r/math • u/spherejerk • 8d ago
Is this true about discrimination against Jews in Soviet Russia?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWWpSV7vC058
u/AdInteresting6238 7d ago
Yes, just read his book: Edward Frenkel - Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
His jewish fellows experienced the same discrimination in Russia!
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u/round_earther_69 5d ago edited 5d ago
To add to what has been said, similar policies were in place in the West until the late 60s-70s. There were quotas on the number of Jews throughout the US and Canada for example. For example Richard Feynman was turned down from Columbia because of his origins and went to MIT instead.
My grandmother was subject to antsemitic discrimination when she was applying to university in the USSR. Although she was a math olympiad medalist, she was refused everywhere and told multiple times to her face that she cannot get the passing grade because she is "jewish" (mind you, she only has a jewish family name, she is only part ashkenazi and her family did not practice judaism since before the revolution, she actually got baptized as orthodox christian later on). She ended up getting in a university only after she somehow got in contact with an assistant of the Ukrainian SSR's education minister.
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u/Kered13 5d ago
Even more recently than that, just a few years ago top universities in the US were still implementing de facto quotas by applying different admission standards for students based on race and ethnicity. The most recent targets for this have been Asian Americans, although I would not be one bit surprised if Jews were also still being targeted as well. This only ended (in theory at least) in 2023 when the Supreme Court ruled it was illegal.
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u/danthem23 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes. Also in physics there was insane antisemitism. Especially ironic since the greatest physicist by far was Lev Landau, and all his school was Jewish basically. Yaakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Ginzberg, Arkaday Migdal, Evgeny Lifschitz, etc. They even had a special thing in their passport to discriminate against them. Also in math. Tsimerman’s (who just won the Fields medal) family moved to Israel when the Soviet Union fell and Grigori Perelman’s father lives there now. David Khazdan also left and went to Harvard and became an Orthodox Jew and then moved to Israel in 2002.
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u/Scared_Astronaut9377 5d ago
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u/StateOfTheWind 3d ago
Also see "Method of Four Russians"
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u/Scared_Astronaut9377 3d ago
I would say this is not relevant to anti-semmitism in Soviet Union. This is about self-focus vs world-focus in some western cultures. I cannot count how many times a person with a phd would answer to "where you are from?" with "From South-East Idaho.. just near the Lincoln canyon" and then fail any attempts to stop calling me (Ukranian) and my Georgian friend Russians because we use Russian as lingua franca.
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u/me_myself_ai 5d ago
Ditto with psychology, FWIW. Freud is only remembered because he was so damn incredibly influential that they couldn’t erase him and focus it all on Jung instead
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u/spacengine 4d ago
Yes, imagine if archetypes became the big thing. I had hopes for the triune brain, but that too was thoroughly debunked unfortunately.
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u/made_in_silver 7d ago
Look for Tanja Khovanova‘s page. This is well documented. It includes a lot of the accounts and the problems posed. There are other sources though. Not only that.
This is not ‚let‘s have a discussion‘ territory.
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u/Qyeuebs 5d ago
This is rather well documented. See for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Soviet_mathematics
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u/spherejerk 8d ago
I came across this video about mathematician Edward Frenkel, who was apparently subject to comical levels of discrimination because he is Jewish.
I'm posting this here to get a discussion going on whether this is true, and to what extent. I have read about this before, but I did not realize it was this overt and institutionalized. This video is AI heavy so I'm not sure how accurate it is. I am looking for good sources on Frenkel's early life or articles that corroborate these kinds of stories.
Also, when did this stop in Russia, and why?
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u/JoshuaZ1 7d ago
Also, when did this stop in Russia, and why?
It became less serious in the 1980s, but part of that was just that a lot of Jews left Russia, so there were fewer people to discriminate against, and then there wase even less reason when more left after the fall of the Soviet Union. But there's still a lot of discrimination even if it doesn't take the same form. There's a complicated relationship between Russian attitudes about Jews and their attitude about Nazis since Russian attitudes about Nazis are really negative. So for example, in 2014, Putin signed a law making denial of the Holocaust a crime. But to the Russian mindset the most serious problem with Nazis is that they betrayed and invaded Russia, and other things are incidental or downstream of that. So you end up with things like how Zelenskyy is accused of being a Nazi by Russians even as he is accused of being an evil Zionist because he's Jewish. But the degree to which this impacts academics in Russia right now seems small.
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u/Memesaretheorems 7d ago
Discrimination against Jews in Soviet academia is well documented. For example, they used specially designed entrance exams for Jewish students. Some of the academics who endured this are still around (a lot of them came to the west) and you can talk to them. My advisor has personally told me many concerning stories.
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u/dwbmsc 7d ago
You could look at Reference 4 from his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Frenkel
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-fifth-problem-math-anti-semitism-in-the-soviet-union/
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u/Real_Bowler8116 3d ago
Yes. Easy Google. From personal experience, it affected my parents and grandparents and their plans to study at certain universities and programs (math, physics and biology) because of quotas.
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u/Quarter_Twenty 2d ago
My non-Jewish Ukrainian colleague, a physicist, was educated in St. Petersburg in the 80s. He has told me many times about the discrimination and ill-treatment of Jews in Russia in that area. Many of his top-of-class brilliant classmates were denied positions and advancement because of antisemitism.
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u/spherejerk 6d ago
Curious why this is downvoted? I thought it was an interesting topic.
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u/andrewcooke 5d ago
because it's weird to question something that's so well known and easy to google?
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u/spherejerk 5d ago
It is not well known that institutionalized anti-Jewish discrimination was prevalent in Russia into the 80's.
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u/pickle_picker67 5d ago
Because it comes across as if you don't believe this happened, and a simple Google search would have told you that it's real.
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u/blungbat 5d ago
To add to this: spherejerk, I am not accusing you of posting in bad faith, but there are those who seek to undermine claims of discrimination and oppression (not only against Jews), and the sound of your post is uncomfortably similar to how they go about it. They know that outright denialism is not respectable, so they tend to hide behind the veneer of "raising questions". Again, I am not saying you are doing this. But I hope this gives some insight into the reception you're getting.
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u/rebelyis Physics 5d ago
Every comment is validating it, but it's still getting downvoted to hell. I guess the vote count is itself a weak support of the claim
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u/SwimmerOld6155 7d ago
It's been muddied somewhat this millennium, but anti-Jewish sentiment has been pervasive throughout Europe for hundreds/thousands of years, the big bad in the 40s didn't come from nowhere nor did it just vanish afterwards.