New minority label at CUNY: ‘Jewish’.

New minority label at CUNY: ‘Jewish’.(NYP).Something isn’t kosher about a CUNY scheme to single out Jews, angry professors charge. Touting a move to make its faculty more diverse, CUNY administrators have broken out Jews into a separate minority group: “White/Jewish.” CUNY insists “some faculty” want the label, instead of being lumped in as just white. But the theistic tag has outraged both Jewish and non-Jewish professors, and sparked a furor. “This is, as far as I know, the first time a religion has been introduced into any affirmative-action document,” said David Gordon, a history professor at Bronx Community College and the Graduate Center. “What would the response be to a category ‘White/Methodist?’ Silly? Irrelevant?”“It’s an insult and idiotic,” said Hershey Friedman, deputy chairman of the Finance and Business Management Department at Brooklyn College. “Most Jews are brown-skinned. We also have black Jews and Asian Jews. Once you mix religion with race you’re opening a Pandora’s box — and you look stupid.” The new White/Jewish category is discussed in a report on CUNY’s Diversity Action Plan, issued last month by CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. The plan is aimed at boosting the recruitment and inclusion of minorities.Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who last week called on the state attorney general to investigate complaints of anti-Semitism in hiring at Brooklyn College, called the new Jewish category “abhorrent.” An Irish-Catholic professor at Lehman College quipped: “I can get yellow stars to put on my colleagues’ arms,” referring to the badges that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi-occupied Europe.Hmmmm......Read the full story here.