Jewish problems

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

by cal2 • 15 years ago

303 187 15 years ago

arxiv.org

gsivil• 15 years ago

I've just browsed the pdf and problem 2 is my favorite.

cal2• 15 years ago

My thoughts exactly!

killedbydeath• 15 years ago

At least when I was studying there (late 90-s), all entrance exam problems were supposed to be solved without any calculus. The motivation given was that algebra and geometry give enough variety of material for hard and beautiful problems and high school calculus is a joke so they would have to teach it again from scratch.

Sniffnoy• 15 years ago

This problem can be done without any derivatives, actually. First observe that since (x-y)^2=(y-x)^2, we have |F(x)-F(y)|<=(x-y)^2. Given x and y with y>x, divide up the interval between them into x_0=x, x_1, x_2, ..., x_n=y evenly spaced. Then applying the observation above and the triangle inequality, since F(y)-F(x) is the sum of the F(x_(i+1))-F(x_i), we have |F(y)-F(x)|<=n*((x-y)/n)^2=(x-y)^2/n. Since n can be arbitrarily large, |F(y)-F(x)| is smaller than any positive number and hence 0, so F(y)=F(x).

Note that 2 here can be replaced with any number greater than 1; this is actually a well-known fact, that any Hölder-continuous function on the reals with exponent greater than 1 is constant. But I suppose it would not be well-known to high-school students! To be honest, I mostly only know it because of the old legend about the student who... well, here's a link: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-l...

suivix• 15 years ago

I don't understand how these problems would be harder for Jews than anyone else. It's controversial in my opinion to claim that educated Jews are worse at these based on their ethnicity.

edit: wow people responded too quickly, sorry if it was to something I edited out

andrewpi• 15 years ago

This was a set of problems only given to Jewish candidates.

ralmeida• 15 years ago

I had the very same doubt the author of the comment you replied to seems to have had. What confused me is that I thought that the 'directioning' these problems to Jewish people was an implicit scheme.

After all, simply directing the questions to Jewish candidates is discrimination too start with. They took so much care in finding a set of problems they could justify as not discriminative that I though they had developed a clever scheme to implicitly direct the questions.

I mean, the university prepared itself to answer "But the problems aren't hard, check out the solution!" when asked "Why did you give hard problems to Jews?". I would simply ask "Why didn't you give everybody the same set of problems?". What I don't get from having skimmed over the paper and comments is how they prepared to the latter question.

capnrefsmmat• 15 years ago

They're not supposed to be; the goal was to give Jews harder questions which had supposedly simple answers:

> One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find.

DanielRibeiro• 15 years ago

They could also give huge boolean formulas, and ask the applicant to decide if it is satisfiable[1] or not. Simple yes or no answer, which is quite a hard (NP-hard) to come by.

But then again, it would probably fool nobody.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem

jerrya• 15 years ago

The Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, the most prestigious mathematics school in Russia, was at that time actively trying to keep Jewish students (and other \undesirables") from enrolling in the department.One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find. Any student who failed to answer could easily be rejected, so this system was an eective method of controlling admissions.

It was arbitrary.

zmitri• 15 years ago

I once had a question on a first year calculus exam that broke down to problem 17. It took a while to figure it out, but the exam got bell curved up by almost 50% in the end.

3pt14159• 15 years ago

Were these questions for entrance from high school or a bachelors program?

If the latter, many (say half) of them are acceptable, but if the former then none of them are.

saucerful• 15 years ago

These were for university. This sort of addresses your point:

Now, after thirty years, these problems seem easier. Mostly, this is because the ideas of how to solve these problems have spread and are now a part of the standard set of ideas. Thirty years ago these problems were harder to solve and, in addition, the students were given these problems one after another until they failed one of them, at which point they were given a failing mark.

adgar• 15 years ago

I agree that the problems have gotten much simpler - several of these remind me a lot of the difficulty I saw on the AIME back in 10th-12th grade. I mean, that's still pretty advanced relatively speaking, but certainly doable by tens of thousands of high school aged students each year.

And then there's two levels of competition past that I never made it to... just 1... damn... question... short...

01PH• 15 years ago

Makes an interesting read.

Does anybody know what kind of repository Cornell is there running? The paper seems a bit odd structured and I don't really see that as an open-access publication(lack of DOIs). Or is this just a working paper repository?

_delirium2• 15 years ago

It's the arXiv, a fairly well-known open-access repository. It contains a mix of unpublished drafts / working papers, preprints of papers at various stages in the submission/review process, and manuscript versions of published journal articles.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

Alex39172• 15 years ago

Whereas in the US the reason that colleges use essay questions is because jews score too highly on the SATs. We can thank Harvard for this, as usual. Gladwell has an essay about this here:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlar...

