Ron Unz has an important article on Jewish overrepresentation in the Ivy League. Essentially the subterfuge was likely counting only religious Jews as Jews which resulted in a sudden very large drop in Hillel’s claims about Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League. As Unz notes, this is beautifully reminiscent of Jewish strategizing to avoid the charge of Jewish overrepresentation among Bolsheviks during the horrors of the first decades of the Soviet Union: The ADL and other Jewish organizations simply claimed that Bolshevik Jews, being godless Communists, were not really Jews at all. This is why Chapter 3 of The Culture of Critique is concerned with showing that Jewish Bolsheviks and other Jews on the left in the diaspora in the West not only identified as Jews but also saw communism as “good for the Jews,” as the saying goes. And of course, it was good for the Jews: Yuri Slezkine provides a great deal of corroboration that indeed Jews became an elite—a hostile elite—in the Soviet Union during the most murderous decades of the regime.

Notice also that non-Jewish Whites and Asians of high academic ability are also discriminated against by this Jewish strategizing — and this despite well documented decline in Jewish academic performance compared to their upwardly mobile parents and grandparents. As Unz found in his 2012 paper, non-Jewish Whites are underrepresented by a factor of 15, Asians by a factor of 7. As I noted,

But the numbers for Jewish overrepresentation compared to Whites are even more striking. Corresponding to the collapse of Jewish academic achievement has been an increase in the percentage of high-performing Whites in math and science competitions. And whereas the performance of Jews has declined dramatically, the performance for Whites has stayed approximately the same—an amazing and very heartening finding considering the corrosive effect of the MTV culture and a public school system whose main function would seem to be spewing multicultural propaganda and White guilt rather than academic rigor. “Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.”

So instead of constituting 65–70% of the student body at elite universities, non-Jewish Whites average around 23% for elite universities while Jews, constituting less than 6% average around the same.

However, needless to say, only the Asians have sued—and they may well win. If (in an alternate universe) non-Jewish Whites were to sue, it would be quickly thrown out because Jews are considered White. As Unz notes, if Jews and Whites are included in the same category, there is no evidence of pro-White discrimination.

However, there are several reasons to reject the argument that Jews should be included in the White category:

Population genetic data indicate that Jews are a Middle Eastern group and that there is substantial genetic distance between Europeans and Jews.

Jews typically do not identify with the people and culture of Christian Europe and its offshoots; traditional Jewish attitudes conceptualize Judaism as separate from White, Christian society; partly because of their lack of identification with non-White Christian culture, Jewish groups have led the campaign to remove Christianity from the public square;

There is a long history of very mainstream Jewish activism and identity that sees Christian Europe as an evil outgroup responsible for a long history of persecuting Jews; an important aspect of Jewish self-conception in America—apparent in much of the material reviewed by Unz, such as Jerome Karabel’s work—is that Jews were subjected to quotas at Ivy League universities until after World War II;

Jews are a relatively powerful group that has often been in competition with non-Jewish Europeans; Ivy League enrollments may be seen as one aspect of that competition;

Jewish ethnic activism typically excludes non-Jewish Whites and favors Jews, as in the appointment of Elena Kagan and the Jewish campaign to increase Jewish enrollment in Ivy League universities mentioned above;

As a result, the distinction between Jew and non-Jewish White is of considerable real world importance.

But such an argument would be strenuously resisted by the powers that be.

These are the last two pages of Unz’s recent article, slightly abridged.

In general, classifying an individual as Jewish has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.

It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?

Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.

Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.

For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.

One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.

As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.

I gradually noticed that the huge and continuing increase in the enrollment of non-white and foreign students at our most elite universities had caused a complete collapse in the enrollment of white American Gentiles, but oddly enough, no similar reduction in Jewish numbers. It was well-known that Jewish activists had been the primary force behind the establishment of Affirmative Action and related policies in college admissions, and I began to wonder about their true motivation, whether conscious or unconscious.

Had the goal been the stated one, of providing educational opportunities to previously excluded groups? Or had that merely been the excuse used to advance a policy that eliminated the majority of white Gentiles, their primary ethnic competitors? With the Jewish population numbering merely 2%, there was an obvious limit as to how many elite college slots they themselves could possibly fill, but if enough other groups were also brought in, then Gentile numbers could easily be reduced to low levels, despite the fact that they constituted the bulk of the national population.

Asians represented an interesting test-case. As their numbers rapidly grew, white Gentiles were consequently pushed out, and this process was celebrated across the academic community. But by the late 1980s, Asian numbers had increased to such an extent that they inevitably began to impinge upon elite Jewish enrollment as well and future increases would surely worsen the situation. And at that point, the process suddenly halted, with Asian numbers being sharply reduced and thereafter permanently capped. The implications of this situation were already in the back of my mind when I published my 1998 Wall Street Journal column describing some of these striking racial facts.

The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American group and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.

The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.

Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.