Unless you claim that the officials of MGU went great lengths to keep young Edward Frenkel out of the university for some other reason than his Jewish surname, you are giving an ex post facto excuse for the continued and long-standing discrimination against Jews that the Soviets inherited from the Russian Empire.

Although it was nowhere as bad as in the Old World, Jews were historically discriminated against in the U.S.—universities had Jewish quotas, for example. This had nothing to do with "being white", even if we limit ourselves to white European Jews. The whole "reverse discrimination" angle you try to bring in is neither here nor there.