Today in history, April 13, 1895: French Army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a convicted spy, entered the notorious penal colony on Devil’s Island.

The powerful men who sent Dreyfus there knew he was innocent, but lies are more powerful than men.

What made it convenient for them was the fact that Dreyfus was a Jew.

The daughter of a former student of mine was recently admitted to Cal on the basis of her letter, her grades and her character.

The SAT was not required. This was the test that, in the 1920s, was devised by the deans of the Ivy League to keep Jewish high-school graduates out of their schools. Harvard became alarmed when they realized that 22% of the student body was Jewish.

Jews, most of them recent immigrants, had not scored well on World War I Army aptitude tests. So the deans devised the SAT, based on those tests.

In neither instance did the powerful win. Dreyfus would be admitted to the Legion of Honor for his service in World War I; his son, Pierre, earned France’s highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre.

And the Ivy League men were no match for Stanley Kaplan.

I hope that we Americans are a match for the same kind of polarization that so divided France in 1895. This was the way I introduced the lesson on Dreyfus to my history students.