Yoram Ettinger writes:
"Global economic, social and educational circumstances make Israel an attractive place for 500,000 "olim" (Jewish immigrants to Israel) during the next decade. .. For the first time, Israel is attracting olim due to economic - not only ideological - considerations. Against the backdrop of global economic meltdown and uncertainty, Israel’s credit rating has been upgraded and its GDP growth exceeds any Western country. Unemployment is 5.4 percent; the national debt is less than 75% of GDP; inflation is at 1-3%; no mega-stimulus; banks are managed with fiscal responsibility; all-time high foreign exchange reserves of $75 billion; the flow of overseas investments is robust; exports are sustained at high levels despite global economic insecurity; high-tech industries are expanding; and the economy is energized by the surging secular Jewish fertility rate, increased aliyah, reduced Jewish emigration, accelerated return by expatriates and growing integration of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel’s workforce. By 2018, Israel is expected to become a major net-exporter of natural gas and a growing producer of oil and, possibly, shale oil.He is wearing the same white cotton T shirt he has been sleeping in all the week. He carries the menu on his shirt. A twin soul.
Rising anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and in Russia, accompanied by shattered expectations of democracy in the former USSR, is producing an aliyah tailwind among the 750,000 Jews there (according to conservative estimates). .. Weak economies, intensifying anti-Semitism and increasingly assertive and growing Muslim communities in France, England and other European countries have increased the number of olim. Economic insecurity and dramatically expanded, but very costly, Jewish-Zionist education systems (mostly Modern Orthodox) have augmented the aliyah potential from the USA. Jewish-Zionist education is provided, almost free of cost, in Israel."
30 comments:
Analysis is one thing, hope is another. You and your twin Ettinger are not engaging in disinterested analysis of the facts - therefore the results have no credibility.
Even Ettinger does not dare to hope that the mass of American Jews (outside of the tiny Modern Orthodox segment) will make aliyah.
My daughter is making very concrete plans to spend a semester at Technion in her junior (3rd) year. She is planning to take Hebrew courses at Harvard (MIT does not offer them).
K
My daughter is finishing her studies at the Technion. She pays for the room 800 shekel a month (220 dollars) and earns that money through the Perach program (mentoring once a week some high school student or some other social work). She also worked as certified safety officer and guide of the Haifa Science Museum. Life for students is not expensive. You may rent a small car for her (150 dollars a week) to tour the country and go to the best parties in Tel Aviv (Haifa is half dead). The Technion has a good swimming pool and sports club (free). Everybody speaks English.
Prof. J.,
I wish I had the option to emigrate to a stable, cohesive state full of my co-ethnics. When I came to America, I hoped I would get prongs one and two of that fork, since the third was impossible.
But America is the second country I am seeing die under me, and I am not even middle-aged yet. Fortunately for the Jews, I have no plans to go to Israel...
-s.n.
BTW, paranoids may have enemies, and even interested analysis may come out true.
Fortunately for the Jews, I have no plans to go to Israel... s.n.
Should Israeli Jews care about it, they would send you a Thank You note for staying in America.
Anyway, if you cant come, you can always send your money...
And a stopped clock is right twice a day....
I'm not sure that I would trust my daughter to be on the road with Israeli drivers.
K
PS, in most American universities, when you do a semester abroad you continue to pay your home university full American tuition (around $40,000/ yr) and the university pays the foreign university (much less $) and pockets the difference. It's a racket.
One the one hand, top American universities are vastly overpriced for what they actually provide (mostly large lectures or courses taught by grad students) but on the other hand, the credential and networking opportunity has tremendous market value and the top universities are getting 10 applicants for every spot, including many from overseas, so if they wanted to they could charge even more. Apparently one of the services that the murdered British businessman performed for Bo Xilai's family was helping to get his son into foreign schools, including Harvard.
K
Anyway, if you cant come, you can always send your money...
It is comforting to know that even if I am killed, my money will live on.
-s.n.
K is correct to point out that Ettinger's analysis lacks credibility because it is not disinterested. He accentuates only the positive, but he does not mention the constant existential threats and the looming possibility of regional war. If the war occurs, I expect that there will be a considerable decrease in immigration and a significant increase in emigration.