I forget what Gladwell is copying from, but I know that there is an earlier article that goes into even more detail.

leoc• 15 years ago

> I forget what Gladwell is copying from, but I know that there is an earlier article that goes into even more detail.

I'm trying to find a similar - likely the same - earlier article too. I'd be much obliged if you could post the link if you find it.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

I know that John Taylor Gatto linked it to from his website at one point, it's possible that you might be able to dig it up through archive.org or somesuch.

wisty• 15 years ago

He usually cites his sources. Look for the professor in the tweed jacket, with horn-rimmed glasses, and the gaze which pierces through both his students' excuses for late homework and statistical irregularities. Or the 6-3 guy who looks like a line-backer, but now teaches psychology, and still plays ball on the weekends.

In this case, Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” how the Ivy League started to look for "manliness" to avoid too many geeks and Jews. Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale did the economic study on the selection effect vs. value added. James L. Shulman and William Bowen wrote "The Game of Life", on athletes getting an easy ride.

ellyagg• 15 years ago

Jews had a hard time getting into some Ivy league schools for a stretch, but not colleges in the US in general, c.f. elsewhere on this page.

What is it with you anyway? I found your comment earlier today about "the US does it too!" re the Dalai Lama almost odd enough to comment on but this is the second comment in a row where you found an angle to bash the US. Do you think every negative comment about a country is a secret thumbs up to the US? And you just can't be having that?

wnight4• 15 years ago

It was informative. I didn't know the USA put restrictions on what the Dalai Lama would say. For China. I think the average person would be surprised to hear it.

It's like not recognizing Taiwan as a country. Offensive.

danssig• 15 years ago

I think the better question is why you're so worried about people criticizing the US?

dilap• 15 years ago

Some would argue that this sort of discrimination continues into the present day, but sub asians for jews.

steve-howard• 15 years ago

It's mentioned at the very end of the article (I skimmed).

"In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears."

lsc• 15 years ago

That newyorker article is very interesting. Really, it sounded like it was as much about being tall and confident as about anything else; I've known a few big IDF types who would have done better than I would, by those standards.

Of course, maybe it's because I've spent so much of my life in silicon valley, and there is a strong prejudice against people who appear shy, I believe that this prejudice is much stronger than any ethnic prejudice, at least in this area.

It's interesting, as speaking as a tall and apparently confident white male,[1] I definitely agree that I get a "white guy bonus" - I mean, part of it is the completely rational fact that I have a fairly neutral American accent- when dealing with groups consisting of people with diverse accents, quite often having someone around with an accent everyone can understand can add real value.

But really, I think it goes beyond that. Even when I was in the central valley and dealing mostly in groups of people with accents as American as my own, I think I've been offered opportunities beyond what you'd expect from my intelligence and my educational background.

Another aspect of this is just regular old confidence.[2] I present much better than I am. I interview very well, but once it's time to actually do the work? to be honest, I'm not as good as I look. I mean, I'm certainly not without value, but I'm not as good as I present. Of course, this is true of most confident people, and yet confidence is still seen as a positive rather than a negative, for some crazy reason.

The weird thing to me is that as far as I can tell, this effect is even stronger when working for foreigners. I mean, I guess part of it is that they want to exploit other people's racism, and certainly if I'm interacting with customers, having me on staff can make you look more American, but the effect seems to exist even when I'm in a purely technical role that doesn't interact with customers.

[1]My dad's family was catholic, but my mother's family was 'protestant American' and I'm not religious at all, but I guess I ended up with a more protestant look, if there is such a thing. My outward confidence is an affectation; I mean, inwardly, I believe in myself the way a catholic believes in god, but my natural personality is much less aggressive. The outward confidence is there because I've noticed that other people vastly prefer that sort of thing.)

[2]The most shocking example of being picked over someone more qualified I can remember was when I got picked over someone who was also white, male and also did not identify as jewish (but he was shorter and dramatically less confident.)

staunch• 15 years ago

> ...these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find.

Like the place to view the problems, for me at least: PDF http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.1556v1

mdda• 15 years ago

... also available as the link titled 'PDF' under 'Download' on the right hand side of the page.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

I visit arXiv maybe five times a year, and every time I do the same "where the hell is the link" search. The problem is that the box with downloads appears to be part of the page chrome, not part of this particular entry.

