A new study of the American Jewish population in the New York metro area contains this stunning statistic: sixty-one percent of all Jewish children in the area live in Orthodox households. This is a remarkable statistic. It’s probably NEVER been the case in American history that such a high percentage of young Jews in New […]
Archive | Jewish Culture
How Four Jewish Butchers Brought Down the New Deal
An interesting article by Steve Horwitz, written for laypeople, on the Schechter Poultry case.
The New York Times on the Politics of Russian Immigrants
The New York Times has an interesting article on the political attitudes of New York City’s Russian immigrant community. Unlike most New Yorkers and especially most New York Jews (the Russian immigrant community is overwhelmingly Jewish), they tend to support the GOP over the Democrats: To many Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, the cornucopia in the […]
HIAS Book of Immigration Memoirs by Soviet Jewish immigrants Now Available Online
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has just published a book of thirty immigration memoirs by Soviet Jewish immigrants, which is available for sale here. My father, Yefim Somin, and I are among the contributors. There are also several well-known contributors such as novelist Gary Shteyngart and artist Marc Klionsky. I blogged about my contribution here.
HIAS Event Launching a Book of Memoirs of Soviet Jewish Immigrants
This Sunday from 3 to 5 PM, I will be at an event sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York City, for the launch of a book of memoirs of immigration by Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The book includes contributions by thirty different immigrants, including a short version of […]
Eric Alterman on Sheldon Adelson
Eric Alterman has a bizarre column in The Nation on billionaire Gingrich-backer Sheldon Adelson. The column purports to be a celebration of the fact that “no one” is using a combination of Adelson’s Jewishness, money, somewhat shady reputation, and hawkishly pro-Israel views for anti-Semitic purposes. The column, however, really seems to be starts off with […]
Glenn Greenwald and the Neocons
Greenwald has another post on the “Israel Firster” controversy. It’s easy to miss this in Greenwald’s typical avalanche of verbiage, but he (finally) acknowledges that the term was originally coined by anti-Semites, and is “gratuitously inflammatory.” He analogizes it to using the word “fascist” to describe contemporary politics or making comparisons to Nazis. This, however, […]
Margaret Thatcher and the Jews
In this recent column, conservative writer David Frum points out that Margaret Thatcher represented a heavily Jewish constituency, had numerous Jewish advisers and cabinet members, and won the Jewish vote in her electoral campaigns as leader of the Conservative Party. These are not new revelations. As I pointed out in this post, which cites Thatcher’s […]
Communism and the Jews
Co-blogger David Bernstein links to Polish Jewish scholar Stanislaw Krajewski’s article on the relationship between Jews and communism in Eastern Europe. As Krajewski emphasizes, this is an extremely sensitive subject. Right-wing anti-Semites have long claimed that communism was really just a “Jewish conspiracy” intended to subjugate gentiles for the Jews’ benefit. I agree with most […]
Jews, Communists and Jewish Communists
Here’s an interesting article by Stanislaw Krajewski, who asserts ten theses: 1. Marxism, radical leftist ideologies, and “real socialism” constitute not only a fragment of world history, and of Polish or Hungarian histories, but also a chapter in Jewish history. 2. Antisemites have grossly exaggerated the Jewish involvement in communism, distorted the facts, and interpreted […]
Decoys to Deter Attacks on Jews in Europe
My wife and I recently got into a conversation with a man sitting next to us in the lounge of the Barcelona Hilton. It turns out that he runs kosher tour groups from France to the rest of Europe, and was checking out the Hilton because it was across the street from the Barcelona Chabad […]
Enemies and Wickedness
There’s been a very interesting back and forth between Allison Benedikt, author of a rambling but widely discussed piece on her disillusionment with Israel, and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. The most recent contribution to this exchange is here, and you can work your way backwards from there. What struck me, though, was that Benedikt’s […]
Enemies
I’ve been thinking for some time about blogging about the concept of “enemies”, and how modern universalist liberalism has trouble dealing with the possibility that in some conflicts there is no mutually acceptable solution (at least not from the subjective perspective of the participants in the conflict), and thus one really has a conflict among […]
A Lesson for Israel Advocates from the OBL Reaction
The nonsense spewing from the various usual suspects–the European left, left-wing NGOs, leftist international law experts [update: here’s an excellent example from an Israeli commentator]–regarding the takedown of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces should provide an important lesson for advocates of Israel. The hostility emanating to Israel emanating from these sources is not, primarily, […]
Tyler Cowen on the Political Attitudes of Russian Jewish Immigrants
In this post, Tyler Cowen asks why Russian Jewish immigrants tend to overwhelmingly support the GOP rather than the Democrats. The reasons are actually no mystery. As I have previously explained here and here, Russian Jews are hawkish on foreign policy and their experience with communism leads them to be suspicious of domestic policies that […]