It is comforting to know that even if I am killed, my money will live on.
There is an old story about people seeking absolute safety. An European Jew saw that WWII was coming and it would be dangerous, so he emigrated to the remotest and safest island he could find on the globe. It was called Guadalcanal.
Regarding Ettinger's analysis, he enumerates facts, while war threats are mostly in people's minds. The only things I am sorry in my life are the many things I didnt do because of fear. I should have been more courageous and optimistic.
Ettinger listed facts that reflect a snapshot in time. Any perturbation could shift the trends. It doesn't pay to take too triumphalist a line. Too much risk of being wrong in the long run.
I'll be visiting Israel from July - August. Should I expect the conflict between Israel and Iran (or a nearer neighbor) to escalate within that time frame?
According to the some popular news sites, the nearest time a war or confrontation would likely break out is Summer.
I dont know. If Iran submits without a war, we can always organize some little shooting war for your entertainment.
Iran may "submit" without a war and then unveil its nuclear weapons capability later. What's to stop them from continuing work. Inspectors? They can probably outsmart them. The Irani nuclear facilities are spread out all over the country, some buried, and there may be facilities western intelligence services don't know about. The intimidation tactics (sanctions, etc.) get much more risky once Iran has the bomb. So if Israel wants to act, this is the only window. It's probably futile to contain proliferation of nuclear capability in the long run, but the Israeli govt doesn't seem to agree with me, so it might just do the crazy thing and attack.
As we used to say in the barrio, when God closes a window, he opens a door. Dont despair. God is with us. If not 100% with us, at least sure he is not with Ahmeenijad.
On a more secular plane, I'm always for doing. We are not Arabs, who tend to let time and Allah take care of things. I hope the country leaders share my temperament.
There is no God to be with you or Ahmadinejad, J. I guess I didn't make my point clear. Even if Israel were to strike Iran and eliminate its nuclear capability, it will likely prove impossible to keep nucs out of the Middle East in the long term. If Israel strikes unsuccessfully, there is the real possibility of regional war in the near future. Either short-term or long-term, the neighborhood doesn't look hospitable for Israel.
The region - the world - never looked hospitable for us.
An excellent reason to abandon Judaism. There is no truly winning strategy.
The question is whether Iran would be willing to annihilate the Palestinians/Jordanians, which would be an essential concomitant of dropping a bomb on Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
I think here it might depend on first strike vs retaliation; the latter, no question. The Western mind would tend to imagine Iran would under no circumstances undertake a first strike, but I have my doubts.
On the other hand, with the superb TaepoDong 2 delivery vehicle, there is now enough genuine uncertainty as to where it would eventually land, for Iran to claim they really had no intentions of harming anyone and were simply conducting a 'test' delivery of their new 'power plant' to their 'friends' in Gaza.
Anon.
An excellent reason to abandon Judaism. There is no truly winning strategy.
It has passed by mind, as it does with every Jew. ARgentina is really an accepting country and Catholicism is really pro-Jewish, so I had no objective difficulties to assume a non Jewish identity. To illustrate why I couldnt do it and decided "to risk my life" by settling in Israel, let me tell you why I abandoned my street gang in the barrio. I loved my friends, I gave them my ten-velocity bycicle, and they loved me to the point of setting up their sisters for me. True. But they were futbol fanatics, they knew all the players, they read the futbol section of the papers, they debated endlessly futbol. I could not force myself to talk futbol, simply I cant find sense nor interest in it. Gradually I passed to a Zionist Socialist youth movement, where the subjects were Marx, Borochov, Frantz Fanon, etc. and had nice summer camps.
