A Jewish applicant to a teacher training scholarship in the UK was quite surprised when he was told that a Jewish woman who was dismissed from her university teaching position by the Nazis was “too white to be diverse,” The Jewish Chronicle (JC) reported.
Izzy Posen, a 27-year-old graduate of Bristol University, recently applied to the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications for a £26,000 scholarship for teacher training.
At his interview, he was requested to provide an example of a “diverse mathematician.” He responded by naming Emmy Noether, a prominent member of the math department at the University of Göttingenin in Germany in the 1930s who fled to the US after the Nazis dismissed all Jews from university positons.
The interviewer told him that “she’s white and we asked for someone who is diverse.”
“So I said, ‘I don’t think that a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 30s is not diverse,'” Posen wrote on social media. “Her response was, ‘You did say Germany, which is a white country, and your pupils might not know about the Holocaust.'”
Posen told the JC: “I was very taken aback, I was very shocked. I mentioned Emmy Noether because she’s genuinely a role model, and I thought that somebody who overcame great difficulties is an inspiration for lots of women, Jews, and everyone.”
“He said the interviewer had responded: ‘Your pupils might not know about the Holocaust, so they’ll hear Germany, they’ll hear white, so this won’t be representative for them.'”
“He said: ‘Why was [a question about] a diverse set of backgrounds taken to be specifically to be about ethnicity, and specifically non-white? For me, a diverse set of backgrounds meant somebody who overcame lots of odds; the system was rigged against them.”
“So, Emmy Noether, a woman, who even today are very underrepresented in maths, especially then, who literally couldn’t teach under her own name, who got expelled for being a Jew, so there’s nothing more diverse than that. There’s nothing more of an inspiration for somebody who overcame lots of odds.”
He said he felt that “I wouldn’t be appreciated for the odds I’ve overcome, I wouldn’t be accepted as a Jew. I’m not enough.”
David Rich, head of policy at the Jewish Community Security Trust, said that Posen’s story is not a rare one, unfortunately.
“This is awful, and not isolated,” he wrote on Twitter. “I’ve heard other examples from adult educational settings of the Jewish experience being excluded from discussions of racism and exclusion.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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8 Responses
ANTISEMITISM BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD STINK…. THIS IS ANOTHER COLLEDGE TO ADD TO THE LIST OF WOKE NON-ACADEMIC ORGANISATIONS TO AVOID.
Jewish Applicant responds, never been white, don’t want to be white and there is no such thing as white…unless it is WASP____please stop taking us down this path
“Izzy” is an apikorus, who ate chazer in Gateshead yeshiva. I wouldn’t feel bad for him…
The white woman in the picture has a beard. Isn’t that diverse enough?
“diverse” is a code word. “Code words” keep changing. 90 years ago in much of the world the code word used is “Aryan”. What’s the hiddush here? Perhaps YWN is very naive and doesn’t know about anti-semitism, which is quite possible, the best way to avoid it in America is to live inside the frum ghetto and avoid contact with goyim.
Izzy, the hero of the story, has spent the better part of the last 5 years running around to every media outlet that would have him slandering and defaming the Charedi community in the most despicable way possible.
He’s now unpleasantly surprised to learn that the population outside his former community isn’t quite as welcoming and perfect as he thought.
I wonder how this changes his views of the world he left behind.
YWN, start making researching the backgrounds of stories instead of blindly plagiarizing the Jewish Chronicle…
People raised in frum “ghetto”-like communities often have a “rose colored glasses” view of the outside world. I’ve encountered many, who for example, think that pork must be some especially wonderful type of meat (rather than what is usually given to the lower classes, and often looked down upon by the upper class). It isn’t surprising that someone going OTD might be shocked to discover that the outside world is deeply flawed. Our own education system’s approach to secular studies tends to reluctantly (only because we would rather skip it) borrow the government’s schools curriculum which gives an uncritical view and deliberately ignores many serious flaws in the “outside” world. I’m not saying we should try to cut ourselves off entirely from the secular world, but we need to remember that while it might be a nice place to visit, and has much of value, it will never be “home”.
izzi !!!
stick up for the judaisim within yourself
if you care care for your neshoma…..