AHC: Make Yeshiva University the Jewish Notre Dame
- Thread starter IanS
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With a nationally recognized top football program? Almost impossible. Yeshiva University outside of athletics is more like a Jewish version of an Ivy League school though, at least for most of its existence, until it ran into some issues in the past decade and had to sell the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to Montefiore Health Group.
You could make Fordham kind of similar (as a Catholic school with a top football program) if you have a PoD at about 1920 or so. Fordham was actually a great football school in the interwar years but they suspended football during World War II, which pretty much ended their time as a big football school
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Right, right. Not familiar with American football myself, so was thinking of a very different kind of challenge.
The problem is that Yeshiva University is more Jewish than University of Norte Dame is Catholic meaning that YU is more geared to serve the Jewish community that was traditionally shut out of the more Protestant founded Ivies and does not have many students from other religions, while ND has been more accepting of students who are not Catholic and thus can recruit from a much larger pool of top rank high school players.
If you look at the record of the great players and coaches at ND who were not Catholic you would find names like Knute Rockne (later converted to Catholicism), George (The Gipper) Gipp and Ara Parseghian.
If you look at the record of the great players and coaches at ND who were not Catholic you would find names like Knute Rockne (later converted to Catholicism), George (The Gipper) Gipp and Ara Parseghian.
There are far more Catholics than Jews. And Jews were much less interested in athletic success than non-Jews generally. The tremendous success of Jews in intellectual fields has meant that Jews tend to work at that, rather than sports. It takes a lot of time and hard work for even a talented person to become a top-rank athlete, or a top-rank scholar or professional. With Jews largely devoting themselves to the latter, there were never enough Jewish top athletes to establish anything like Notre Dame, even had they been concentrated at Yeshiva.
