Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

94 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:89
administration “threatened [Spectator] with the withdrawal of its
subsidy.” 11
Campus denunciations of the Spectator were sometimes explicitly
antisemitic. In April 1935, for example, Columbia junior Robert Bellaire
condemned the Spectator in a letter to the editor as “the voice of the Social
Problems Club, the Columbia Communist, the Jewish Students Society,
[and] the National Student League.” This elicited an angry rejoinder from
editor Wechsler, who noted “the grave significance” of Bellaire’s
antisemitic conflation of Jews and Communists. Wechsler pointed out that
the Columbia Jewish Students Society firmly opposed left-wing radicalism.
He added facetiously that Bellaire had “omitted only the Spectator’s link
with international Jewish bankers.” 12
During his first year at Columbia, Robert Holway Burke became fascinated
with the student struggle against Nazism, as well as campus labor
conflict. He was born in Hubbard, Ohio, on September 4, 1914, and grew
up in the nearby steel manufacturing center of Youngstown, raised by parents
shaped by Irish republicanism. Burke’s father, Geoffrey Burke, a former
steelworker and a Democrat, was a retail coal dealer and hauler and
identified as a follower of Henry George. Terry Burke, his youngest son,
recalled that “[t]he Irish tradition of struggling for justice and fairness . . .
was arguably the predominant influence” on Robert Burke, who “never
tired of singing the songs of his forefathers’ struggles.” 13
Robert Burke faced formidable financial obstacles in attending Columbia.
He toiled for three years in Youngstown in a steel mill and as a truck
driver before enrolling. During the two years at Columbia before his expulsion
he often worked thirty hours a week, even washing dogs and selling his
own blood. James Wechsler claimed that Burke “set an employment record
on Morningside Heights.” Burke’s jobs at Columbia included theater usher,
soda jerk, and boxing instructor at a private school. Wechsler noted that
Burke, “having saved his dollars,” went to Columbia for an education, and
refused to assume the role of “quiet ‘dumb athlete.’ ” Alone among Columbia’s
athletes, Burke campaigned against American participation in the Ber-
Games in Berlin in 1936, on account of the Nazi attitude toward non-Aryans.” The
New York Times, December 30, 1933.
11. Robert Burke, “Why Columbia Told Me Not to Return,” Champion of
Youth, August 1936, 12.
12. Columbia Spectator, April 17 and 23, 1935.
13. Terry Burke, telephone interview by Norwood, August 21, 2009; Terry
Burke to Norwood, August 7, 2010.