Forty Acres and a Shul

It's not hard to wonder, sometimes, whether my students teach me more than I teach them. Because the students I teach are at such a high level--by the time students reach what we call the Upper-Intermediate Level, they know virtually all of English grammar and mostly need speaking practice, reading, and vocabulary building--I find my classes are the ideal place to learn all that I can about Russian values and Russian society.

This week, I got this opportunity in a couple of different ways. In my upper-intermediate business class, I found myself having to explain the concept of "positive discrimination" to my students (this is the British term for what Americans know as affirmative action). My students by and large were appalled that such a thing went on in Britain and America and rankled at what they saw as its clear injustice.

These days, I don't really know how I feel about affirmative action myself. I find myself becoming more liberal--the behavior of the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel seems to be forcing me into it--but am not sure whether vague, long-ago promises of "40 acres and a mule" merit policies that only seem to stir up more racial hatred, to keep American government and business institutions eternally involved in deciding who is "really" African-American (something it does not do with any other group, save Native Americans), and delay the day when all citizens will be truly equal under the law.

Nonetheless, I feel some compensation is owed to people who were denied their basic human rights under decades of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and who are still alive and able to collect compensation. If compensation is owed to the survivors of Japanese internment camps, it is owed to millions of African-Americans who survived the Jim Crow South. That giving this compensation to African-Americans would be more expensive does not change this, in my opinion.

All of this was hard to get across to my students. I find in general that Russians have an excellent grasp of history, not only their own but of other people's as well. For all the talk there was during the Cold War about Russia's being a "closed society," Russians do not seem to live in the kind of bubble Americans do, blithely ignorant that there is a world beyond their shores.

I asked my students to what extent ethnic discrimination still exists in Russian society. I have heard quite a bit about discrimination against people from the Caucuses (if you really want to get a discussion going in a Russian classroom, tell a bunch of ethnic Russians that in America, they would be seen as "Caucasian"). My students largely felt that the Russian business world, while full of corruption and lawlessness, at least tries to adhere to notions of equal opportunity.

One of my students, a woman of about seventy, did volunteer that there had been significant discrimination against Jewish people in Soviet times. This I had known about, but it was the first time I had heard anything about it from a Russian person. The younger students in my class (all in their mid-thirties, from what I gather) don't seem to think anti-Semitism is a serious problem in Russian business circles today. But my older student sighed and said she thought they were being naive.

All in all, I cannot say that I have encountered any direct anti-Semitism in Russia. Other forms of discrimination are more visible, however. Unlike America, Russia allows businesses to specify age and sex in job advertisements. I have seen ads in store windows stating the store is looking for "a girl, not older than 30" to work there.