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Musician Wins $260,000 In Lawsuit Against Ex-Girlfriend Who Sabotaged Career
In the spring of 2014, Eric Abramovitz got the opportunity of a lifetime. He just didn't know it. Abramovitz was the victim of a deception that a Canadian judge called "despicable," as he granted Abramovitz $350,000 Canadian dollars (more than $260,000 U.S.) in damages.
Abramovitz is a gifted Canadian clarinetist who received national attention when he was still in his teens. As a student at McGill University, he applied for a spot — and a scholarship — at the prestigious Colburn Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he would study under the famed clarinet teacher Yehuda Gilad.
Only two spots open up per year, and they're seen as launching pads for elite careers. Competition is fierce. Abramovitz made it to the audition phase. But in March 2014, he saw an email in his inbox telling him he had been rejected.
It was heartbreaking. He went through "some really dark, sad, angry days," he told BuzzFeed. His girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lee, another musician at McGill, consoled him.
But Abramovitz's despair was born out of a lie — and Lee's comforting words were, in retrospect, "really sick," he told the site. He had actually made it into the Colburn Conservatory. He never saw his acceptance email, however, because Lee got to it first — and sabotaged him. Apparently, a Canadian judge concluded, she didn't want him to move from Montreal to California.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday June 18 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)
The main reason Jewish kids are more likely to go to top-quality colleges has a lot to do with Jewish kids having, on average, better test scores [discovermagazine.com], and presumably the GPAs to go with it, than most other religious groups. This largely comes from the fact that their parents are much more likely to have higher education, which in turn comes from the efforts of earlier generations really making a point of taking advantage of every educational opportunity they could come by (e.g. my Jewish grandfather got his start working his way through City College of New York, which had no tuition).
Not a single college admissions officer or conservative faculty member I've ever talked to or worked with expressed any kind of preference for Jewish students.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @06:25PM
Many Jews learn at least two languages from a young age as well ($NATIVE_LANG & Hebrew), and learning multiple languages is well-correlated with academic success.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @07:15PM
I don't know if that article quite so much proves your point, as the average result range isn't too wide, and Asian Jews are listed at the bottom of the list of SAT scores.
According to Wikipedia, there are 5.7m Jews in the US compared to a total population of about 325m. That makes them less than 2% by population, yet they are overrepresented in academia. Your grandfather may have pulled himself up by his bootstraps, more so than his contemporaries were willing to do. But today, Jewish kids from wealthy families probably go to good high schools with many kids from non-Jewish families who also value education.
But this case is more akin to graduate study, and the advisor is committing to spending an awful lot of time and effort on his student. It helps if you have some common ground. It doesn't have to be an open preference: Academic competition is so fierce that acquaintances of student and professor can make the connection. No idea why Mr. Abramovitz didn't bother to call up Professor Gilad to thank him for his consideration, it would have saved him a lot of pain. I also had no idea that something as formal as admission to grad school was being done by email now either.