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Who Is Joining NYU in the Gulf?

Branch President, leading professor are Jews

by
Allison Hoffman
June 22, 2010

In case you hadn’t heard, New York University is opening a new campus this fall in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich emirate that has also attracted outposts of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. The project is the brainchild of NYU’s current president, John Sexton, who says his effort to build “the world’s honors college” is a first step toward a self-consciously globalist network that will outclass anything much wealthier institutions like Harvard or Yale or Stanford can offer back at home. Over the weekend, the New York Times wrote about the efforts to attract a top-flight inaugural class, and yesterday the university announced that its 189-person Class of ’14 includes students from 39 countries speaking 43 languages and with average SAT scores of 770 (reading) and 780 (math). Naturally, we wondered: How many of these smarty-pants brainiacs are Jewish?

The university has emphatically advertised the religious diversity of faculty heading to the Gulf—Branch Campus President Alfred Bloom, formerly head of Swarthmore College, is Jewish, as is Amir Minsky, who will be teaching a course in the development of German ideologies of the 19th century. But as far as the students go, not so much: Spokesman Josh Taylor told us that the university, despite saying that it expects religious as well as national, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity at the new campus, hasn’t polled students about their sectarian affiliation. Taylor checked, and it turns out that neither Hebrew nor Yiddish are among the languages students reported being able to speak. So: If you’re Jewish, and you’re among the lucky group joining Erin Meekhof of Woodbridge, Va., in September, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!

Allison Hoffman is a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Her Twitter feed is @allisont_dc.