
Jewish Problems - victorhn
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556v2.pdf
======
mynameishere
It's just affirmative action. This sort of thing happens in _every_
multicultural country, especially when one group apparently does better
financially than the others.

[http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-
Empiri...](http://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Around-World-
Empirical/dp/0300107757)

The Russians came up with an unusually crass method for this, but guess what?
Jews and other whites and East Asians all are, to some degree, kept from elite
institutions _today_ because of our more subtle system.

~~~
DaniFong
Affirmative action? Are you mad?

Perhaps you're unaware of these:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire)

Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially _harder_
for a discriminated minority!

~~~
continuations
It is exactly like affirmative action:

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/?page=full)

"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton
Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what
looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated
that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same
chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410
and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six
times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US
university as Asian-Americans."

In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests
to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians
are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder ( _15 times_
harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.

~~~
ibotty
please have a look at the history of antisemitism in europe. you cannot
compare things which are not comparable at all.

~~~
continuations
Or you could take a look at the long history of anti-Asian racism in America
(Chinese massacre of 1871, imported Asian slave labors for building the
transcontinental railroads, Chinese Exclusion Act, Asiatic Barred Zone Act,
etc). Just because you want to claim they are not comparable doesn't mean they
are not.

------
pav3l
I'm assuming this is a follow-up on
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047>

Wow, that is crazy!! Even though i have 2 math degrees and am doing applied
math and stats for a living, there is a very good chance I'd fail such an exam
if I took it now!

~~~
WalterGR
Just to add some context, the HN submission above is for an article entitled,
"The Fifth problem: math and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union"

The URL of the submission is [http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-
Fifth-problem--...](http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem
--math---anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446)

------
shmerl
Number 17 doesn't look to be extraordinary, it actually was commonly given in
Moscow State University (on math and computer science departments) until
recently, when oral examinations were removed altogether.

In general such discrimination against Jews in Moscow State University was
commonplace until the beginning of 1990s, and is gone since then.

~~~
cema
Until 1989, to be precise.

Incidentally, during Perestroika the society was changing at such a high rate
that what was hard to imagine just three months before was becoming routine.
Now looking back 20+ years it is so difficult to reconstruct the timeline.

~~~
shmerl
Well, I know when Perestroika started, but I gave it a bit of a margin, since
I can't say for sure when precisely it affected this discrimination. It's
known to be gone for sure in the 1990s. Could be, it started in 1989.

~~~
cema
I remember it well -- many of my friends and myself were affected, so we kept
a close eye on that, and the memory is still alive.

------
Sniffnoy
When linking to arXiv, please link to the abstract, not directly to the PDF.

~~~
shmerl
Here you go: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556>

------
pessimizer
repost: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096793> [202 comments]

------
qdpb
To see problems that incoming students of MSU math department need to solve
now, you can check out: <http://www.math.msu.su/admission/exams-write.html>

E.g. <http://www.math.msu.su/admission/MATWRITE/w2001j~1.gif> does not seem
much easier than "jewish" problems; and my understanding is that math
department of MSU attempts to admit brilliant people who deliberately prepare
to solve problems of this kind.

~~~
shmerl
Here authors also filtered problems which have relatively "simple" solution
(which is hard to find). The problems used to fail students included those
with extremely hard (or non existent) solutions.

Andrei Sakharov once commented, that he reviewed those kind of math problems,
and was perplexed by their complexity.

------
charlesjshort
Jews invented racial discrimination. Let a gentile apply to a Jewish school,
even if his father is Jewish and he practices Judaism they will turn him down
if his mother is not ethnically Jewish.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
You actually can't see the difference between religious law being used to
discriminate among applicants to a private, parochial, religious K-12 school
and discrimination at a public, state-funded institution based on inescapable
racial identities recorded by the government at birth?

~~~
charlesjshort
If you've been subject to the discrimination it probably feels the same.
public/private whatever you call them, they are all just groups of people, and
exclusionary judgment based on a couple generations of dna, well I think THAT
should be reserved for haShem only. Live by the sword die by the sword,
reciprocity, lex talionis, karma, ... almost always catches up.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I think you shouldn't go around referring to Hashem when you blatantly don't
know His laws. Jews face judgment, not karma.

------
khmel
Guys, I studied in Moscow Institute of Pysics and technology, top technical
university in the former USSR - I had in my class people who won International
Olympiads in physics, math, chemistry, computer science. Those problems are
average or below - you could meet them on math entrance exams to economics
specialization. Problems are of the level of district\city math olympiads. I'm
sure that jewish people as well as any other applicants with good math
background solved them without big problems.

~~~
cema
I see. Please take a look at a partial collection of references at
<http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html> \-- it contains memoirs,
discussions, and some bibliography.

~~~
khmel
I believe, issue was not the final numbers - % of Jewish people/Jewish
population was the highest compare to other nations in the USSR. Number of
Jewish professors, academics and billionaries with academic background is
amazing.

I understand why USSR did that. Government sponsored education. Number of
places in best universities was very limited, it was nation's genome and
capital. People who supposed to develop new weapons and economy. Soviet
government did not trust Jewish people - as we see from the history, Jewish
people were often the first who left the country in case of problems. It was
hard to imagine that they will become Soviet patriots. That's why USSR came up
with artificial barriers in order to give more places in universities to more
potentionally patriotic students. USSR wanted to save its intelligent capital
investment and feel more save.

The problem was the rude way how artificial barrier was created by USSR.
Instead of organizing super-complex writing exams for Jewish people, or making
ideological interviews they tried to eliminate them with fake oral exams.

See below how US handles the same issue with asian students (reposted from
user continuations).

[http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04...](http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04..).
"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton
Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what
looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated
that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same
chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410
and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six
times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US
university as Asian-Americans."

In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests
to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians
are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times
harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.

------
nacker
I think America will soon be having a Holocaust problem.

[http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-
americans-w...](http://www.infowars.com/poll-nearly-one-third-of-americans-
would-accept-tsa-body-cavity-search-in-order-to-fly/)

~~~
agf
What exactly does that have to do with math or intolerance?

~~~
nacker
Actually, nothing. I just posted it because I am in shock after reading it.
Feel free to downvote, or, I'll just delete it. Are you one of the "nearly one
third"?

EDIT: To be fair though, it does have a Jewish connection - cattle trains?

~~~
agf
No, I'm not of the "nearly one third". I think the privacy implications of the
_current_ TSA procedures are not anywhere near the most problematic privacy
issues in our society, but an escalation of that type would be beyond what I
would accept.

I am, however, Jewish, and was originally a math major in college, so I do
have a particular interest in this story and would appreciate it if the
conversation could stay on topic.

The "cattle train" connection is pretty contrived. One is voluntary travel,
the other involuntary. One is certainly a breech of dignity, rationality, and
privacy, but the other was often deadly, and is at a completely different
level of dehumanization.

