Dress British, Think Yiddish: How Jews Came to Yale in Ivy League Clothing

From the 1920s to the 1960s, Jewish clothiers supplied the accoutrements of success—the Ivy League style—at American universities, but especially at Yale, one of the oldest and most traditional. At the same time Yale admitted few Jews as students. And then a funny thing happened: as the penchant for repp ties and natural-shoulder suits declined at Yale, the influx of Jews—and other minorities—increased. The story of how this came about is related by someone who was on the scene at Yale in the 1950s, at the dawn of the school’s changing attitudes toward diversity, character, and the new meaning of success. Daniel Horowitz, Yale Class of 1960, later became an accomplished historian, but his personal history includes the Jewish penetration of Yale by other than button-down shirts.