quota Levels, University Leaders Say Jewish Community is ‘Thriving’