Pro-Palestinianism, the fourth Abrahamic religion

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The political revenge of mass migration Have you noticed how concerned Jews and non-Jews in the West discuss what they perceive as a rise in antisemitism? They talk a lot about the increase in antisemitic incidents (granted, by the way, these have increased to unprecedented levels everywhere in Western Europe). They also talk a lot about societal attitudes towards Jews and Israel: what do the surveys say about the share of the Western public that openly dislike Jews? Has that share increased? Is it just about being anti-Jewish (for them, terrible) or about being anti-Israel (for them, somehow better)? And they, those concerned Jews and non-Jews, sponsor and conduct no end of surveys on this topic. In fact, I can bet you any money that a survey of antisemitic attitudes is being carried out somewhere in Europe as I type. In reality, I can tell you, they are not interested in any of that. To be precise, they are really interested...
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Immanuel Todd, a demographer-prophet, and his book that stings

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Let us start from the beginning. In the painting below a Soviet artist captures a very famous, to Soviet citizens of course, moment in Lenin' s life. His house in Shushenskoe, a place of his exile, is being searched by the police. As an aside: Lenin is supposed to be 27 years old here. There are two versions of Lenin in the Soviet art- an angelic looking 3 year old and a wise elder, a sage. Nothing in between. Here he is a sage. In reality, Lenin looks older than he had ever lived. He died aged 53 years. Note a little detail in this painting: one of the policemen is paging through the books on the shelves. This was, according to the large Soviet corpus of writings on the subject, the so-called Leniniana, the main point of each of the many house searches performed by the Russian imperial police in Lenin’s houses. Search for forbidden books. What were they,...
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MUSK: THE UNBEARABLE SILLINESS OF BEING

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It looks like nobody is prepared to talk about it seriously. Let me try. And to do this topic justice, I will have to lead you by the long road (derech aruka). The Alter Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Lyadi, a founder of Chabad movement, outlined this method in ‘Tanya’, a foundational text of the Chabad. It goes like this. Whether in daily activities, or rhetorically, one can choose to put things succinctly, cut corners and ‘get there quickly’. That would be taking the short road (derech kztara). Only that method leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding, endless back and forth, correcting uncertainties and errors and explaining that takes a looooong time. It is better to go by the long road-to allocate proper time for explanation and/or activity. That way, corrections and repetitions will not be needed. One is likely to ‘get there’ in a shorter time frame ultimately. So, the long road it is. My in-laws have had this family...
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THE GREAT ISRAEL-through the eyes of the Russian nationalist

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This would easily be the most important essay on Jews and Israel in the year that is coming to an end as I type. In the West, Alexander Dugin is often cast as Putin’s philosopher. Those who do so, underestimate Putin. Putin’s philosophy is eclectic, multi-angular, with a great deal of historicism, as many of his speeches and interview testify. It is an underestimation of Dugin, equally. Dugin is his own man, known to scholars of Russia, from his early dissident activities. We are talking the mid-1980s. Then, before the Perestroika, all oppositional dissident forces appeared all the same to a Westerners’ eyes. All were perceived  to be ‘against the Soviet regime’, which gave them the status of the righteous and the differences between them did not matter. In truth, because the whole activisation of the civil and political life, outside of the Communist Party limits, was such a new phenomenon, dissidents of different shades did not feel like they...
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TRAGIC DAYS FOR POLLSTERS?

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According to Rambam, it is natural for people to follow others when it comes to thoughts and wishes. To put it differently: people, on average, tend to be led. Rather than lead, let us just say. If one takes Rambam into account, one knows everything one needs to know about why pollsters, on the occasion of the 2024 US election, look pale to some (not everybody). Seemingly, they could not predict Trump's victory..? Is that so? Let us what the best forecasters said. Nate Silver is known, hardly requires an introduction. His magic? He aggregated all Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Harris polls he could lay his hands on, but, unlike other aggregators, like ‘Real Clear Politics’, he weighted them differentially. In weighting them he took into account not just the sample sizes but other characteristics that, in his eyes, could impact on the trend. Timing of surveys was taken into account, for example. This is not something that anyone...
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THE WEST AND THE REST: THE ANTI-TRUMP VS THE PRO-TRUMP WORLD?

