Jewish Problems

The problem is with shmerl saying we can't use the phrase "affirmative action".

At no point did the OP imply that there was no discrimination against other groups.

From the Frenkel article: "People of other nationalities, like Tatars and Armenians, against whom there were prejudices and persecution—though not nearly on the same scale as against the Jews"

One who thinks the Soviets hurt anyone more than the Ukrainians and Chechens is deluded.

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.... "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.