Natsu• 15 years ago

Weird thing is that Firefox isn't doing anything when I click on that, either at from the site or from here. I had to fire up WGet, which showed me that the request gets bounced to a cached copy located at a different URL:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.1556v1.pdf

zalthor2• 15 years ago

When they say 'oral exams', are the applicants expected to shoot out an answer without actually looking at the problem or writing a solution? And if that's the case, how much time would they get to solve these problems mentally? I can't imagine being able to solve any of these without a pen and paper. I would assume that unless you already know the answer, there isn't a way for an 'unwanted' applicant to be able to do so either.

eliben• 15 years ago

No - an oral exam in this context is more like a programming interview. You get a board and chalk, and you solve the problem on the board in front of the teacher, explaining what you're doing along the way. This is opposed to a "normal" exam where you have your pen and paper and a pre-set amount of time to struggle with the problem on your own.

zalthor2• 15 years ago

Ah, that makes a lot more sense now.

pixcavator2• 15 years ago

It's actualy the latter, followed by the former -- on paper.

cheez• 15 years ago

Can someone please explain to me what the hell is the problem people have with Jews? The only thing I can tell is maybe they're disproportionately financially successful? I guess that's a problem...

panza• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism

alecbenzer3• 15 years ago

I've also always wondered why a specific group has been so apparently consistently persecuted against for so long. It seems like it's been too long of a time period for the hate to simply have been passed on from generation to generation.

adrianwaj6• 15 years ago

Very good observation. I think it's metaphysical, unseen.

I found this interesting, if not alarming.

EXPOSE: The Vatican is Cozying Up to Iran's Ahmadinejad http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/1070...

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

The reason they have been persecuted for so long is because they have survived for so long. Most heavily persecuted groups don't last long.

wtracy• 15 years ago

More so than almost any other culture, Jews have been consistently able to maintain their own cultural identity even when they are in the demographic minority or displaced abroad. A lot of this is due to their willingness to close themselves off from the surrounding population and maintain their own, separate, religious and social structures.

So, from the outside, the local population sees a group of foreigners brought into the country. This group refuses to assimilate, actively shuts strangers out of their group, and maintains a certain aura of secrecy.

This means that the perception of the Jews as "outsiders" never goes away, even several generations after their arrival. Throw the semi-legendary Jewish financial success into the mix, and you fuel suspicion that "those people are up to something."

iskander5• 15 years ago

The "locals" still get grumpy even when Jews can't own land or amass much wealth. The pogroms and massacres in Ukraine, Poland, Russia, etc... were generally against very poor communities. On the other hand, Jewish communities were much more financially successful and culturally prominent across the Arab world and seem to have drawn a lot less antipathy.

microarchitect• 15 years ago

Very interesting.

Muslim and Hindu communities in the West are also trying to be insular and maintain their own cultural identities, but I guess they're not so effective because they don't have the financial success backing them up that the Jews have. It's a lot harder to deride someone when you know they're making way more money than you, I suppose.

those people are up to something

I don't mean this in any negative way, but they ARE up to something. This something is maintaining their levels of privilege. Is this wrong? I don't know. Probably not, I guess.

I come from an upper caste family in India and it's easy for me to see that this is game that we in India have been playing since independence. There's a lot of cultural and economic know-how that helps people succeed in life, and upper caste families have an abundance of this.

On the one hand, these folks succeed only because they ace the admission tests, have extraordinary academic records and are excellent communicators. On the other hand, the reason they have these qualities is because they were born with privilege. Is this wrong? Unfair? I really don't know. I can't help thinking it's the same situation as the Jews, though.

jberryman• 15 years ago

I mostly agree with your comment about Jews maintaining their cultural identity and can't really speak to how Jews live in other countries. But I wanted to make the point that in the USA Jews have been if anything more involved in civic life (just look at the profound role Jews played in the civil rights movement of the 60s) and certainly have had great influence on what we think of as American cultural. So insular doesn't characterized American Jews at least in the 20th century.

iskander5• 15 years ago

As much as the Soviet Union tried to keep down Jews, they were also trying to promote people who fit a nationalist narrative. So it wasn't just antisemitism, it was also affirmative action for Russians (especially those of peasant descent).

mazuhl• 15 years ago

And at the same time the Russians did much to preserve Yiddish (a Jewish language).

TheDroids6• 15 years ago

Probably has a lot to do with things like AIPAC (the largest lobby in the US) and Zionism. I'm guessing this is just the tip of the iceberg though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Stat...

tkahn6• 15 years ago

Except that Zionism has only existed as a coherent and codified ideology since 1896 and AIPAC has only existed since 1963.