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Western Europe is an anti-Trump world. If there is a stable feature in the Western European politics, it is that: anti-Trumpism. For anyone who engaged in any political conversation on the topic in Europe since 2015, that much is clear. The ‘uncloseted’ pro-Trump individuals I personally came across in the UK since Trump’s appearance on the map of the world politics can still be counted in single digits. This well-entrenched European anti-Trumpism is seen pretty much nowhere else in the world. In 2017, very early in Trump’s first presidency, YouGov conducted a global survey of attitudes toward Donald Trump asking how confident respondents felt about Trump being a good US president. In every single Western European country featured in Figure 1, a majority said that they were not at all confident. It seems like the Northern European block of countries was especially pessimistic in relation to Trump , with Denmark and Sweden leading in prevalence of this sentiment. Majority of British...
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BANANAS AND POTATOES

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My grandmother never ate mushrooms. I could not understand it. I thought they were the most delicious thing on the planet. I asked her why and she said ‘You see-I never ate them as a child. We just did not eat them. And something you do not eat as a child…you rarely learn how to eat later’. I was curious about that. My grandmother’s family did not eat mushrooms. They lived in a town, not in a village. To get mushrooms-you need to pick them in the forest. Central Ukraine in year 1914 was not known for its supermarkets. To pick them-you need to know an awful lot about them, otherwise you are at a risk of serious poisoning and death. Given the lack of effortless lifestyle-based knowledge and the risks, it is easy to see why they never ate them. But: is that true that childhood determines your taste for the rest of your life? Before I was six I...
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GIVE ME YOUR POOR

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Life offers few certainties but there are surely advantages to being a demographer and a country bumpkin. It makes you less cynical where most people are, and more cynical where trepidation is expected. The good place to start this essay is to say that I self-identify as a country bumpkin for a good reason. There are just three places I lived in and know well. Just three. One is a godforsaken location in the South-West of today’s Russia that might as well remain nameless, who cares after all..? Is it not just bears drinking vodka and playing balalaikas there? Another one is the majestic Jerusalem, second to none, I might have been born there if not the Romans. None of them prepared me for the third, and so far, the last: the South of England, the United Kingdom. Cambridge, to be precise. There are other small stations in the middle but they matter less for the purpose of this story. When...
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COVID-19 and fertility

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COVID-19 pandemic for demographers was what the 9/11 events in the US were for experts in the Middle Eastern affairs. A sudden upgrade from an esoteric and who-knows-how-useful discipline to something actually interesting. At first, the focus was on mortality, understandably so. The concept of ‘excess mortality’ started travelling across publications read by ‘normal people’ and the humanity learned that the ‘force of death’ is (a) quantifiable and (b) obeys certain rules. Which also means that the effects of the pandemic could be captured in numbers and compared across countries, ethnic groups and medical systems. A small step for demographers themselves but a big step for humanity. So far so good. COVID-19 pandemic is over, at least the governments across the enlightened world decided that it is…and when the Government says, pandemic stop, is it not?….Irrespective of that, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are not over. It is now the turn of fertility, not mortality, to come under scrutiny. What...
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2024 UK general election: voting intentions of British Jews and other minorities

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4 July 2024 is the Election Day in the United Kingdom. The position of the ruling party, the Conservatives, has not been looking very strong since the early 2022, if the voting intentions poll are to be believed. To be fair- there is little surprize in this: the Conservative Party have been at the steering wheel, so to speak, for the past 14 years (from 2010) and, looking back, for another 18 years in the late 20th century (1979-1997). All the way back to the mid-1940s, the Labour-dominated periods of British history appear like relatively short stunts, mostly 1-6 years long, looking a lot like a little dance of desperation with the Conservatives that the British public performs from time to time. The longest period that the Labour party managed to rule continuously in this time was under Tony Blair/Gordon Brown: 13 years (1997-2010). Telescopically speaking, between the end of the second World War and year 2024 (almost 80 years),...
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