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James Borden's avatar

The Hannah Arendt was very thoughtful but probably needs to be counterposed to Joshua Leifer writing last year that in almost any reasonable future the majority of the Jews in the world will be living in Israel and American Jews will not be the second pole of world Jewry anymore. This happened because Israel a) could make peace with just enough neighbors to counteract Arendt's prediction that it would be under permanent siege b) became an impossibly wealthy country even relative to when spouse lived there in the late 1990s c) allowed Haredi Jews who mostly loathe the entire idea of the IDF to have very large families

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James Borden's avatar

The way I learned it after the fact was that world Jewry supported the creation of Israel because the world system could not be trusted to protect Jews even if individuals and some countries like Denmark had done heroic things to save Jews--not that everyone had "unconscious bias" against Jews the way we might put it nowadays

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