In fact Herzl published Der Judenstaat as a response to what he witnessed covering the Dreyfus Affair as a journalist.

TheDroids6• 15 years ago

Wow, I watched myself go from +3 to now -3

Either I made some sense (pointing out that AIPAC or Zionism could be a reason for hatred) or these guys just showed up in the thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Defense_League

TheDroids6• 15 years ago

Really laying into me now at -11.

Not sure how my points weren't completely relevant. They were.

scotty79• 15 years ago

I guess they are too damn smart:

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/mormons-have-highe...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/12/religion-iq/

EDIT: Ouch. I know race, religion and intelligence are touchy subjects but I never thought I'll get downvoted on hackernews for (somewhat) sourced compliment. I myself am atheist in 95% catholic country where Jews are unrecognizable for anybody except antisemites. I personally have nothing against or for Jews.

mdasen• 15 years ago

Answering as someone Jewish. . .

Jews don't assimilate (fully). In the Passover story, one of the things we note is that even living in Egypt for a long time, they didn't assimilate and they were disliked for it. Heck, how often do you hear people talking about other immigrants "not assimilating these days". For centuries, Jews even spoke a language other than the vernacular. We're a much more tolerant world today and yet there are plenty in this country (the US) that wish everyone "would just speak English". I have plenty of friends whose parents grew up speaking Yiddish in this country.

Likewise, Jews were seen as people with divided loyalties. But this, again, isn't specific to Jews. Kennedy took plenty of hits as people questioned if he'd "just do what the pope told him to do." Were Jews really going to be loyal to the state they lived in? In an era when wars were often fought with what makes today's reasons seem air-tight, would Jews decide to sit on the sidelines (since they weren't really X nationality)? I mean, imagine if the US and Canada got into a war over who could call they're syrup "maple syrup". Would you fight in that? People have fought for some stupid things. Also, during a decent period of time, mercantilism became a big factor in economic thinking. If Jews didn't see a problem with cross-border trade, that was doing economic harm.

For Christians, "you've heard the good news and yet you still reject Christ?!?" This is one of the more simplistic ones. People have killed (and continue to do so) for religious reasons. Jews were especially problematic for Christianity. Here you have the predecessor religion co-existing. If they thrive more than the Christians, does G-d like them better than the Christians? And there's plenty of "they killed Christ" to go around.

Jews are, in some ways, refugees. I mean, there was an ancient state that existed and then diaspora as the Jews had to leave their homeland. First, people often don't like immigrants. How much scapegoating happens even today around immigrants and crime, jobs, culture, etc.? Heck, even things like sexuality come into play. In a lot of anti-Semitic literature, Jews were portrayed as ultra-sexual in the same "hide your daughters" way that can happen with African Americans today. Second, people really don't like refugees. I mean, these are people coming with nothing. These aren't university trained computer programmers coming over like H1-B visa getters. These are people who have it really hard.

Beyond that, someone like Dawkins might point out that we try to propel our genes and like genes forward. A decent amount of history looks like people trying to force their culture, their nationality, and their genes forward through history. Jews were a different group. If you're under the impression that wealth cannot be created, then any wealth that Jews get is wealth that people like you don't have. So, it becomes competitive in that sense and people try to propel people like them forward through history.

I guess I'll also touch on the fact that diaspora Judaism somewhat flies in the face of nationalism. I mean, if you're big into patriotism and nationalism, then the state should be the citizen's first priority, right? I think a lot of us now see the state as a tool meant to make our lives more stable and just. We don't live for the glory of our country. Our country is meant to help us have better lives. When we serve our country, it's to enhance the lives of the people and increase justice, not to enhance the country (although they sometimes go hand in hand). This is a big shift in modern thought (at least to me). But diaspora Judaism can fly in the face of "commitment to your country should take precedence over commitment to something else". I mean, to us it might sound ridiculous to say that your country should matter more than your morality - and I mean secular morality here. But in a Europe coming out of feudalism where they were trying to define national loyalties and borders, worried about losing territory to the neighboring country, worried about all sorts of things that look foolish from a modern perspective, well, if Jews weren't going to care if they were Polish or Russian, that was a huge problem. Frankly, this is one of the reasons that Jews came to America. While America has its nationalism, it's pluralistic, and it's often based off good governance and democratic principles more than the history of most places.

Jews could also be insular. Kosher dietary laws meant that they didn't eat with non-Jews and that they bought their food from within the community. Again, it's easy to see how something like "those assholes won't buy meat from me saying my meat isn't clean!" turns into anti-semitism in the way rumors spread. Before cars, towns were organized for churches or shuls to be within walking distance which means segregation.

