Jewish Organizations: What Was Good For The Jews Is Not Good For The Asians

[NOTE: An abbreviated version of this post appears, here, on Minding The Campus]

Asian-Americans are often described as the “new Jews.” With equal accuracy it would appear that Jews can be described as “new WASPS,” as Alan Dershowitz did a decade ago in explaining why Jewish organizations that had long opposed affirmative action reversed their position and came to embrace “diversity”-justified discrimination. Attempting to explain why the American Jewish Committee had, with his help, supported Alan Bakke’s lawsuit against the University of California but supported the University of Michigan’s defense of race preferences in Gratz and Grutter, he wrote a decade ago that “fears of a new ‘Jewish quota’ were not borne out after Bakke.”

We feared that our hard-earned right to be admitted on the merits would be taken away. The WASP quotient would be held constant, and the Jews and African Americans would be left to fight over the crumbs. What happened is that Jews have become the WASPs. They are among the dominant groups on campus, in terms of numbers.

Three of the most influential Jewish organizations — The American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League — opposed preferences based on race in Bakke. In fact, according to a detailed summary of the brief they filed jointly, the two AJCs went much further and even opposed all classifications based on race, calling them “presumptively invalid because of their irrelevant and invidious nature.” A few other arguments in their joint brief:

• “Racial discrimination is invalid regardless of the victim of discrimination and regardless of whether it is invidious or benign”;

• Race conscious admissions cannot be justified as compelling because there is no evidence that particular skills or viewpoints are “racially based” and “relies on ‘group think’ that race and ethnicity” outweigh other factors;

• What really motivates preference programs is “belief that representation in each aspect of society should be proportionate to representation in population as a whole,” a belief that “would result in a society permeated by officially sanctioned racial, ethnic, religious and sexual quotas”;

• “Minority students who excel strictly on merit will carry stigma of inferiority of having benefited from double standard”;

• “Acceptance of race as an admission factor will progressively lead to consideration of race in other aspects of operation.”

The Anti-Defamation League filed its own brief in Bakke, and it was equally strong, insisting at its core as a matter of fundamental principle that “a difference in race cannot be an appropriate justification for different treatment by the state.”

By 2002 both the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, perhaps fearful of exacerbating strained black-Jewish relations or for whatever reason, had abandoned the principles they advocated in Bakke and supported the University of Michigan’s use of race preferences. “Disallowing the consideration of race as one factor among many in university admissions would have the effect of eliminating meaningful diversity on American campuses,” said Jeffrey Sinensky, General Counsel for the American Jewish Committee. Its brief, unlike its brief in Bakke, now found “diversity” a compelling justification for the use of race and that neither the Michigan law school’s “holistic” admissions nor the college’s 20 point bonus for race “constitute quotas.”

In sharp contrast, and alone among the major Jewish organizations,

 Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said his organization is sticking to its “principled position” that people should not be judged by skin color, and any use of race in admissions is unconstitutional.

“We feel diversity should be achieved in a racially neutral manner,” Foxman said.

“What we want is society to be as colorblind as possible,” Foxman insisted to the Jewish Daily Forward, “and therefore to use [race] for good purposes we believe is as unconstitutional as using it for bad purposes, especially if there are other ways to achieve the goal of diversity.” For example, he said, “the ADL supports Texas’s policy of guaranteeing the top 10% of each high school’s graduating class admission to the state university of their choice to promote diversity in lieu of racial preferences.”

The ADL’s brief noted that “it has consistently opposed the non-remedial use of race-based criteria, believing that the eradication of discrimination in our society is best achieved through strict assurance of equal treatment to all” and that while it is “strongly sympathetic to the goal” of diversity “ADL continues to adhere to the principle that school admissions programs must be race-neutral.”

After the decision Foxman said ADL’s “main concern” with Grutter “was over how schools and other institutions would interpret the law, possibly viewing it as a fear [sic]-reaching approval of the concept of affirmative action.”

Back in 2002 I wrote:

 Because the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress no longer feel the interests of Jews are threatened by preferential admission, they have dropped the principled arguments they made over the years. Now, like other liberal groups, they chant the mantra of “diversity.”

…. For the first time I wish I had actually joined these two groups, so I could now resign in protest. Fortunately all the Jewish organizations are not so shameless. Alone among the major Jewish organizations The Anti-Defamation League has remained true to its principles.

Now, alas, if I were a member I would have to resign from the ADL as well. Last Friday the ADL abandoned its ”consistently” held “principled position” of opposing “any use of race in admissions” and filed a brief supporting the University of Texas’s open-ended use of “race-based criteria” in Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear next October. Swallowing the same “holistic” race preference Kool-aid to which the American Jewish Committee and American Jewish Congress had been adicted since Grutter, Abraham Foxman, still National Director of ADL, and Robert Sugarman, its National Chair, issued a statement revealing that they now believe that “diversity,” not non-discrimination, is “critically important.”

The University of Texas’ approach does not impose quotas, assign people to categories based on their race, or use race as a determinative factor in making admissions decisions. Rather, it uses race as only one factor in a holistic review of each applicant. This is not an overt or a covert quota system, which ADL would have opposed.

Thoroughly jettisoning its formerly “principled” opposition to “any use of race in admissions,” the ADL now opposes only “quotas, assigning persons to categories based on their race, or using race as a determinative factor in making admissions decisions” [emphasis added]. I wonder what Foxman et al. will say when at some point in the not so distant future religion is considered “as only one factor,” and not a “determinative” one, in efforts to diversify departments, faculties, and professions in which Jews are “overrepresented.” They certainly can have no principled objection to taking religion into account in admission and hiring.

Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist who supports affirmative action, demonstrated in a 2005 article I discussed (along with his other work) here that if affirmative action were eliminated across the nation “Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class now taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent.” Espenshade’s book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, shows that at selective private colleges and universities black applicants receive an admission boost equivalent to 450 points on the SAT compared to similarly qualified Asian applicants.

The “new Jews,” in short, must jump higher hurdles to gain acceptance to selective institutions, just as the old, original Jews were forced to do in the past. Nevertheless, now that Jewish quotas are a thing of the past and Jews no longer face systemic discrimination all the major Jewish organizations whose defining mission was to combat that discrimination have joined those lifting the bar for some groups in order to lower it for others. They now believe that the state can use race — as “a factor,” of course — in distributing benefits and burdens and that equal protection allows or even requires unequal treatment.