Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

60 Language Diversity in the Classroomof the Binet IQ test to immigrants at Ellis Island. The tests were inEnglish. Nonetheless, the results suggested (to the testers) that Jews,Italians and Poles were of feeble intelligence (Slotkin, 2005). In one earlyadministration, Goddard found that 25 out of 30 new Jewish immigrantswere feeble-minded: ‘we are now getting the poorest of each race’, heargued (Portes & Rumbaut, 1996: 197). Goldstein (2006) has recentlywritten about the perceived ‘Jewish problem’ here, with particularlyinteresting notes on relationships real and attributed between Jewsand blacks. More particularly still, he describes the classificationaldifficulties that the white mainstream associated with the Jews themselves:they were obviously not black, but were they ‘white’? It seems anodd question now, but Goldstein shows how caricatured representationsof Jews often gave them ‘black’ lips and hair, and how the presence ofJewish merchants in black neighborhoods was seen to be at onceopportunistic and in opposition to white sensibilities. At the sametime, more middle-class Jews emulated mainstream values even to theextent of mounting black-face minstrel shows. Still, if Jews were somehownot fully ‘white’, they were anti-semitic cartoons aside clearlynot black. How, then, were they to be understood?Growing recognition by white Americans that the Jews defied easyplacement into the categories of black and white did not mean thatthe color line ceased to play a significant role in framing the ‘‘JewishProblem’’ during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact antisemites in theperiod between the two wars became preoccupied with understandingthe relationship between Jewishness and whiteness. If theycould no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likeningthem to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, andexpose their role as an unstable element in white society. (Goldstein,2006: 125126)Handlin’s classic study of race and nationality in America (1957)remains a fine source on the assessment and the subsequent restriction ofimmigrants in the first decades of the 20th century. Particularly relevantfor my purposes here is his discussion of the influential report of theImmigration Commission (1911) and the later analysis by Laughlin(1923); the latter was supervisor of the Eugenics Records Office (seebelow), and an associate of the Immigration Restriction League led byMadison Grant (1916) whose book, The Passing of the Great Race,extolled the unique virtues of the ‘Nordic pioneers’. In his submission,Laughlin pointed out that ‘the foreign-born show an incidence ofinsanity in the state and federal hospitals 2.85 times higher than that