Heck, even looking at the Harvard example, you see a private club that had a certain culture that was losing that culture. No longer would Harvard be almost all Wasp. I mean, they and their forefathers had put their money and effort into it. Shouldn't their progeny and the progeny of their religion and culture get the benefits of it? I'm not saying you should agree with that logic, but it is logic that is often used. I mean, there are people who don't want this country to become Spanish speaking or bi-lingual. Whether someone is the first person someplace or not, people and culture become entrenched and people don't want to see that culture change away from them. Heck, how much complaining do some people do that a lot of advertisements don't say "Merry Christmas"? Harvard was created by Wasps and now it was benefitting Jews and turning more Jewish. The identity of the institution was changing.

It isn't that the hatred is that different from a lot of other ethnic hatred. A lot of it can be seen in a lot of the other ethno-religious hatred that has existed in the world. It's that the Jews hit a lot of different sore points in human history. There was religion, there was national identity, there was immigrant status, there was language, there was hope of another homeland, their was separateness/insular-ness, etc.

I come from the point of view that nationalism is a bit outdated. People deserve to be justly governed in ways that make their lives better and that they should be allowed to choose how to live their lives in a way that makes them happy (clearly with restrictions on things that cannot be abided like murder). But providing good, just governance isn't why Europe has so many countries. Good governance and happy lives for citizens isn't why England subjugated Wales. Justice isn't what drove the Reconquista of Spain. Power, control, and the perpetuation of one's genes, culture, language, and religion have been a driving force in human history.

I, for one, am happy that we at least see such injustice and hatred as a bad thing these days. I'm not sure if you were looking for an answer like this. I didn't mean for it to be long like this. Hatred can be a bit hard to wrap one's head around (at least for me) and yet it's defined a lot of human history. I can't imagine someone hating me without knowing me. I don't understand it. I'm nice (honest)! Yet, even without understanding it, I know there are people who wish I didn't exist who don't even know me. It's actually quite an odd feeling.

goo• 15 years ago

Thank you for that deeply insightful comment -- growing up surrounded by a very Jew-positive culture, I never properly understood why Jews had been oppressed in a modern context in the first place.

thret• 15 years ago

This explanation is comprehensive, logical, and doesn't make gentiles seem like arseholes. Thank you. I am going to keep this handy.

johnyzee• 15 years ago

Great comment and the length of it just goes to show how complex the issue is.

If we were to add contemporary issues things would get even more complicated: Zionism and Israeli policies has created a lot of anger against 'Jews'. This has much less to do with ethnicity than historical anti-semitism, but the two get conflated which leaves everybody confused and talking past eachother. Add to the mix the fact that Jews dominate banking and media (I assume this is accepted as fact and not conspiracy theory), industries that get little love these days.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

Interesting.

Muslim immigrants in the west have very similar problems: they don't assimilate, their loyalties are brought into question, they only eat "halal" food, etc.

StrawberryFrog• 15 years ago

Great comment.

> Before cars, towns were organized for churches or shuls to be within walking distance which means segregation.

It's not gone. Some areas of North London are full of kosher delis, men with black hats and side-curls, etc, some don't have any.

0x12• 15 years ago

Super comment, thank you very much. What about the Israeli/Palestinian issue? I find that tends to polarize people strongly as well.

darklajid5• 15 years ago

Thank you for the long comment.

It took me a while and I needed to move here to get a tiny feeling for the complexity of this issue. Before that, 'jewish' was a label that I had in the same mental box as 'christian', 'muslim', 'hindu' or whatever. Boy is that misleading.

So many things here in Israel are challenging my understanding, every day. It doesn't help that I'd describe myself as agnostic or atheist. I guess Jews are the only example (that I know of) of a group of people that claim to share religion, ancestors and culture. I wouldn't know how - for example - one could create a model of a secular state here. I wouldn't know where to separate culture from religion and I'm convinced that I'll never understand the idea of common ancestry / being descendants of the same tribes.

Maybe this intermingled religion/culture/ethnicity (if this is the right word?) is confusing more people, just like me. And maybe some people react with fear if they don't grasp a concept?

rubashov2• 15 years ago

It's worth pointing out that there's something in Jewish character that produces revolutionaries and anti-establishment types who rock the boat. The anti-tsarist intelligentsia, the 19th century anarchists, the Bolsheviks, Spanish Red Terror, German 1918 revolution, Alinksy-ite 60s radicals, Neo-Cons -- All these movements and more had very identifiable Jewish leadership.

rubashov2• 15 years ago

> Jews were seen as people with divided loyalties

But they very often ARE people with divided loyalties! Several folks in the Obama and Bush administrations have had Israeli passports. To me, that's completely crazy.

