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I wonder what the actual Jewish representation is. Even back in 2014 I remember Jewish friends deciding to omit “Jewish” on their competitive applications, a practice which was apparently common knowledge disseminated via Jewish summer camp social networks. Is there really not a public list of Harvard graduates that we can examine? If the only gauge of Jewish enrollment is Halal Org or Chabad Org then they are undercounting the large number of non-practicing Jewish Americans.
Funny that some people here claim that being Jewish clearly provides a nepotistic admissions advantage over being gentile white and others claim that Jews are deliberately hiding their identity for admissions. I doubt either is true, admissions officers are disproportionately Jewish, but Unz’ insinuation that this led them to admit large numbers of statistically underqualified Jewish applicants was relatively unlikely. Your friends were likely just worried about not seeming like a basic candidate, and some rich Jewish kid writing about what he learned on birthright is not going to impress anyone in Harvard admissions.
'Funny that some people claim x while others claim y?'
There must be something about this argument that is highly effective because you see it virtually everywhere
'Funny that some people claim immigrants are stealing jobs while others claim they're getting taxpayer benefits'
Ad nauseum
It's all enough for me to say "voting was very obviously a mistake." Not women voting, not freedmen voting, not unpropertied men voting - the franchise itself was a mistake.
This argument should have been over after the invention of language because it's not even an argument: People can reach similar conclusions for different, even seemingly opposite reasons. And, more than one thing can be true at the same time.
As an aside because your original thing was so absurd, the only Jewish person in public life that didn't gentile-up their name was Neil Diamond - and that's because they'd already changed it in the old country!!
Sure, that was almost all at a time when (a) antisemitism was much higher than it is today and (b) Germanophobia was also much higher than it is, and many European Jews have and had German or at least German-sounding last names. Gentile German immigrants also changed their names in many cases at this time.
Today no Jew is changing their name from Goldberg to Williams or whatever in the US (at least not outside of marriage)!
On voting, I couldn’t agree more.
Just...don't
(This is a what that fat guy from Superbad said in reference to changing his last name, quote not originated from but cited by article below)
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/would-jonah-hill-have-saved-kanye-west-if-his-name-was-still-feldstein-q93xvxc5
Actors changing their names is extremely common and is far from a specifically Jewish phenomenon in the past or present. If anything the Hill comment was about the journalist clearly trying to bait him.
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Jews being discriminated against less than the average white applicant because they, like, wrote an essay about their Grandma in the Holocaust or something would constitute a nepotistic advantage. The fact that the admissions officers are disproportionately Jewish would obviously lend credence to this.
It's impossible to know because they haven't tracked the data with the same urgency they have tracked the data they have pointed to in order to disenfranchise Whites from their own institutions.
Yes, Unz implies this. But (a) the zenith of Jewish achievement in the Ivy League and other elite colleges spanned the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, well before regular discussion of the Holocaust was a mainstream topic even in Jewish communities, and (b) I think it’s very unlikely that large numbers of the best-qualified Jewish applicants are writing college application essays about generational trauma from the Holocaust. I don’t deny that it happens, but I tutored mostly Jews for elite college admissions while I was at college and I never saw it a single time, and in fact would usually advise people to leave out stuff like (summer) camps and Jewish volunteering activities, not because of possible antisemitism but because they’re just boring upper middle class kid activities from the suburbs.
That's interesting, how did it happen that you tutored mostly Jews for elite college admissions? It sounds like you participated in an ethnocentric apparatus you have denied exists. Do the admissions and administration at these institutions have similar sympathies and identification that directed you towards coaching mostly Jews on acquiring admission? It's difficult to determine without the data that they refuse to collect and publish.
There has traditionally been an ethnocentric equivalent for Whites vis-a-vis legacy admissions but that has increasingly been branded as racist and cast out. My alma matter has publicly disavowed legacy consideration as an instrument of white supremacy.
In the absence of data, it's impossible to point to the zenith of Jewish influence over the Ivy League from the perspective of admissions to the student body. But even more so over the administration of the Ivy League which is more relevant in determining the responsibility for the staggering under-representation of White students in those colleges. Recently when this came under discussion, I pointed out that of 8 of the Ivy Leagues, 5 have Jewish presidents, and only 1 had a White president. But now, only a few months later, the only 3 non-Jewish presidents of those Ivies have all resigned under pressure by the Jewish lobby for anti-Israeli protests on student campuses.
