A Jewish applicant for a scholarship to train teachers in Britain was quite surprised when he was told that a Jewish woman who had been fired from her university teaching post by the Nazis was “too white to be diverse”. The candidate explained that she was deported by the Nazis, but it didn’t help
Izzy Posen, a 27-year-old University of Bristol graduate, recently applied to the Mathematics Institute for a $35,000 teacher training grant. In his interview, he was asked to give an example of a “diverse mathematician” (African American). He responded with the name of Emi Neter, a German Jewish mathematician and physicist, she taught at the University of Göttingen, which was then the most important mathematical center in the world, until the rise of the Nazis in the early thirties.
She fled to the US after the Nazis fired all the Jews from positions at the university. The interviewer told him that “she’s white and we wanted someone diverse,” referring to an African-American character. “So I said, I don’t think a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 1930s isn’t diverse,” Posen wrote on social networks. Her response was, “You said Germany, which is a white country, and maybe your students didn’t know about the Holocaust?”.
Posen told the British Jewish newspaper Jewish Time.news, “I was very shocked, I mentioned my mother Neter because she really is a role model, and I thought that someone who overcame great difficulties is an inspiration to a lot of women, Jews and everyone.” He said the interviewer responded: “Your students may not know about the Holocaust, so they’ll hear Germany, they’ll hear white, so it won’t be representative for them.”
He said: “Why was a question about a diverse group of backgrounds considered specific to ethnicity, and especially non-whites? To me, a diverse set of backgrounds means someone who has overcome a lot of odds, that the system has gone against them, so, Emi Neter, a woman, who is still very much represented in mathematics today , especially then, who really couldn’t teach in her own name, who was expelled because she was Jewish, so there is nothing more diverse than that. There is no more inspiration for someone who overcame many odds.”
He said that he felt that he would not be accepted with appreciation, and he would not be accepted as a Jew, “I am not enough for them.” David Rich, head of policy at the Jewish Community Security Organization (CST), said that Posen’s story is not an uncommon one, unfortunately. “It’s terrible, and not isolated,” he wrote on Twitter. “I heard other examples from educational settings for adults of the Jewish experience being excluded from discussions about racism and exclusion.”
Rosalind Azuzi, the director general of the Institute of Mathematics, said that she “is very sorry for any pain or hurt caused, please be calm that we take this very seriously and stand by the Jewish community that suffered and still suffers from persecution, prejudice and discrimination” she said.
She added, “The stories of Jewish mathematicians, and especially those identified by Izzy, were fantastic examples of diversity in mathematics. The concern was whether it would be challenging to deal with this topic in a math class, especially if the students had not yet been taught about the Holocaust.”