Henry Kissinger, a patriotic American if nothing else, talked openly about how the US relationship with Israel makes no strategic sense. His fellow Jews viciously attacked him for the most part.

alecbenzer3• 15 years ago

Slightly irrelevant to the overall topic, but what is the reason for not spelling out God's name? iirc someone once told me that it was wrong to ever erase or otherwise "dispose" of God's written name, so it'd be wrong to, for example, write "God" on a whiteboard and then have to erase it later. Is this the case? (if so, it seems like writing it on HN might be okay) Or are you just not supposed to write it out at all?

shn• 15 years ago

Probably they are gaining power/wealth not proportional to their numbers in the society they live in. That happens easily when a close knit society works hard while trading, doing business among themselves (e.g. buying goods and services from in-group rather than outside when they can) as well as favor community members over others in the larger society. This probably creates hatred of the majority towards Jewish people and that hatred directed more at times of distress like economic hardship or wars. I heard today that State of Alabama passed an immigration law recently that target immigrants. Probably people in Alabama do not want immigrants these days, since they are seen "stealing" jobs while jobs in US has been vanishing since 2008 economic crisis.

tlogan3• 15 years ago

I don't think the discrimination is reserved for Jewish population.

That is unfortunate story of our crazy world. Pick up any country in the world and you can find a story very similar to Jewish story... For example, Armenins in Turkey in 1915-16 (and latter on). Or Albanians in Serbia. Romas (Gypsies) in Nazi Germany. Palestinians in Israel. Tutsis in Rwanda. Etc. etc.

We just need to always fight against things like this.

adrianwaj6• 15 years ago

"Palestinians in Israel" Well, the big questions of our time are: are the Palestinians actually oppressed? Who's oppressing them? Does finding out the truth even matter?

edanm3• 15 years ago

The things you're describing are very different situations. Jews are citizens of certain countries that are discriminated against based on religion/race. As opposed to, for example, Palestinians, who are not citizens of Israel, and whose oppression or lack thereof is about other things.

Note that I'm not saying anything about the morality of this or whether we need to fight it, just that the different things you talked about are objectively very different from anti-semitism.

tlogan3• 15 years ago

Why is this downvoted? Honestly...

known3• 15 years ago

I think it is due to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Supremacism

Tycho• 15 years ago

The only convincing reason I know of is that while from the middle ages onwards, Christians (and Muslims) were banned in the bible from issuing loans with payable interest, the book of Deuteronomy had a get-out clause for Jews: they were only barred from issuing such loans to their 'brothers. ie. eachother

This would have three logical consequences: Jewish people becoming masters of finance; Jewish people helping their own community over others; and Jewish people obtaining all the disrepute that comes with being a loan shark. You can see how all 3 things would breed resentment/jealousy from other ethnic groups.

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice cuts to the heart of the matter. Shylock offers the financing needed by the protagonists - but such financing by necessity comes with brutal collateral ('a pound of flesh'). People see the heartless lender exacting payment, but not the underlying laws of economics.

pixcavator2• 15 years ago

Here’s a “Russian” problem: find the largest projection on the plane of a box with sides a, b, c.

btmorex• 15 years ago

Well, I don't care about my math rep so... I don't get it.

You've listed 3 sides of a box. Does that mean that the "fourth" side is part of one of those 3 sides so a = b = c? Or are you asking for the orientation and relative length of the 3 sides such that the fourth side would maximize the area of the box?

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

You don't know how to represent a rectalinear shape with only 3 sides? Man, you really are behind.

... kidding :)

nandemo2• 15 years ago

The "3 sides" are the height, width and depth of the box.

losvedir• 15 years ago

I think the question is asking something akin to "You have a box with width a, height b, and length c. What's the biggest shadow you can make?"

For example, if you think of the sun straight overhead, then the shadow will have area a*b. But if the sun moves over, then the shadow will grow by inclusion of some of the height of the box.

bbrizzi• 15 years ago

Thanks to you, I just spent half my morning trying to solve this without getting anywhere. I tried using vectors a, b and c that i project unto the xOy plane to get the sum of three parallelograms.

But then the problem is to parametrize these three vectors' positions. The first one can be define in spherical coords as (acos(phi)sin(psi), asin(phi)sin(psi), a*cos(psi)) but then I need to introduce a third parameter for vector b and write both b and c using this system...

