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Comment by the_lego | Hacker News Reader

In 2013, the Pew Research Center's Portrait of Jewish Americans found that more than 90% of Jews who responded to its survey described themselves as being non-Hispanic whites, 2% described themselves as being black, 3% described themselves as being Hispanic, and 2% described themselves as having other racial or ethnic backgrounds. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews

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Well yes, if you define Iran as a "white" country of origin, all of LA's Persian Jewish exiles will report themselves as "non-Hispanic white", as if they were somehow akin to Boston Brahmins for having come to the USA from Iran in 1979.

US demographics surveys typically lump the entirety of Europe (except Spain), most of Russia, and the middle east into "Non-Hispanic White". Iranians would definitely be marking themselves down as such. Occasionally you'll see one that has subdivisions of "White", typically splitting it up into Eastern and Western Europe, and Middle Eastern.

We can debate the various subtleties of "white" till the cows come home, but that is irrelevant to how accurate those graphs are. Let's assume the graphic erroneously counted 100% of Jews as white, instead of 90%. That would change the estimate of non-Jewish whites in the US from 55.4% to 55.64%, and the estimate of non-Jewish whites in the Ivies from 29.2% to 30.63%.

This changes the under-representation of non-Jewish whites from 0.53 to 0.55.

Is this so significantly different that the entire graphic can be dismissed?

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