How Jews became Wthie Folks Post

1. This article talked about how many European ethnicities were at one point discriminated against in the United States. But after World War II, most of the different European ethnicities in the United States have been grouped together as white and had moved up to the middle class. The main reason that they were able to do this was because of the GI Bill of Rights.
2. Karen Brodkin begins her article by explaining how odd it was that at one point in our nation’s history, European workers were thought of as biologically different and not really “white”. She says that she would like to believe that Jews became successful wholly because of their hard work and intelligence. But she says that their rise in America’s class ladder was also because social barriers were removed by the affirmative action program that our country enacted after the Second World War She began the main part of her article by explaining that there were four major European races in America and that the Nordic race was thought of as more superior than all of the others such as the Alpines, Mediterraneans, and the Jews. On page forty she says, “race and class were interwoven: the upper class was racially pure Nordic; the lower class came from the lower races. They were clearly discriminated against as the elite whites thought of Jews as unwashed, uncouth, unrefined, loud, and pushy. She explained this as she told us that her father almost failed a speech test because his speech wasn’t the “standard” non-accented English. But times changed as she stated that in 1940 the census all the ethnicities were not singled out and that the whole white population was listed as white. She says on page forty-three that this took place because, “the economic mobility of Jews and other Euro-ethnics derived ultimately from America’s postwar economic prosperity and its enormously expanded need for professional, technical, and managerial labor, as well as on government assistance in providing it.” The GI Bill of Rights was aimed at and disproportionately helped male, Euro-origin GI’s. She explained how this bill helped nicely on page forty-four, “The almost 8 million GIs who took advantage of their educational benefits under the GI Bill cause ‘the greatest wave of college building in American history.’ White male GIs were able to take advantage of their educational benefits for college and technical training, so they were particularly well positioned to seize the opportunities provided by the new demands for professional, managerial, and technical labor.” After that she explained that unfortunately African Americans and women could not make these same gains. The progress that was made during the war was lost when the soldiers came back. Black students were not allowed in white colleges and all of the black colleges were filled to capacity, so many of them were not able to attend college. Also, housing companies refused to sell houses in suburbs to African Americans and they were not able to make improvements to their current houses.
3. I think that the author’s argument is an extremely valid one in this article. She clearly provided the reader with history of all of the major steps that allowed Jews and other European ethnicities to make the jump to the middle class. She also clearly explains why African Americans were unable to make that same jump. I’m glad that she could see the facts that this bill did help Jews out and that their rise wasn’t only because of hard work. Although they did work extremely hard, so did the African Americans. But the bill didn’t reward them for their service during the war like it did the Europeans.
4. I don’t think that this bill affected any of my ancestors. My father and uncles were born after this timeframe and my grandfather did not fight in the war. Therefore he stayed in the working class as a farmer. I think it is so sad that even this late in our countries history, blacks were being segregated against in brutal ways. It had to have been horrible fighting for the country and then not being rewarded for your service the way others were and in fact, they were almost punished for serving the country.