{"id":93328,"date":"2016-04-14T12:04:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T20:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93328"},"modified":"2016-04-14T12:04:01","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T20:04:01","slug":"low-iq-jews-in-israel-out-breeding-smart-ashkenazi-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=93328","title":{"rendered":"Low-IQ Jews In Israel Out-Breeding Smart Ashkenazi Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Kramer writes<\/a>: There is another demographic reason for \u201cdistancing.\u201d In 1948, American and Israeli Jews were landslayt. They or their parents had come out of the same cities, towns, and shtetls of Europe. American Jews looked at Israeli Jews like family, and often they were: almost everyone in Israel had some (allegedly rich) uncle or cousin in America. True, other Jews began to arrive in the 1950s, as refugees from Arab and Muslim lands. But they were mostly out of sight in immigrant refugee camps and development towns. As for the political leaders, most were born in Russia or Poland\u2014from David Ben-Gurion through Golda Meir, Menachem Begin through Yitz\u1e25ak Shamir. Levi Eshkol could hardly refrain from slipping into Yiddish in cabinet meetings. They all hailed from what Irving Howe called \u201cthe world of our fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

All that has changed. Today, over half of all Israeli Jews identify themselves as being of Sephardi or Mizra\u1e25i descent; less than half, of European or American descent. (Were it not for the immigration from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Ashkenazi share would be closer to a third.) Israelis today just don\u2019t look as much like family to American Jews, 90 percent of whom are of Ashkenazi descent.<\/p>\n

Because Israeli Jews are drawn from a wider spectrum of cultures, everything else about them is more diverse. Jewish religious practice, despite the formal monopoly of Orthodox, is more varied in Israel than in the United States. Nor are the historical legacies that inform politics limited to the Holocaust, so central to American Jewish identity. The forced Jewish flight from Arab and Muslim lands is just as relevant, and explains much of the present skew of Israeli politics with regard to the Palestinian Arabs.<\/p>\n

On top of this, about 70 percent of Israeli Jews are Israeli-born. Israel is no longer primarily a nation of immigrants. The hybrid Hebrew-language culture nourished by native-born Jewish Israelis isn\u2019t easy to pin down in a sentence, but it\u2019s a lot edgier than the dominant culture of the blue-state suburbs where most of American Jewry resides.<\/p>\n

One reason is that those suburbs are more peaceful and stable than any environment in the history of humankind since Adam. Israel, in contrast, sits on the crust of the world\u2019s most active geopolitical fault line. It isn\u2019t that American Jews are from Venus and Israeli Jews are from Mars. It\u2019s that they reside on opposite ends of planet Earth, one nearing perpetual peace, the other leaning toward perpetual war.<\/p>\n

So an American Jew, disembarked at Ben-Gurion airport for the first time, might have to stretch his or her imagination quite a bit to see Israelis as \u201cmy people\u201d and Israel as \u201cmy homeland.\u201d For some significant number of American Jews, indeed, this is precisely what makes contemporary Israel so exhilarating. If there is any meaning to ahavat Yisrael, love of the Jewish people, it is solidarity not with Jews who look and think like you, but precisely with those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Kramer writes: There is another demographic reason for \u201cdistancing.\u201d In 1948, American and Israeli Jews were landslayt. They or their parents had come out of the same cities, towns, and shtetls of Europe. American Jews looked at Israeli Jews … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93329,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93328\/revisions\/93329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}