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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HARVARD UNIVERSITY ANTICS: 55 YEARS OF SUPERSTITIO, AND COUNTING

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‘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...
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ANECDOTALLY SPEAKING: the Russian street and Israel-Gaza war

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

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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...
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Russian antisemitism and Jewish immigration

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‘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...
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POLITINFORMATION/Политинформация

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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...
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ANTISEMITISM IN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE

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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...
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ANTISEMITISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

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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...
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Antisemitic victimisation of Jews in Europe

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The picture of self-reported antisemitic victimisation of Jews in Europe should be known considerably better than it is at present. Antisemitic harassment, shown in the figure below, includes antisemitic threatening comments in person, online and via email/texting, threats of violence and offensive gestures, targeting Jews as Jews. The fact that about a quarter of Jews in Europe are exposed to such harassment on an annual basis is not very well known in itself. This is unfortunate; the data are as sound as it gets. They originate in the European surveys of Jewish experiences of antisemitism and , unlike the official police-recorded statistics of incidents, or indeed statistics of incidents maintained by the Jewish security organisations, are unaffected by under-reporting. What raises the value of these data further is that here it is set in a comparative context: antisemitic victimisation alongside hate-motivated harassment of ethnic and immigrants minorities, also obtained from the surveys of minorities conducted in Europe.Voila...Antisemitic harassment...
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