I'll give it another try this afternoon using matrices.

EDIT: Alright, I guess you can write a, b and c as a rotational matrix using Euler angles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_angles ). You can probably also cancel one of the angles (let's say theta) by rotating your xOy plane around which doesn't change the problem.

You then just have to calculate S using phi and psi.

S = ||a^b||+||b^c||+||c^a||

and solve

dS/d(psi) = 0 and dS/d(phi) = 0

However, that's way too much trig for me for today so I'll leave it to someone more courageous than me.

ryanhunt• 15 years ago

sounds like a similar (although at least a little bit more achievable) to the "White Australia Policy" that was once one in place, where a language exam was given to 'undesirables' in a language that it was clear the person wishing to emigrate to Australia could not speak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy

natasham25• 15 years ago

Yep, that is why my family moved to the US from Russia. My mom wanted to be a doctor, but wasn't accepted to medical school even though she got straight As and was completely qualified. They just said they can't accept her because she's Jewish, and there is nothing she could do about it. I'm really glad I got to grow up here in America.

iskander5• 15 years ago

Similar story: My dad was his high school's valedictorian in Kiev, but couldn't get a spot at a regular university. He ended up getting a degree in 'applied physics' from a night school after his military service. I think he's always regretted not becoming a researcher. My grandfather also did really well in high school, tried to become an archaeologist but it wasn't a common profession in the USSR and university positions were mainly reserved for well connected non-Jews.

mturmon• 15 years ago

Here's a nice article about Grigori Perelman, Fields medal winner, solver of the Poincare conjecture, and mathematical genius/recluse.

Perelman came up in the Soviet system in the 1980s, when the discriminatory practice you mention was in force:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/he-conq...

Relevant quote:

"For a Jewish boy [sic] gifted in mathematics to be admitted to a university, there were three possibilities: hope you were one of the two Jews accepted at Leningrad University every year; go somewhere with less draconian admission policies; or make it onto the Soviet team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, which guaranteed admission to Leningrad University. Perelman decided to try out for the team."

toyg• 15 years ago

Moral questions aside, I wonder if forcing entire ethnic groups to "perform for the country" in order to earn social status is really that bad. A lot of countries have done it across the centuries (Rome, France, UK, Arabs... and more recently US and USSR); they were usually successful in "extracting value" from those groups in the short term, while in the long term fostering a sense of belonging to a non-discriminatory ideal of citizenship.

Even in this case, the Soviets might have discriminated generations of Jews, but then they produced a Perelman.

adrianwaj6• 15 years ago

I'd pack my bags and go so quickly, so whose loss would be it be? Then as a non-Jew, I think I'd do the same.

pavpanchekha• 15 years ago

Haha, you think it was that easy to emigrate from the USSR, especially for Jewish men and women? There's a reason people didn't, and it isn't because everyone thought they were better off staying.

adrianwaj6• 15 years ago

I would've made it out. That's what I believe.

mannicken• 15 years ago

Actually, it was easier to emigrate from the USSR for Jewish men and women than for the rest of the nation due to refugee programs that US offers for minorities suffering persecution. I think other countries offer those two.

I am one of the people whose parents emigrated in 2004 as Christian refugees, btw. They had to prove they suffered from religious persecution (bible raids, not getting into colleges, etc).

The whole 'give me your poor and hungry' thing never really went away ;-)

Hitchhiker• 15 years ago

Truly remarkable.. and chilling.

andreiursan• 15 years ago

Just want to say something about the math problems: I'm living in Romania, somehow closer to Rusia. Anyway, in Highschool I took private math lessons from an over 70 years old math teacher - man, he was so good at finding solutions to similar problems with those in the url. Sometimes the quickest solution is to construct your own function. I do enjoy the time when I had to solve problems like those, it is quite a creative process.

known3• 15 years ago

There are ~50 mutually exclusive religions in this world. It is prudent to create 50 independent states for these people. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Religious_wri...

rbanffy• 15 years ago

And have ~50² religious wars in the process? No, thanks.

ceejayoz3• 15 years ago

Only 50? There are probably well over 50 mutually exclusive Christian sects alone.

known3• 15 years ago

http://www.jewfaq.org/origins.htm

nivertech2• 15 years ago

This thread prove only one thing: you can be sound and logical Hacker News reader, but once the topic is Jews and/or Israel - you become irrational and brain-washed.

