Does This Mean Gentiles Like to Get Up at 4 A.M.?
So occasionally I get sent things...like this inspired piece of satire, in which UC-Berkeley sociologist Nancy Chodorow wonders: What if Larry Summers had mused more on that burning question, Why
are there so few Jews in farming? The president's quote comes first...Chodorow's imagined extension folllows.
Jews in Farming?Lawrence H. Summers
Cambridge, Mass.
January 14, 2005
It is, after all, not the case that the role of women in science is the only example of a group that is significantly underrepresented in an important activity and whose underrepresentation contributes to a shortage of role models for others who are considering being in that group. To take a set of diverse examples, the data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture. These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it's important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation. >>
Why are there so few Jews in farming? —Nancy J. Chodorow Psychoanalyst; Professor of Sociology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
I can think of three hypotheses, and I'll give them to you in order of most to least probable. The main reason, I think, is because Jews don't like to get up at 4 am, so they simply select themselves out of jobs, like milking cows, that require such early rising. Secondly, we need to consider biogenetic factors: that Jews may have less innate aptitude than non-Jews for activities like driving tractors or combines, or figuring out how much money you can make on a silo of grain, and whether you should sell it in early or late August, or being able to deliver a calf. Finally, and I think this is the least important of the three possibilities -- though of course I'll be glad to be proven wrong -- there is the possibility that the socialization of Jews has not been in the direction of making them farmers, and possibly there has been discrimination against Jews, when they've tried to own land, or to move into traditional rural Christian communities. But I'd just remind you that I think these last possibilities -- that Jews have been discriminated against in terms of whether they could own land, say in the Ukraine in the 19th century, or here in the U.S., when those few immigrants moved to Minnesota or Upstate New York, or that Jews are socialized to be more interested in urban occupations – those are way down the line in terms of where I'd see the causal probabilities -- I could be wrong here, of course, and I'm just trying to be descriptive, not get into all that judgmental stuff that one gets into when one is looking at questions of inequality. But I’d say, thinking systematically and clinically, that the factors of choice not to have jobs that require such early hours, and innate biological or genetic factors that favor Gentiles over Jews in those aptitudes that make for good farmers -- those seem to me more likely to be first and second as reasons.
