* The future of Judaism is the ultra-Orthodox. They have kids and they stay Jewish. They are as alien to me as the Amish are to your readers. Still, it is nice to know that they will exist in a hundred years whatever I instinctively feel about them.
It’d be nice if were there a true English equivalent.
The problem, as Rabbi Sacks says, is that they reject the world. Just as other Jews truly reject Judaism/traditional values.
Combining faith, family and place with an openness to the world as it actually is, may be the fundamental challenge facing all European peoples. Or simply all developed nations.
How do we learn to have modern, liberal societies while still turning up for the future?
* All of UNZ.COM is blocked at a friendly public university near me on the same grounds. I can’t send links to anyone who works or attends there–they don’t even bounce; they just vanish. Additionally, I noticed that Google News will not permit Unz to be added to permitted news sources in user preferences. Same with Taki’s and VDare etc.
* The modern orthodox seem to strike a pretty good balance. Men who are modern orthodox typically wear a yarmulke but not a black hat. For the most part, they hold down jobs. They tend to have decent-sized families (3-4 children) but not crazy large. In Israel, the modern orthodox serve in the military and in fact it’s very common to see girls wearing military fatigues which include skirts instead of pants.
But even so, it’s hard to get away from the cold equations of the situation, which is that the modern orthodox (as well as secular Jews) are on track to get swallowed up in a tidal wave of black-hat wearing ultras.
And in fact the entire world is on track to get swallowed up in a tide of ultra-observant people of various religions, it’s just that Jewish people were one of the earlier groups to be fully confronted by modernity and are therefore a bit ahead of everyone else.
* Sailer: Modern Orthodox are well-educated and do a lot of things right. But you better make a quarter of a million dollars per year or so, from what I hear. Sounds like a lot of pressure.
* I have a friend who married a divorced Jewish woman over a decade ago. He converted to Judaism (of what form I’m not sure) as a condition of the marriage, as she had some teenage children from her first marriage.
Prior to his marriage he had been a serious evangelical Christian of some type. The thing is, prior to her first marriage, she also had been a Christian and had also converted because her first husband wanted Jewish children. Chain conversion!
Between the two of them they were making mid six figures easily.
The last time I saw him, a few weeks ago, they had both ceased identifying as Jews and had returned to nominal Christianity. I asked him why he had left Judaism. His answer? “It was costing us way too much money”.
That was all I could get out of him, though I didn’t press very hard.
The kids? No religion at all, though one professes Buddhism after a trip to Asia.
* For an educated couple in the NYC area, 250k is pretty attainable. Keep in mind that Jewish parents are usually pretty good about helping their adult children, which is normally feasible if you have 3 or 4 children not 8.
Probably you should write more about the relationship between parental support and financial/career success. What I’ve learned over the years is that (1) when your family has your back, you can take a lot of risks that others cannot afford to take; and (2) an important element of financial success is calculated risk-taking.
* The article’s summary of David Reich: “recognition of the essentially mongrel nature of humanity should override any notion of some mystical, longstanding connection between people and place.”
Obviously, he’s talking about the Jews and Israel, right? What he is saying is that Jews should give up their ethnocentrism, marry out of their group, forego their claimed connection to the land of Israel and stop trying to destroy the legacy nation-states of Christendom to advance their own narrow tribal group interest.
