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Priorities For Good Will Reporting on on Experiment in Inter-Faith Education /»> Raimi Morris Y Kehtzeh Katior Col (.Ml.in “The bigot has found confirmation for his prejudices in Coughlin's i n ions mouthing*." Editor's note: Unhid Kertzer, Jewish professor at the l niversUy of Iowa School of Religion and director of the ll'nai ll'rith llillel Foundation at Iowa, reports the findings groti ing oat of a unique experiment in interfaith educa tion at his school. W HAT areas in the I. nited Stales offer the most fertile field for prejudice, the obscure village or the over-crowded city? Who is most intolerant towards minority groups, the un educated. unskilled worker or the sophisticated, col lege-bred socialite? Does more intimate associa tion with Jews tend to decrease or heighten anti- Jew ish sentiments? These are a few of the myriad questions which confronted our Seminar on Inter-faith Problems during the past year. As a result of nation-wide in terest in the first of the Iowa inter-faith studies, we undertook a second series of experiments dealing with the fascinating theme of ('.hristian-Jewish re lations. The course was offered by the School of Re ligion of the l niversity of Iowa, where B nai B'rith maintains a llillel Foundation, and was open h\ invitation only to a selected group of seniors and graduate students who were leaders in the Methodist. Quaker. Presbyterian. I nitarian. Kpis- copalian. Catholic and Jewish groups. The reac tions of the seminar members were not recorded, as the\ were an unusually broadminded group, re flecting few of the prejudices in whic h we were interested. Meeting two hours weekly, we analyzed the sources of tension and friction between Cath olics. Protestants and Jews, and in laboratory fashion we placed anti-Semitism on the laboratory table as one might isolate an infection for tin* pur poses of study. One member of the group, for instance, returned from her home town with a malicious story about Jews avoiding the draft through |M»litical influence. W e proceeded to “put the rumor on the laboratory table" and asked ourselves “Who made the state ment? How did it spread? W ho stands to gain or lose by circulation of the rumor? What is the liest technique for rooting out the ‘infection ? Four experts were brought in for counsel; a po litical sc ientist, a sociologist, a psychologist and an educator, all pre-eminent in their field. Our main task was to get a cross-section of student opinion, not only on the Iowa campus, but at four small de nominational schools representing the Methodist. Congregationalist. Lutheran and Quaker branches of Protestantism. I he opinions of 400 students were recorded anonymously, young men and wom en who represented every type of community and everv type of home background. We constituted ourselves a fact-finding board, who were interested not in making inane pledges of mutual affection, but in ferreting out those areas of misunderstanding which kept us apart. A bib- liograph\ was compiled of every book and maga zine article published in the past ten years which might add a little light on tin* fierplexing problem of Jewish-(lliristian relations. The questionnaire results gave us much food for thought. Apparently we had over-estimated the amount of intolerance which the average Ameri can boy and girl have imbibed from a prejudice- ridden world. From all groups came ample evi dence that our young jieople did not share the big otry of some of their elders. The size of their home community seemed to be directly related to the extent of prejudice. To quote from our “chart of prejudice" the scores were: Farm community .44.8 Village 28.4 Democracy \etcr Sanctified Murder anil Violence I ow II Lit\ 26.6 24.4 iZero representing a complete absence of prejudice.) Organizations devoted to “good-will" and anti- defamation will probably find confirmation of their observation that a large part of their work should be ft x used upon the rural regions of Amer ica. It might be noted that the metnqiolitan dweller reflected more extreme views in both directions: where intolerance was present, it was more marked and more vitiqierutive. The type of discrimination e\ inced by the large-city dweller was likely to be economic or social. Among the farm imputation, we were surprised to discover that some Christians who expressed a willingness to employ Jews would not enter a synagogue under any circumstances! Apparently the word synagogue has a mysterious und sinister connotation for some villagers far removed from Jewish contacts. In general it was found that the religious motif dominated small town prejudice, und economic considerations col ored the views id the urban non-Jew. After an extended study of the literature dealing with economic discrimination against Jews, we were amazed to find among our young |>enple there was hardly a suggestion of the prejudice in theory. The average college boy declared that he would not hesitate to employ a Jew. By and large he would rather work for a non-Jew, but even this discrim ination was not marked. One might speculate about these young people when they enter the business and professional world. Will they adopt the line of least resistance and fail into the traditional policy of discrimination, or w ill they resist the well-estab lished custom? In recent years I have heard from the lips of disap|N)inted young Ph.D.’s the old story of “Not Wanted" as uni versity instructors. The lame excuse offered by deans in various parts of the country was that their students re sented a Jew ish instructor. Our exper iments revealed that the charge is ut terly without foundation. Students rarely inquired into the religious af filiation of their teachers, and in sev eral cases actually expressed a pref- I Please turn to page 201 The Sot thf.rn Israelite [7]