100%. As another poster pointed out, “Jew as diverse candidate” just does not play well. So as a strategic decision, it makes no sense to write an essay about it.
I think they don’t consider us a minority because at many institutions (especially Ivy/T20-T50) Jewish students are over-represented for a group whose only 2.4% of the population.
“Jewish student populations at Harvard, Yale and Cornell were estimated to be between 20 and 25 percent , while those at Dartmouth, Princeton and Brown hovered between 13 and 20 percent”
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My comment here is somewhat off-topic. But I can’t get this experience out of my mind as I’m reading this thread.
I am Jewish by birth. I was never taught anything about my religion and, at age 17, barely identified as Jewish.
When I went to college (I entered in 1966), I attended a large midwestern university with a strong Greek system. Rush occured during our second week on campus. (Yeah, I know – that made no sense to me either.) I went to all 18 sororities on the first two days and then, for the second round, was not invited back to Kappa Kappa Gamma. I was really surprised – I had had a wonderful conversation with someone there and thought she really liked me. When I expressed surprise to someone – maybe another naive freshman like me?? – her comment was – and I’ll never forget it – “Oh, Kappas never invite Jewish girls back.”
My last name is not Jewish. I never belonged to any Jewish organizations. I never celebrated any Jewish holidays.
How the hell did they know I was Jewish? That was my first experience with anti-Semitism, and I was stunned speechless.
My mother (sounds like she’s around your age) was raised in a secular, reformed Jewish family. When she rushed a sorority (I don’t know which one) at UCLA around the same time as you did at your college, she was at some social event and one of the sorority sisters started feeling around her scalp. She was looking for horns. You’d think that most people at UCLA in the mid-1960s would have encountered Jews before, but I suppose not.
My dad went to college in the late 1950s. He told me that he “didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish” until he went to college and tried to join the tennis club (no Jews allowed…), fraternities (no Jews allowed…), pre professional business clubs (no Jews allowed…) etc. He didn’t tell me any stories about horns, though!
The whole family had fled Germany in 1938 when he was a toddler, and I guess they didn’t want to talk about any of that stuff with him and his siblings, and instead tried to protect them from prejudice… so he waltzed into college innocently thinking everything was open to him, and had somewhat of a rude awakening.
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It’s so crazy that I’m this country, so recently, we’ve had this behavior and many would argue it still exists.
It’s not long ago and it seems to be returning.
Terrible.
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I am amazed at the number of kids who take their parents advice on essay topics!
Mine had zero interest in discussing their topics, letting us “review” what they’d written, etc. Each had a HS teacher (English or History) review and make structural suggestions (“your conclusion sort of peters out… make it more emphatic”, things like that), but that was IT.
Your kids really would listen to you? And on something so fundamental to their identity (either they emphatically WANT it in their application, or emphatically do not… but there isn’t a lot of gray).
I’ve gone through life with a stereotypically Jewish name (think “Rachel Cohen” although that’s not my name). I married someone with a stereotypically WASP name (Chip Franklin, although again, not his name). I chose to keep my name since I was past grad school and launched in my corporate career and it seemed too painful to change it back then.
I know which situations have made other people uncomfortable because of my identity (I’m never uncomfortable- the child of refugees… we understand that our social and economic standing is precarious regardless of where we live and how hard we work). I don’t think the dubious calculus of “there’s a sociology graduate somewhere working as an Adcom who is prejudiced against my kid” is a reason to hide. You don’t have to major in sociology to be an anti-semite (just look at the demonstrations at MIT- not a sociology major in the bunch) and there are plenty of sociology majors who have a nuanced understanding of terrorist organizations and how they operate, exploit their own populations, steal money intended for humanitarian aid in order to buy missiles, etc.)
Whether or not it evens out… I can’t imagine encouraging my kid to “pass” as something which is other to what they are. I had a boss tell me that I was “too Jewish and too loud”; I lost out on a job because my “activities” outside the office weren’t “mainstream enough” (i.e. no golf, country club or DAR) and I’ve moved past it.
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This logic only makes sense if the student is, say, Black and Jewish, and is in the unusual position of deciding whether to write about one or the other. If we’re talking about a middle-class Ashkenazi student (on CC, we usually are), then there is no “strategic” identity to share. The diversity essay, in these cases, is about showing the college who you are. A good diversity essay never relies on a thesis like “I’m a Jew”; it is always “Here is a snapshot of my life,” and for some kids, their Jewishness is in the snapshot.
