The Dirty Bicker: Princeton, the Jews, and the Scandal of 1958

Summary

In February 1958, at the end of the annual “bicker” period—when Princeton sophomores seek admission to the university’s prestigious eating clubs—an unusually high number of students got no offers—and most of them were Jews. The “dirty bicker,” as it came to be known, was a troubling episode that laid bare the persistence of antisemitism in higher education. The Dirty Bicker tells the story of the affair that rocked the world of upper-class privilege, shedding light on the challenges that ambitious, upwardly mobile young Jewish men faced in postwar America.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with the men involved, both the rejected students and those who rejected them, Mark Oppenheimer transports readers to a time when status was tied to family heritage and even the ability to select the right blazer for the occasion. He addresses questions about what it means to belong—both in the Ivy League and in society more broadly. Were students blackballed because they were Jewish or because they were public schoolers in a pecking order presided over by preps? Were there quotas or just a gentleman’s agreement not to admit too many “undesirables”? And what was the role of the administration in perpetrating a system that treated some boys as more equal than others?

A must-listen for anyone who wants to understand campus antisemitism today, The Dirty Bicker is an absorbing account of a national scandal that spoke to the barriers confronting minority and working-class students in their struggle to be accepted in the upper echelons of society.