Jews Students: Race, Education, and Myth-Making Essay

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The educational process in schools can be a place where racist and other intolerant attitudes of parents are passed on to minority children. Even in modern Western higher education, bias and prejudice are common perceptions of Black and East Asian students (Moosavi, 2022). To trace the origins of such a behavior, it is illustrative to discuss Nancy Foner’s writings about waves of migration in New York. The main argument about the interconnection of race, education, and myth-making will be depicted in the example of Jews students.

The atmosphere in New York in the 1910s and 1920s was full of discrimination against Jews because of their alleged inferiority. There were plenty of forms of open discrimination in employment, access to different parts of the city, and education (Foner, 2008). In universities, colleges, and medical schools administration set special quotas on Jewish people, limiting their enrollment opportunities (Foner, 2008). Even after officials restricted open discrimination, educational facilities continued to use tacit ways of limiting the number of Jews. This example shows how the myth about the inferior status of Jews influenced their opportunities to attain the education they wanted.

Another form of myth about Jews is related to their learning achievements. Many Russian Jews who immigrated to New York did not know English and had to enter levels in which they were the oldest in class (Foner, 2008). In addition, Foner (2008) indicates that education did not allow them to leap to the middle class. Despite these problems, many Americans did not appreciate cultural differences and wanted to “make Americans out of immigrant greenhorns” (Foner, 2008, p. 206). Greenhorns was a derogatory word used to describe a deteriorating place in the society of immigrants like Italians and Jews. As a result, although Jews experienced great difficulties in accommodating to new realities, they faced many myths about their success in New York’s schools. Many students, seeing as white, spoke black about the Jews, trying to justify their failures.

References

Foner, N. (2008). From Ellis Island to JFK: New Yorks two great waves of immigration. Yale University Press.

Moosavi, L. (2022). The myth of academic tolerance: The stigmatisation of East Asian students in Western higher education. Asian Ethnicity, 23(3), 484-503.

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