Showing posts with label American Jews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Jews. Show all posts

Friday 21 October 2016

The American clouds of Anti-Semitism

Image of New Statesman Cover from wikipedia co...
Image of New Statesman Cover from wikipedia commons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
69 years old Larry Jacob who was born and raised in New York had not his ears and eyes closed the last months. He is aware of the danger that lures around the corner.

In his article "Modern anti-Semitism" for the Times of Israel he notices that
Many modern-day American Jews are unaware of the current depth and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism (“AS”) in the U.S..
Therefore he warns them they are feeling too much at ease, thinking that their rights are protected by anti-discrimination laws, such as Title VI. A problem may be that
 they are too busy earning a living and raising a family to focus on AS.
Jacob understands that but
that does not diminish the clear and present danger it represents.
In the previous moths we have seen many documentaries on the American white evangelist lobbies who promote weapon bearing and could hear how they think about "the Jews who killed Jesus". I myself had some correspondence with such 'devout' American evangelicals who are convinced that Jews are the evil of the world and who are convinced the world better could be cleansed from that race.

Anti-Semitism (AS) and other forms of discrimination may officially be prohibited by various federal and state laws in the United States of America, but it looked lie this was only on paper and not something for the reality or to be taken serious by a big group of American citizens.

Jacob writes
 it is also true that attitudes and beliefs cannot be completely controlled by laws.  AS has not yet risen to the level of the 19th Century Russian pogroms or the organized terror of 1930s Nazi Germany, but, ...  AS is still present in the 21st Century, even in the US.  Often, it is more subtle, but, nevertheless, it permeates many areas of our culture.
Also Adele M. Stan the same as we could not do without the idea where Trump could have got the mustard from. Looking at Trump his speech she wrote on AlterNet
The speech was hinged to the original purpose of his campaign: to trade on the resentments of a restive remnant of white America — angry white men and the women who love them — and set the stage for mayhem in the wake of his likely electoral defeat.
This was not your standard, off-the-cuff Trump rant. This was a scripted speech, delivered with a teleprompter. It was crafted. It featured the key words of right-wing complaints: “sovereign,” “global bankers” and “slander.” Really, it came right out of a Nazi propaganda playbook. And when one considers the themes common between Nazi propaganda films and the films made by top Trump campaign staffers Stephen K. Bannon and David Bossie (as analyzed by AlterNet), we should hardly be surprised.
Our thought that Trump sees everywhere a conspiracy against him was confirmed in the debate, him beginning with an attack on the New York Times (whose majority owners are a Jewish family), which he said was engaged in a conspiracy of global proportions with the Clintons, international bankers and major corporations, all to stop him from winning the presidency.

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Please continue reading

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Preceding article: Jews the next scapegoat for Donald Trump

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Jews the next scapegoat for Donald Trump

speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on Februar...
speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 10, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In the United States of America Ashkenazi American Jews have had white privilege since at least after World War II. Most Jews could build up a nice life in the States and managed to get in some high positions.

Until the preparation for the election of the new president this year they never experienced some examples of it that other ethnicities have and had not to worry about showing to others which religion they belonged to. But when Donald trump came into the picture as a candidate for the presidency this changed in the negative sense.

Suddenly it became clear that Jews are still more “ethnic” than other white Americans, leaving them more vulnerable to prejudice. And that prejudice grew by the many remarks which were made at the sideline as well on several speakers platforms of the Republicans.

During his campaign Trump showed his right-wing tendencies and welcomed many of his volatile anti-Semites supporters. Being a right-wing, populist, authoritarian demagogue with no political credentials and not with enough political knowledge. all the time he never came up with some serious political propositions for the future, but did everything to attack his opponents and telling lots of things which were far from the truth.

I cannot understand ho this man of 'big words', showing no respect for others, got such a following even from women whom he considers a lower species, having no right to decide for themselves. We can see that by his daring to attack the system and doubting the integrity of the state, enjoying fear-mongering and open bigotry he could build up an unbelievable group of followers who seem to take everything he says, though quite often he came to say the opposite of what he said before. He managed to have those who do not think for themselves behind him.

