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Friday sermon at the Moscow Memorial Mosque, by Imam Shamil Alyautdinov, 13 October 2023

October 13, 2023October 15, 2023 by admin Comment Closed

First, why to talk about it? Why to consider and listen to something as (deceptively) esoteric as a Friday sermon to Muslims in Moscow? Well, the historical conflict that is coming to a crescendo as I am keypunching, is between Israel and some surrounding Arab populations but it echoes across the world. Islamic communities across the globe, albeit many not all, seem to align with or at least produces voices of support for Palestinians. Muslims in Russia are a genuine ‘black whole’. If Russia is not well understood and known to the average and above-average Westerner, then Russian Muslims ten times so. Yet, it is an important community. It is big, as I am going to show in a minute. It is also situated in the midst of the country that is itself at war. And it lives and thinks and operates from the larger Russian society, with its peculiar collectivism, a degree of reverence towards leadership figures and a...

Russian antisemitism and Jewish immigration

August 4, 2023August 4, 2023 by admin Comment Closed

‘Has antisemitism been increasing in Russia?’, ‘Is that the reason that immigration of Russian Jews has been so high lately?’ – these are the most frequently asked questions that I received since the publication of the report ‘Jewish migration today: what it may mean for Europe’. The report has shown that, since the outbreak of war between Russian and Ukraine in February 2022, immigration of Jews and their family members from Russia and Ukraine rose to the levels last seen at the end of the 1990s, almost quarter of a century ago. If these levels keep for the next 5-10 years, Jewish community of Russia would be less than a half of its current size while Jewish community of Ukraine would almost disappear. Immigration of Jews from France have been high in the early 21st century but really at an incomparably lower level compared to the new Russian and Ukrainian realities. It almost feels like immigration of Jews from Ukraine does...

JEWS IN THE 2021 CENSUS OF ENGLAND AND WALES: THE ACTUAL NUMBER, THE ACTUAL DEVELOPMENTS

January 22, 2023January 23, 2023 by admin Comment Closed

The reported situation At 9.30 AM on the 29 November 2021, the latest results of the 2021 Census of England and Wales describing the religious and ethnic composition of the nation made it into the public domain. The Office for National Statistics (the ONS) told that in 2021 the Census of England and Wales registered 271,327 people who self-identified as Jews in response to the religion question. To be precise, these are people who ticked the ‘Jewish’ box in response to a question ‘What is your religion?’. A decade earlier, in 2011, there were 265,073 such people. That means an addition of 6,000, or growth of 2.4%, in a decade. For comparison, the population of England and Wales as a whole grew by about 6.3% during this period. Just how credible is it? This picture is rather incredible. Anyone with sound knowledge of the recent demographic realities of British Jews would say so. Konstantin Stanislavsky, a notable Russian theatre producer and actors’ trainer,...

Cambridge versus Oxford Jews

December 8, 2022December 9, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

Nights are still getting longer and weather is getting colder. Which is exactly why the Office for National Statistics in England and Wales chose to release the 2021 Census data on religion and ethnicity. To keep us on fire with excitement. Census data are exciting (said nobody ever), but bear with me. You can do all sorts with the Census data. Cambridge versus Oxford Jewish race, for example. Have you not always wondered which one, Cambridge or Oxford, has more Jews? So here is the end of that mystery. It is Oxford. Oxford has slightly (very slightly!) more Jews than Cambridge. Just above 2,000 people in the City of Oxford and the surrounding districts of Oxfordshire ticked the ‘Jewish’ box in the 2021 Census (2,117). Just under 2,000 people identified as Jews by religion in the City of Cambridge and the surrounding districts of Cambridgeshire (1,978). Just under 1,000 Jews in each place identified as Jews by ethnicity, but-from the experience of...

HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIA, AND HOW NOT TO

October 9, 2022July 28, 2023 by admin Comment Closed

Autocracy it isHaving gone through a period of radical political transformation and economic crises Russia is back as a world player. It re-emerged gradually, but its recent direct involvement in Syria, its sightings within the context of the American election and finally its 2014-2022 ‘Ukrainian campaign’ brought it back to the Westerners’ attention. Russia, in the eyes of an average Westerner, is an exotic and somewhat incomprehensible place. Russian bears, Russian dolls, Russian oligarchs, Russian brides, Russian vodka, Russian baths. A soft form of ‘Orientalism’, if you ask me. ‘Natasha from Russia’ will tell you everything you need to know about that… A lot has been written on Russia by serious scholars since the collapse of communism and the access to the archival materials that followed. However, the area of Russian studies in the Western academia never stagnated. Robert Conquest, Robert Service, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes published maybe 50 books on the Soviet period of Russian history, all before 1990. There...