Maybe in Argentina it passed by your mind, but not here in the US in the post-WWII period. Conversion to Christianity was at one time a popular strategy for Jews (there are many famous conversos in America - Kerry, Goldwater, Albright, etc.), but by the time I was growing up in the US it was deeply unpopular, indeed almost unheard of. If American Jews "convert" to anything it is mostly to atheism. Once in a while they go in for Eastern religions - Buddhism or Hari Krishna or somesuch. Once in a while they "convert" to Lubavitchism which might as well be a different religion because its customs are so different from the brand of Judaism practiced by most American Jews. But I don't know of a single Jew that I grew up with who converted to Christianity. This by the way has nothing to do with sports. Although I am with you and largely see spectator sports as a waste of time, there are plenty of American Jews, even religious ones, who are devout sports fans and spend all their time talking of sports. American teens of any religion rarely go in for political philosophy and I would venture that discussions of sports teams or popular music outweigh discussions of the dialectic and critical theory by a factor of 1000 to 1 or more. Marx might be identified as a comedian, Fanon would draw a blank for 99 out of 100 and Borochov is totally obscure.
In my daughter's school there was a girl who was a bit of a evangelical Christian fanatic with whom my daughter was friendly. Somehow my daughter got hold of her diary and in it she expressed a private wish or prayer that my daughter would accept Jesus and be saved. This is absolutely the furthest thing from my daughter' mind and it pretty much ended the friendship. On one level my daughter found it laughable but on another I think she was deeply shocked or insulted. The girl did not really fit in well with the atmosphere of my daughter's school, which is not at all religious and she left soon afterward.
K
Kerry is half-Jewish ethnically, but it was his grandfather who converted. Goldwater was also a half-Jew or quarter-Jew, and I believe it was likewise a grandfather who converted. Albright is the only full-Jew in that list, and she didn't convert to anything. Her parents tried to shield her from Jewishness, so painful had the experience been for them in Europe.
What I was trying to say is that I had easy opportunities to drop out of the Jewish people, but could not do it mostly because my inclinations. I like to study and learn, read books etc. and cannot assimilate to people whose interest is stupid sports. I gravitate towards people like me, which mostly are Jewish and anything I do always end finding myself among Jews. Even in the water and wastewater field, I participate in discussions and find out that once again the people I am talking (anonymously) through the net is Jewish.
My interests are mostly academic or high-culture as well, but I do not find that many of my generation share them. Jews not only have a disproportionate role in the generation of pop-culture, young Jews also consume it. My right-leaning political inclinations also create distance from other Jews. I am also not religious or interested in becoming so, and I therefore do not seek interactions with rightwing Orthodox American Jews. Judaism, frankly, has little appeal for me, but that is also true of the rest of the world.
What position did Marx play?
Koko assures me it was left wing.
Anon.
I don't know but I think Borochov is a goalie for the Detroit hockey team.
K
Perhaps he specializes in "shifting the goalposts"?
Fanon's work influenced, among others, Obama, as he struggled with
"bourgeois society's stifling constraints", and also Steve Biko, whom I once met briefly.
Anon.
Borochov was an early Zionist Socialist ideologue. He tried to reconcile Marxism with Zionism, which is a national liberation movement.
Franz Fanon was a Caribbean psychologist, who participated in the Algerian liberation war. He wrote on the colonized people's psychology, and we young Jews in Argentina certainly felt we shared the mentality of an opressed, colonized minority. It made much sense in that time.
How times changes! We conceived Zionism as part of the awakening of the colonized peoples and we were recognized by liberation movements as one of them. I dont remember if Israel participated in the Bandung Congress or not, but I remember it was a very significant event in our youth movement.
Our "Youth Movement" at university in South Africa consisted entirely in Left Wing, anti-white, pro-militant, anti-Afrikaner self-hating zealots and manipulants trying to recruit idealistic, guilt-ridden white students to hard-line, violent Communism.
Several of my acquaintances became radicalized, and more than a few pretended to, because that's where all the sexual action was; but there was a small minority that took it to extremes, including one I knew well who was killed.
I myself, having seen Black Africa at first hand, stayed above it,
finding (like Buridan's Ass) both apartheid and Black Nationalism equally distasteful.
Since then, with the enrichment of the ANC political class, SA student politics has morphed away from the crude economic Marxism of our day to the type of Cultural Marxism now prevalent in the West; but the white self-hatred remains.
Anon.
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