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