Liz Mcgill, the only White Ivy president, resigned in August, followed by Claudine Gay (black) who resigned as president of Harvard and replaced with a Jew (Alan Garber), and very recently Nemat Shafik resigned as president from Columbia. So last time we discussed this, I mentioned that there were only 3 non-Jewish Ivy presidents, but since then all 3 non-Jewish presidents have been forced to resign due to fallout from campus protests over Israel while none of the 5 Jewish Ivy presidents have resigned.
A reasonable person could identify this as the Zenith of Jewish influence over the Ivy League, with almost-entirely Jewish control over the Ivy League, the forced resignation of every single non-Jewish Ivy president in the span of a few months, and harsh crackdowns on campus protests over Israel. Obviously the Zenith in administrative control is going to lag behind the peak admissions.
In 1922, the president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, Lawrence Lowell, in favor of creating quotas for the admission of Jews, wrote:
I will allow you to dispute the causality, but what can't be denied is that, at the apparent peak of Jewish influence over the Ivy League since admissions have been loosened since the 1920s, White Gentiles have been driven away from these institutions by administrations with a large amount of racial animus towards White people.
I spent three months working for a moderately well known college admissions tutoring company in NYC run by an Asian guy. The Asian parents typically preferred Harvard and Princeton grads, so I was left with the rest, who were most Jewish and a few other NYC white ethnics.
But please, tell me how this is covert ethnocentrism.
Ethnocentrism can manifest in subtle ways, like your ability to relate more to an application because its closer to your own experience or identity... But it's not even subtle. Jews are overrepresented by at least 500% their population proportion (probably more, I seriously doubt Hillel is counting all ethnic Jews despite your counterargument), White Gentiles are underrepresented by 60%. It's always tricky having an intuition for the far tail ends of distribution, It could easily be determined with data collection and crosstabs, but they don't want to do it.
Even if you consider the present state relative to what you believe to have been peak Jewish enrollment, the decline in the representation of White Gentiles is much more significant than the decline in the representation of Jews. And, I don't think there has been nearly as large as a decline as you are suggesting in Jewish enrollment.
Basically, the prospect that these Jewish-dominated college administrations are discriminating against White Gentiles is 100%. The prospect they are discriminating against Jews with the same weight they are discriminating against White Gentiles is extremely unlikely to me. Maybe they still discriminate against Jewish applicants, but that discrimination is less. It's also possible the numbers of ethnic Jews are being undercounted and there is no discrimination relative to their academic merit. The only thing that is absolutely certain is that they hate White Gentiles and are driving them away from these institutions consciously.
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It wasn't necessary to my point, but I think it's certainly higher than 10%. Hillel's methodology seems intentionally opaque. They do have countervailing forces: showing a high Jewish population strengthens their legitimacy and mandate as an institution representing the student body. But they also have an incentive to undercount if they think that definitions which are too inclusive would make the evaporation of the White Gentile populations at these schools too on-the-nose.
IIRC Ron Unz concluded that Hillel changed their definition more recently to only include Religious Jews instead of all ethnic Jews (and non-religious ethnic Jews have grown as a % of all Jews in recent years). In practice, we don't have good data around this exactly because they don't want it to be known.
It’s more that Unz’ myth of American meritocracy used an extremely flawed method of calculating the actual percentage of Jewish students at elite colleges, so he subsequently became highly defensive. Everyone knows there has been an extreme fall in the number of Jewish students at HYPS over the past thirty years, my own estimate of the real percentage is around 8%, a substantial proportion of whom are themselves half+ gentile (a group that often identifies as at least somewhat Jewish). Columbia is obviously still much higher due to being in NYC, other Ivies vary.
Hillel organizations are far more incentivized to overcount because that literally gets them more funding than to undercount because of some vague fear that the far right might point out overrepresentation (something only extremely online Jews keyed into DR spaces would even be concerned about; the chief warrior in the crusade against affirmative action is himself Jewish).
There isn’t good data in large part because most Americans would consider it strange for a college to ask all incoming students whether they had any recent Jewish ancestors. Nevertheless, given the zenith of Jewish elite college enrollment was around 35% (in most of the most elite colleges; there were outliers) and given the extreme fall reported in and around even secularish Jewish publications and in the wider community, I think 8-10% is a fair estimate for those with a genuine Jewish identity of some kind.
Of course, given assimilation rates of 70%+ among secular American Jews, the population of gentile Americans of Jewish descent will likely continue to rise dramatically.
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