Pro-Palestinianism, the fourth Abrahamic religion

by admin Comment Closed
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...
Read More

Immanuel Todd, a demographer-prophet, and his book that stings

by admin Comment Closed
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,...
Read More

MUSK: THE UNBEARABLE SILLINESS OF BEING

by admin Comment Closed
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...
Read More

THE GREAT ISRAEL-through the eyes of the Russian nationalist

by admin Comment Closed
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...
Read More

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ANTICS: 55 YEARS OF SUPERSTITIO, AND COUNTING

by admin Comment Closed
‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’-Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem, made this point 3,000 years ago. Want a prime example of words that ‘aged well’? These are Kohelet’s words. Arguably, they did not age at all…. And if another example is needed, it exists in the form of the autobiographical account of Richard Pipes, a historian of Russia whose illustrious career started and developed in Harvard, then continued in the framework of the CIA, and then concluded in Harvard. Being an advisor to the American administration on all-things-Soviet during the period of the Cold War, Pipes became a very public persona. His reputation of a ‘conservative intellectual’ is a responsibility of the ‘liberal press’. The label of a ‘conservative intellectual’ has a function akin to a warning ‘contains nuts’ on food products: consume with care, remembering your sensitivities, just in case, you know…There...
Read More

ANECDOTALLY SPEAKING: the Russian street and Israel-Gaza war

by admin Comment Closed
The following text is a translation of the post published by the resident of St Petersburg, a theatre critic and a journalist, Elena Volgust, who decided to walk the streets of St Petersburg with an Israeli flag. *************BEGINNING*************** “I followed the route Moscow boulevard -Kuznetzovskaya-Brother’s Strugatskiye square-bus-trolleybus-Zagorodny boulevard-Vladimirskiy boulevard- corner of Nevsky and Liteiny-trolleybus-bus. All the way -I travelled silently. I did not talk to anyone and did not ask anything. All that time I simply held a flag in my hand, vertically. Reactions: A boy on a bicycle shouted : ”Jews!” A woman in a mask: “An activist..ugh” Two aged men: “Well done” Four people smiled at me on the street, size people smiled-on public transport Many looked intently but did not express any view One significant conversation happened, with a woman who initiated it, at a bus stop near Vitebskaya station. She approved of the flag, said that watches news day and night and all sorts of clever commentary, worries about Israelis, wishes them victory. Another woman,...
Read More

Friday sermon at the Moscow Memorial Mosque, by Imam Shamil Alyautdinov, 13 October 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...
Read More

Russian antisemitism and Jewish immigration

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...
Read More

POLITINFORMATION/Политинформация

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...
Read More

ANTISEMITISM IN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE

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...
Read More