“Affirmative Action” never was affirmative. From the day of its inception, it closed doors in America to people who had worked hard all their lives to excel and succeed. It imposed barriers against those who had earned success, while it advantaged less qualified — but politically favored — contenders who relied instead on government cheating and handouts to reward them for less achievement.

Democrats pushed the prejudice because they cannot contend without winning 90 percent of Black votes. So it was a plain matter of bribery and political payola from the outset. Sort of like the way the Marxist Socialists and Histadrut in Israel favored their own and kept out former Irgun and Lechi fighters, and Mizrachi Jews from Arab countries.

The true name for the monstrosity of “Affirmative Action” was and is “Quotas.” Congress and the Courts simply allowed racial and ethnic quotas to define Americans. If you were a member of the right race or ethnic group, you were given advantages that were denied to others — and basic civil rights were withdrawn from those others.

In terms of race, Caucasians were cheated. In terms of ethnicity, Asians were cheated. As to religion, Jews were cheated. Each American group was denied its objectively fair portion of the American pie under these despicable quotas.

Jews in particular have faced quotas for two thousand years, always aiming to keep us out. How did we deal with it? We realized there was no point in complaining. That was their whole idea: to hear Jews wailing. So we did the only thing we could do: we learned for ourselves and taught our kids that, if you want a fair chance in this world, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else around you, do twice as well, and just beat “them” at “their” own game.

We emphasized education like crazy. We went into teaching and the skilled professions that required learning. And the transition served a second purpose. Inasmuch as we were expelled from so many European countries so often, we learned to get out of farming because we could not take the land with us on the way out. But we always could bring with us the knowledge we had acquired in our heads. Or diamonds and other jewels, for those less academic. Only upon returning to our own land did we Make Agriculture Great Again: Jewish MAGA.

That is what drove people like me to qualify for the Ivy League and, many years later, for a top national law school. As I then surveyed the scene and saw how discrimination against Orthodox Jews was rife in law school and in major law-firm practice — a bigotry and prejudice perpetrated even more viciously against us by non-Orthodox Jews — I asked myself what else I could do to become indispensable. So I contended beyond excelling in my courses and endeavored to make law review, and I eventually was named Chief Articles Editor.

I was not secure that even that would be enough so I also contended to become a federal appeals court clerk. And even with all that, I still encountered actual in-my-face discrimination during job interviews and at two of the four major law firms where I practiced over the years. But I had made myself indispensable. They had no choice.

People, especially anti-Semites and even ignorant philosemites, sometimes talk about “The Rothschilds.” One should read up on them, at least listen to the song “In My Own Lifetime.” It’s only two minutes. The anti-Semitism where Mayer Amschel Rothschild lived was so bad that there were quotas — Affirmative Action — limiting how many Jews could marry each year. Jews actually had to bribe government officials to allow one extra Jewish wedding in a given year.

So Rothschild decided he had to make himself, a little Jew in a ghetto, indispensable. And he figured it out. He had five sons, and he sent each son respectively to each of the five European capitals — London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples — and they set up a family bank. Mayer Rothschild knew that, in any given year, any European country might impose ever-more-brutal anti-Jewish laws, so he set up as many locations as possible so that money could be moved out as needed, whether England, France, Germany, Austria, or Italy.

Consider Asian Americans. First of all, they are not yellow. It is an outright fraud on society and especially on them to include Asian Americans as “People of Color,” just to con them to vote for the intersectionalist Woke. Second, as a group, they work and study their tails off. (Obviously, it always is iffy to generalize about people collectively, and there are so many exceptions to such efforts.)

I admire many Asian Americans because, while many American Jews have assimilated to the point that 30-40 percent of them are not even Jews anyway, and so many more know-from-nothing and have made themselves indistinguishable from non-Jews even down to their drinking, Asians have become America’s “New Jews”: the hard-working, high-achieving minority that, despite blatant discrimination, are determined to succeed — and do. The only insane thing about Asians, as with many Jews, is that they self-destruct at the voting booths by voting for the very Democrats and Woke “progressives” who work day and night to keep them out. It’s crazy.

Look at these Harvard admissions data, cited on page 31 of the just-issued Supreme Court opinion:

During the ten years between 2009-2018, every single year Harvard took in a class that was 10-12 percent Black, 9-12 percent Hispanic, and 18-20 percent Asian American. What a coincidence! Who woulda thunk? What are the odds that every year, for ten consecutive years, the percentages of suitable student admissions would fall on racial and ethnic lines in such identical proportions?

The odds? With Quota Bigots? 100 percent.

Here’s the crazier thing: After almost half a century since the 1978 Bakke court decision allowed these quotas — 45 years, two generations — what have the Black beneficiaries of the “Affirmative Action” bigotry amassed to show for it? Can they now stand on their own two feet? Well, after 45 years of advantaged quotas, instead of demonstrated Black gains and achievements, their new demand is for billions of dollars in racial “reparations.” And that’s only California.

Nu, if they get those billions, will that help? Yeah, like giving chicken soup to a dead man: well, it couldn’t hoit.

There has always been one and only one way to succeed: beat the haters at their own game. “They” would not let us into “their” industries, so we created our own new industries. Charles Fleischmann, the margarine king, could not get a hotel room at any decent hotel because he was a Jew. So he bought a whole city in New York State, renamed it “Fleischmann, New York,” built a 5-star hotel in it, and finally got himself a 5-star hotel room after all. Really. That’s how Jews did it.

They saw an opportunity in a desert in California, so they went there and created moving pictures. Non-Jews saw no future in it, so Jews started streaming to Los Angeles and made “an empire of their own.” That’s how Jews did it. It was not “smarts.” American Jews are not as smart as the stereotype says. No other population group votes more stupidly. The more anti-Jewish and anti-Israel the political party, the better the chance the Jews will vote for it. They vote like idiots. (And, as five Israeli elections in less than four years showed, it ain’t just the Anglophonics.)

Jews succeeded because they knew not to rely on the Other to assure their financial well-being. They expected to get kicked out eventually. So they went into diamonds and into education, teaching, academia, and science. When big law firms in America would not hire them, Jews started their own big law firms. Antisemites would never hire such lawyers to represent them — until the Jewish law firms started beating the legendary non-Jewish firms in courts. And then the antisemites found a new love for The Chosen.

That successful journey to overcome bigotry and barriers are how so many American ethnic groups succeeded. Not through “Affirmative Action” but through hard work and self-reliance. In time, each newly arriving group leap-frogged those who had the enormous advantage of having been here before them but who, instead of self-reliance, had relied on government quotas to hand them crumbs.

A case in point: New York City has miserably inadequate public schools, but they also have a handful of top-flight elite high schools with the highest academic standards. In Manhattan, it is Stuyvesant High School, named for one of the worst antisemites and overall bigots in American history and, appropriately, disproportionately populated by large percentages of Jewish and Asian students. Half a century after the Bakke quotas were upheld by the Supreme Court, the data recently were published for the current class of Stuyvesant’s newly admitted students. Of 762 admitted in a city that is propelled by “Affirmative Action” quotas in its every gesture and virtually every policy, where anti-Black prejudice in government-institution admissions is inconceivable, where Blacks comprise two-thirds of the school-age population, and where the city’s Black population have benefited from two generations of “Affirmative Action,” how many of those 762 kids qualified to enter Stuyvesant were Black?

Seven.

And 489 Asian Americans.

Maybe stop imposing quotas. Stop bleating about prejudice. Stop demanding reparations.

And, for goodness sake, teach kids instead how to read this sentence.

Originally published in the Israel National News