Barriers in Access to Higher Education for Jews in the USSR: Study Based on Memoires

Abstract

Jewish population of the USSR can be characterized by very high and growing level of tertiary education and high share of intellectual laborers. At the same time as it is evident from memoires Jews faced discrimination while applying to higher education as well as later in their professional trajectories. Many families had to adapt to this discrimination and to find ways to get access to higher education. Statistics is not enough to research this problem as level of education for Jews remained high despite discrimination. That is why we decide to explore memoires as a source for study of these discrimination barriers and recourses that helped people to cope with them. We chose cases from web site with Jewish memoires (http://berkovich-zametki.com) and in this paper we provide first results of analysis and hypothesis for further investigation. We found out that memoires are more likely to be written by those who managed to cope with difficulties and achieved success. Also we see that memoires are written in certain genres such as «rise of national consciousness» or «struggle for justice». Resources that helped to cope with discrimination mentioned in memoires are social and cultural capital (in terms in Bourdieu) and being ready to use them. We conclude that drawbacks of memoires for our study is that we cannot isolate barriers in access to education from further barriers in carrier pathways, and memoires are not sufficient to understand the resources which helped to cope with discrimination.