Mdasen's comment is the only smart reply on this thread.

jfruh• 15 years ago

This reminds me of an interesting story from Not In My Neighborhood, a history of residential and institutional segregation in Baltimore. Baltimore in many ways had three-way segregation -- black, white, and Jewish -- with Realtors for all three communities refusing to show houses in the "wrong" neighborhood to anyone. However, the public school system only had two-way segregation -- black and white, with Jews attending white schools.

Johns Hopkins, then as now an elite institution located in Baltimore, encouraged local kids to apply, and was integrated long before the public schools were. Hopkins never had any kind of restriction on the number of black students, but they did have quotas on the number of Jews. That's because the black school system was bad enough (and blacks generally financially disadvantaged enough) that they knew they'd never have more than about 5 percent or so of their student body being black -- enough to show that they were liberal and enlightened, but not enough to change the character of the student body. But if they let in all the Jews who qualified, the school would be half Jewish, which would be unacceptable, as they'd get a reputation as a "Jewish" school.

This is also one of the reasons for the long-ago heyday of City College in New York: as a public college, they didn't discriminate, and so a lot of Jewish kids who would have otherwise qualified to go to the Ivy League ended up there.

vbtemp3• 15 years ago

I grew up near Baltimore. It wasn't until the mid 50's I believe that Jews were permitted east of Falls Rd. It took my grandmother decades to be able to comfortably go through that area. In fact, when she and her husband bought their first house in woodlawn, the entire neighborhood signed a petition that they did not want any Jews moving in. My grandparents powered through it anyway.

brandoncor• 15 years ago

What you describe seems to be the same thing that's happening to Asian Americans today: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/art.... Though there might not be specific quotas, there is a feeling that certain universities are "more Asian" than others, Johns Hopkins being one of them.

graupel• 15 years ago

As a Jewish American, the biggest question I have is "How does any college/institution know that I (or my children) are Jewish?"

We don't have a particularly Jewish last name, have some Irish mixed in with an Eastern European background, etc - without putting "Fluent in Yiddish" and "President of Temple Beth Sholom" on a resume, I don't see how anyone would ever pick us out from the crowd as being Jewish.

I can see how it would be easier to discriminate based on race, country of origin, or gender, than religion, that's all.

vbtemp3• 15 years ago

"How does any college/institution know that I (or my children) are Jewish?"

First - it would have been easier some decades ago. Just look at the neighborhood you're from, your last name (and check the mother's maiden name as well). I believe many applications would also have explicitly asked the question as well. And also, generally, and for better or worse, in many cases one can pick jews out of an arbitrary group of people with the same ease as picking black people or asian people. Being jewish is not simple a religious identification. While people endlessly argue this point, being a jew is a combination of an ethnic, religious, national, and cultural components. Most people in the US simply see it as a religious identification, which just isn't nearly the whole story.

sethg• 15 years ago

In the USSR, everyone had their ethnic identity listed on their government-issued identification.

dimitar• 15 years ago

This is true, its the infamous "Fifth point" on many different IDs (they had a system internal passports to keep people in check). It was really easy for any official to discriminate if he wanted to and hard not to when its the policy.

The USSR wasn't "politically correct" in the modern Western view of the word. The party line and the state policies were fact in fact sometimes wildly discriminatory.

Those ethnic issues are a big reason USSR broke up.

pessimizer• 15 years ago

They may not be able to guess whether you in particular or your children are Jewish, but if I can guess your name from your sex, zipcode, and birthdate, I'm pretty sure that there will be many markers of that major a part of your life to someone who examines you at any depth looking for those markers. A major marker will probably be, for example, the lack of any markers of any non-Jewish group, i.e. you're not an obvious Catholic, Muslim, Protestant, etc.

Of course, as a black American, I'm jealous that that's the biggest question that you have.

eps• 15 years ago

FWIW the Jew discrimination in Moscow State University was non-existent by early 90s, and likely even earlier than that. I had a well over a dozen Jew friends join Math dept - basically every one who applied - around that time, with no fuss whatsoever. This was an attribute of earlier times, 50s through 70s.

Secondly, to those asking who did they know who was a Jew and who wasn't. First of all, the nationality was in a passport - the primary ID issued to everyone over 16 years of age. Secondly, they looked at the last name. Thirdly, to those trying to evade this sort of filtering through changing the last name, they asked for mother's maiden name - which is as conniving as it is clever. Fourthly, they just looked at the person. It was an oral exam after all.

maratd• 15 years ago

> FWIW the Jew discrimination in Moscow State University was non-existent by early 90s, and likely even earlier than that.

Quite possibly because all the Jews left by that point? That was around the collapse of the USSR, when the borders opened up. My family and quite a few others just left.

Jewish problems

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