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If only Jews were as binary as the anti-semites wish we were.
A Jewish kid who “presents” as white, but Ladino and Spanish are the first and second languages spoken at home. A Jewish kid who was the ONLY Jew growing up in a rural town in Nebraska. A Jewish kid living in the US whose parents are both refugees from Arab countries-- or more recent refugees from Iran, Farsi spoken at home, a last name which most people assume is Iranian but the family’s origins are India or Iraq (a not uncommon pattern in the 20th century). I have Egyptian neighbors- Jewish, thrown out of Egypt in the 1950’s, they still yearn for the life they led back in Egypt.
Do you have to ALSO be black in order to have experienced more than your share of anti-Jewish discrimination growing up?
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My son chose not to talk about his Jewishness in these essays, as he didn’t feel it would be helpful. He instead talked about his identity as defined by his extracurricular interests and feeling of membership in those communities (music, etc).
Would you say that kind of diversity essay is an acceptable topic? Or is it necessary for the diversity essay to always touch on ethnic, cultural or socioeconomic aspects of identity in some way? I honestly wasn’t sure how to advise him at the time.
I think every kid is different.
If Judaism is important to a kid, then they should feel free to use it.
If other aspects are important, that’s fine too.
Telling someone to hide something (who they are and would like to express) is disgusting…IMHO.
That’s just giving the bigots of the world an easy win.
My kids diversity essays touched on EC’s not ethnicity etc.
I agree with you in principle but again, what we’re talking about here is to achieve the end-goal: writing a diversity essay that gets you into college. Not hiding anything.
Also, I will point out, and I know the comparison is not apt, but under Jewish law, any and all laws are preempted by the most important one: staying alive and not needlessly putting oneself in mortal peril. That includes taking non-kosher medication, wearing a yarmulke or other identifying insignia in public etc.
If you have to disguise who you are to get in, then the school isn’t worth it.
We don’t need to hide whether by religion, sexuality, etc.
It’s terrible.
If you cave now, you’ll always cave.
If Harvard or Montana don’t want Jews, then you shouldn’t be there.
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That’s easy to say. But Harvard (I don’t know about Montana – ) has other advantages. For some people, it may be worth “hiding” – or, at least, not mentioning – their Jewishness to get into Harvard.
I’m not supporting it. But I understand it.
I don’t. But to each his own.
One who would do that has other flaws. Imho.
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I suppose I misinterpreted the OP’s question. The question I have been answering is, “Is it worthwhile {from a strategic standpoint) to talk about my Jewish faith in a diversity essay?”
My answer to that question is a resounding “no” because: i) many will do that, and ii) as stated previously, being Jewish doesn’t doesn’t resonate with the DEI crowd as a group worthy of well…DEI.
If the question being asked is, “Should I hide my Judaism in order to increase my chances of admission?”, my answer to that is, if that’s such a concern then don’t bother applying. Why would you want to go there? I put Harvard and Penn squarely in that category.
In the last decade or so, the percentage of Jews has dropped at most of these schools. A Harvard professor with some knowledge thought the percentage of Jews at Harvard now was somewhere between 8% and 10%. See for a look at the decline across Ivies:
Some of this comes from the push to diversify the class, perhaps some from greater internationalization (though at Harvard, this effect would be pretty small over the last decade), and some may come from Jews’ success – a smaller percentage of the current generation may be striving to make it. Ironically, some may come from schools really using geographical distribution requirements to pick out kids from places like rural Minnesota and Idaho. I’m not really sure.
I have not said this explicitly, but it is important to recognize that many of these universities are big bureaucracies. What the admissions department do and think may not be related to what academic departments do. And even different admissions officers will likely be different. The prior president at Harvard and the provost of Harvard are both Jewish and the president was the son of a Holocaust survivor and neither is antisemitic. That does not mean that you can’t find antisemitism in the admissions office or some academic departments.
The child and the parent need to make a judgment about whether any particular school will be a comfortable environment for a variety of reasons (size, strength of key departments, frat culture, …) including whether it will be more or less comfortable for Jews given the antisemitic winds that are blowing through college campuses. I just would not let the admissions office make that choice for me and my child.
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