DO SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA WORK? A REPORT FROM THE NATURAL EXPERIMENT AND LESSONS FOR ISRAEL AND ISRAEL’S DETRACTORS

September 4, 2022September 4, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

Do Western sanctions against Russia work? Such was the question asked by the ‘Economist’ recently. Those sanctions, yes, ‘like none the world has seen’. Well, how does one know that something works, in principle? In scientific fields, it is rather rigidly understood: something ‘works’ when it achieves the hoped result, and the result is confirmed by comparing the ‘before-policy’ situation to ‘after-policy situation’, and possible alternative explanations that could have generated the result are ruled out definitively. The comparison, in scientific fields, should be based on numerical indicators, not feelings. Presumably, Western sanctions were imposed to end the war against Ukraine. And, presumably, the causal mechanism, if it was ever specified by those who conceived the sanctions, would look something like this: sanctions will be imposed, prices would go up, hopefully scarcity would develop too, Russian population will suffer, it will then turn against Putin and depose him. That will end the war. Has it happened and, if not, how close...

POLITINFORMATION/Политинформация

May 2, 2022May 2, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

Politinformation…is something that every product of the Soviet educational system would remember. Half an hour, once per week, on Wednesday. A teacher would address briefly this or that issue of international politics in front of the class, at a level appropriate for a particular age group. Which issue? All sorts. Olympic games, apartheid in South Africa, a visit of Indira Ghandi, nuclear disarmament, miners' strike. From grade 4 (age 10) politinformation was something that one of the (more literate and confident) children in class was tasked for. If this role was allocated to you, you would have to look at the newspaper in the evening, choose a suitable piece of information and be ready to present it to the class in the morning. The teacher would then facilitate discussion. I was a booky kid and was tasked with politinformation year after year. My future biographers would be tempted to say, I hope: “his path in life was charted early enough”..... I...

ANTISEMITISM IN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE

April 6, 2022April 6, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

How antisemitic a nation is at present? How unpopular are Jews there in this day an age? There are several ways to rise above the anecdotal and the historical and measure that objectively. No single way is perfect, and none has that ultimate ‘eye-opening’ quality that we all hope for. That ‘ultimate eye-opening quality’ is, of course, the capacity to signal where Jews are most at risk, where a host population is most likely to turn against them, dispossess them, torture them mentally and then expel them or annihilate them physically. No measure of antisemitism enlightens us on that exactly. Why to collect them at all? Why to run population surveys asking people what they think about Jews, if we do not know how to convert these findings into a tangible measure of risk for Jews?-ask the cynical souls. The patient souls, myself included, continue to run the surveys, because one day we, the analysts, may be able to create...

WHAT RUSSIANS WANT TO ACHIEVE IN UKRAINE? (=Xотят ли русские войны?)

March 22, 2022April 6, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

I have said it before-the times of intellectuals opining about the current affairs-and 'ordinary people' listening in awe- are truly over. Who needs intellectuals to interpret and 'mansplain' situations, preferences and the ‘actual truth’ when there are opinion polls? There, people speak for themselves. And whoever is interested in what people actually think, can look at the results of these polls-nothing added and nothing taken away, or very little… Here I present, in translation into English, the results of the opinion poll taken in Moscow on 11-14 March 2022. (Sample size of 1,000). The Russian public was asked about the way they see the Russian 'military operation in Ukraine', as the war in Ukraine is called in Russia. The results came my way via a fellow Russian demographer Dmirty Zakotyansky who did the world a favour by publishing them in his blog in Russian. 'Russian Field' was a polling agency conducting the poll at the request of Roman Yuneman,...

ANTISEMITISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

October 29, 2021April 6, 2022 by admin Comment Closed

Earlier this week the Institute for Jewish Policy Research/JPR released a report on attitudes of Jews towards the issue of climate change. I recommend it, not in the least because I know of no other work on the subject. You will find all sorts of interesting things there. Some findings are, sort of, predictable, for example, a majority of nearly 70% of British Jews think that climate is definitely changing and a negligibly small minority of 2% think it is definitely not. Further, just over 60% of British Jews think that climate change is happening mainly or entirely due to human activity. So far the-largely-predictable findings. Others are less so-my personal expectation would be that a lot of people, perhaps as many as one third, would simply say that they do not know much on this subject, or at least that they are not sure about the cause of climate change. Not so. Those who choose these categorical ‘Do not...