How the Jews became White

The article “How the Jews became white” was mainly about who the Jew’s were assimilated into the white community. It started out that the Jews were actually considered lower class by whites; mainly because they were immigrants. Since there were so many immigrants coming to the US looking for work this made it hard for all whites to be assimilated into the main culture. About 70 percent of the population was made up of immigrants and their children says the article. Most people started to think of the Jews an inferior, since they were not of pure Anglo Saxon decent. Madison Grant seemed to be a big supporter of not mixing the races, as he said “A Jew is a Jew” more so saying that they should not be seen as anything else. As the Jews wanted to get into schools and other forms of education they all had to take speech tests, most didn’t pass since they mainly spoke Yiddish; to put it simply the test was designed so that they couldn’t pass it. As time passed, more and more Jews started to attend law schools and or become teachers; they were getting accepted into white culture; or they were leaving and assimilating themselves. After that the article goes into talking about World War II and the GI’s coming back to get jobs, but how the African American GI were getting nothing.

Up until that point I though that the article was making sense, but I do not see the reason for them talking about how the African Americans could not find work for about 2 pages. I understand that the Jews were easily accepted into the community by the whites after a while and that the African Americans went to war and came back and could not even find a job while others could, but I do not see the need to go so far into that. There was one thing that I would like to be pointed out to e though; what did the author mean when he said “I don’t remember hearing WASP as a kid.” On page 43, it might be irrelevant but I don’t remember him saying anything else about that anywhere else in the article. My thoughts on the article are that the Jews had it a little easier than the rest of the people we have read about, they really didn’t have to deal with the prejudice that the Irish went through, or they just don’t talk about it in the article I think that this could have been a better article if it focused more on the jews

Facebook Assignment

The facebook group Anime Enthusiasts seemed to be a very interesting choice. The main outlay of the site is like most face book groups with the blue and white outline. The place itself has a picture of an anime characters that I am not familiar with. Even though the group is open to everybody, it is not really diverse for the fact t hat there id mostly Caucasians and a few others. It seems that the group doesn’t really update that much since the latest update is January 7 of this year so I would think maybe the group has disbanded or it is just for show. Most of the topics seem to be more of an argument than anything, most of the time not even dealing with the things that are relative to the site. There are not any pictures on the page, and the summary is really short and to the point unlike other summaries that I have read. Most people in the group seem friendly enough; I don’t see any thing wrong with them. It does seem however that this is a type of assimilation that is being used. I understand that the group is for people who like anime, being appears that likes it as well, but they do not talk about anime that much. Its likely that the group was just short lived and they all just went to another group since there are only 3 topics and no pictures. But looking t the group before that there is no diversity in this site, its dominated by Caucasians, if I had to guess I would say that it is because most African Americans hide the fact that they like something such as anime from people in fear of being rejected from their own race, or that was how it was in my home town anyway. Its all about image, you could say that in knowing this they made the group knowing that not many people form other races would join. Know thing the reasons behind why someone would make an anime site are hard to figure out when it comes to race because you really can’t tell the difference between hidden racism, and people just not being interested in it. I have to say that this was a hard website to try to analyze, but I think that is why I chose it, you have to look past what is there and pay attention to the little things on this site to really find out something.