A couple of thoughts on this tweet in a quick thread because this is a public forum and not everyone shares my assumptions underlying this. https://twitter.com/JewishWonk/status/1351592938246168583

1) When assessing cabinet picks or other senior appointments there is absolutely no reason to think a candidate's Jewish identity or lack thereof played any role in Biden's decisions.

First and foremost, Biden, unlike soon-to-be ex-President Trump, is assessing candidates from a pool of highly qualified people. Many of them have decades of experience and a plurality of them worked directly for the agencies they are preparing to lead.

The process for which candidate from a highly qualified pool makes the cut is an opaque one in any incoming admin but my guess for factors beyond qualification are:

-Align with Biden's vision
-Can pass Senate confirmation
-Satisfy a broad coalition of liberal groups

There are challenges with this selection process for *any* administration, even a well-meaning one

For starters, who gets the opportunity to go into these career fields? Who is able to overcome internal barriers to upward movement? Who doesn't have to face those barriers at all?

There are other challenges beyond self selection bias in senior appointments in an administration. One highlighted by @jasmineelgamal below is a prominent one, but others, including ideological ones, come to mind. https://twitter.com/jasmineelgamal/status/1351642083942158338?s=19

2) When rolling out these announcements Biden surrogates have been quick to promote a number of them on representation grounds. Among the Jews I listed they were positioned as representing women, Latinos, etc...

Nobody besides Jews and Nazis care if Jews work in the government

That has not always been the case. Despite being unconstitutional, faith-based restrictions, formal and informal, kept Jews out of public service from the municipal through the federal level.

Many of these were formally abandoned in the years following WW2.

But informally, well, some persisted. You won't hear these discussed in public forums often but places like the State Department had a reputation among Jews well past WW2 for being hostile.

Richard Nixon kept lists of Jews in government and fired them or derailed their careers.

This is the same Nixon whose top foreign policy advisor was a Jew who fled Nazi Germany.

The same Nixon who ordered to "send everything that flies" to resupply Israel during its darkest days of the Yom Kippur War.

Every minority can tell you that bigotry is complicated.

The same Nixon and Kissinger who happily agreed that if the Soviets gassed 2 million Soviet Jews, well that shouldn't impede American-Soviet detente, American Jewish complaints be damned.

Which leads me to point 3:

My happiness at Jews enjoying promotion to senior roles is informed by my Soviet background. As I wrote when @AVindman was being demonized by right wing media after whistleblowing: that story was impossible in the Soviet Union. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/30/absurd-charge-that-soviet-jewish-emigre-like-vindman-is-double-agent/