Pssst … listen up all you editors at the Forward and Jewish Week. Have I got a story for you! It’s the kind of piece you folks specialize in: an explosive exposé of selfish Jews engaging in racist exclusion of minorities and favoring their undeserving own members thereby greatly harming countless innocent minority members and likely stirring anti-Jewish sentiment among non-Jews.

And best of all it’s a story neither of your publications have yet covered so it’s a real scoop. I can see it now.… You’ll pull some of your best pit bull investigative reporters off whatever two-bit Orthodox scandal-of-the-month you have them working on and instead put them on the trail of this one which is sure to be much much bigger and has lots of evidence supporting it. 

Come to think of it why indeed haven’t you yet covered it? After all since it broke in December it has been the talk of the media town with stories on it in the Atlantic Forbes et al. Even the New York Times ran an op-ed and a six-participant forum on the topic. But strangely the two leading secular Jewish papers have missed it completely.

Or have they simply declined to cover it? Let’s take a closer look. The scandal was first brought to light in December by Ron Unz in a 22000-word cover story for the American Conservative. Here’s a piece entitled “Asians as the New Jews Jews as the New WASPs” by Russell Nieli a lecturer atPrinceton summarizing Unz’s quite shocking contentions:

Ron Unz’s cover story … — “The Myth of American Meritocracy” — has generated an extraordinary level of commentary in popular magazines op-ed pages and Internet blogs.… Unz’s article presents a powerful data-driven indictment of the fraudulence and dishonesty of Ivy League institutions particularly in regard to their admissions of Asians Jews and non-Jewish whites.…

Asian academic performance in recent years Unz shows has been nothing short of spectacular.  While only 11 percent ofCalifornia’s high school students Asians constituted almost 60 percent ofCalifornia’s [National Merit Scholarship] semifinalists and the picture is similar in other states.… But like the high-achieving Jews of an earlier era the Asians have not been permitted entrance intoAmerica’s most elite educational institutions commensurate with their achievement.  There are “too many of them ” our college administrators seem to be saying and they subject the Asians to unacknowledged ceiling quotas.…

Unz explains [that] “Asian-Americans today neither own nor control even a single significant media outlet and they constitute an almost invisible minority in films television radio and print.  For most Americans what the media does not report simply does not exist and there is virtually no major media coverage of what appear to be de facto Asian quotas at our top academic institutions.…”

[T]oday Unz charges it is the Jews who occupy many of the top administrative levels of the Ivies and who not only consent to Asian ceiling quotas but artificially prop up the number of Jewish students admitted to their institutions despite dramatic declines in Jewish academic performance at the high end. The Jewish administrators Unz says in effect have taken on the role of the older WASP establishment in favoring their own kind.…

He estimates that only about 6 percent of America’s highest performing students today are Jews … a far cry from earlier times when the very high-achieving Jews were often overrepresented in national competitions by a factor ten-to-one or more. Despite the decline of Jews at the high end Unz shows that the Ivy League institutions continue to keep their Jewish student population close to the high level it was in the last decades of the 20^th century (with Jewish proportions in the 15-25 percent range) when Jewish achievement clearly warranted such high numbers.… Unz finds this to be an unfair product of a Jewish admissions bias. The ones most hurt in terms of what their representation would be on a strictly meritocratic basis he says are both Asians and non-Jewish whites.

Jewish administrators in recent years Unz believes have become something like the new establishment in the eight Ivy League schools and although not motivated by animus or ill-will they tend to favor he believes Jews — as well as Latinos and blacks — over better qualified Asians and non-Jewish whites.… Unz is charitable in his account of high-ranking Jewish administrators. They are mostly decent and honorable people he says but like all human beings they are subject to unconscious biases and in-group prejudices. 

Oh so this isn’t a story about Boro Park Hassidics pitted against blacks and Hispanics but about secular Jewish Ivy League administrators (i.e. typical Forward and Jewish Week readers) denying Asian-Americans (i.e. a docile powerless minority that doesn’t trigger feelings of fear and guilt in secular Jews) their rightful chance at academic and career success?

Sorry editors for getting your hopes up and wasting your time. Nothing to see here just move right along.…

SEEING ISN’T ALWAYS BELIEVING It turns out that you haven’t been imagining things — men and women really do see things differently. Literally. This month’s Smithsonian magazine reports:

Neuroscientists have discovered that women are better at distinguishing among subtle distinctions in color while men appear more sensitive to objects moving across their field of vision.… Israel Abramov a psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist at CUNY’sBrooklynCollege gave a group of men and women a battery of visual tests. Abramov has spent 50 years studying human vision.…

[W]hen the researchers tested color vision in one of two ways — by projecting colors onto frosted glass or beaming them into their subjects’ eyes — women proved slightly better at discriminating among subtle gradations in the middle of the color spectrum where yellow and green reside. They detected tiny differences between yellows that looked the same to men. The researchers also found that … an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men while green will look more blue-green to men. This last part … demonstrate[s] Abramov says that “the nervous system that deals with color cannot be wired in the exact same way in males as in females.”

It’s interesting to consider whether women’s apparently greater ability to distinguish between subtle gradations of color might be some sort of physiological manifestation of the advantage Chazal (and our wives …) tell us women have in the binah department. Binah after all is said to be a cognate of the word bein meaning between and thus describes an ability to draw distinctions between facially very similar people or things. Our foremothers Sarah and Rivkah both used the heightened perceptiveness that Chazal call binah yiseirah to discern the deep moral chasm that separated Yitzchak and Yishmael and Yaakov and Eisav respectively. 

Findings like this one about physiological gender differences always highlight for me how feminist critiques of Judaism’s teaching that men and women have divergent spiritual natures and roles somehow fail to draw what ought to be a logical conclusion. To wit: If significant physical differences between the genders undeniably exist as well as significant emotional and cognitive differences — which we can hopefully agree is the case (for those who claim not to have experienced this copious scientific evidence is available) — then does it not stand to reason that spiritual differences might exist as well particularly in view of the Torah axiom that physical reality reflects the underlying spiritual dimension?

This is not of course actual proof that such gender differentiation on the spiritual plane exists; then again the only proof I as a faithful Jew need is that G-d Author of Torah and Creator of Man has said so. But for those denied the knowledge of what He has said this bit of reasoning ought to provide at a minimum a solid logical basis for the traditional view and perhaps even shift the burden of proof to the “we’re all the same”-niks.

The Smithsonian piece concludes that while Professor Abramov has an explanation for how the genders see differently “he’s less certain about why” although he advances the “possibility — which he cautions is highly speculative … that it’s an evolutionary adaptation that benefited hunter-gatherer societies.” Good thing he added that “highly speculative” caveat there.

If the good professor can go on about hunters and such I feel comfortable floating my own pet theory about why this newly discovered phenomenon of differentiation might exist: to get feminists thinking.