Trump in his debate yesterday clearly expressed when he would be president he would people on the major posts  who follow his ideas. And that would make it very dangerously for the freedom of the American citizen. All the previous months he showed his contempt for the American system and called for a ban on Muslim, Mexican and other immigration of noon-white folks as well as on the deportation of American citizens born to undocumented immigrants and the loosening of libel laws, proposals which blatantly violate the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments.

That Trump is loved by Putin may be not a surprise both being cut of the same wood. But this also meaning that when Trump would come into power he also could start taking care to get rid of all who oppose him and to make a dictatorial state.
Americans better would look to some other lunatics in Europe who managed to promise the people a lot, but who once in power created a horrible place for many living in the country of their demagogy.

We can only hope the majority of Americans shall use their brains and shall prefer to chose for their country more than for their party. Because Americans should be aware of the danger this man could bring not only to their own country but also to the whole world. That is the reason why this election has also become so important for us Europeans and for other nations who can see this man who would not mind creating one or another war or being the cause of it.

Americans should also be aware that once in power this man who showed his disgust for non-whites and non-christians (though I wonder to which denomination he belongs and if he is an active Christian) As a dictator, one can only imagine what Trump would be willing and able to do to the various ethnic, racial, and religious minorities toward whom he has promoted animosity throughout his campaign. Once he has his way with African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Muslim-Americans, Trump will need to find a new scapegoat to preserve the paranoia his supporters experience which drives them to rally behind him, and he clearly gave already enough signs that it will be those Jews of which he would be happy that they clear out of his country with the Zionists as soon as possible to Israel where they can fight with the Arabs on their own.


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Wednesday 2 October 2013

Jew refering to be religious or to be a people


Not only the Catholic church faces lots of people who do not want to be active in their 'faith' or who perhaps still take part in certain traditional feasts, like child-baptism, first and second communion, but really do not believe in any God or would ever read the Bible.

In Belgium we still do have a very active Jewish community but everywhere in the world we also notice people who call themselves Jew but have no interest in any god whatsoever.

In the United States the number of nonreligious Jews is rising. When you would go around and ask passers by how active they are in their religion, you probably would find many who are not religious at all. According to a new survey of the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project more than one in five so called Jews, saying they are not affiliated with a religion.

The size of the U.S. Jewish population has been a matter of lively debate among academic experts for more than a decade. Because the Pew Research survey involves a representative sample of Jews, rather than a census of all American Jews, it cannot definitively answer the question. However, data from the survey can be used to derive a rough estimate of the size of the U.S. Jewish population. Perhaps even more valuably, the survey illuminates the many different ways in which Americans self-identify as Jewish or partially Jewish, and it therefore provides a sense of how the size of the population varies depending on one’s definition of who is a Jew.

If Jewish refers only to people whose religion is Jewish (Jews by religion), then the survey indicates that the Jewish population currently stands at about 1.8% of the total U.S. adult population, or 4.2 million people. If one includes secular or cultural Jews – those who say they have no religion but who were raised Jewish or have a Jewish parent and who still consider themselves Jewish aside from religion – then the estimate grows to 2.2% of American adults, or about 5.3 million. For the purposes of the analysis in this report, these two groups make up the “net” Jewish population.

In traditional Jewish law (halakha), Jewish identity is passed down through matrilineal descent, and the survey finds that about 90% of Jews by religion and 64% of Jews of no religion – a total of about 4.4 million U.S. adults – say they have a Jewish mother. Additionally, about 1.3 million people who are not classified as Jews in this report (49% of non-Jews of Jewish background) say they have a Jewish mother.  {Since 1983, the Reform movement formally has embraced a more expansive definition of who is a Jew, accepting children born of either a Jewish father or a Jewish mother if the children are raised Jewish and engage in public acts of Jewish identification, such as acquiring a Hebrew name, studying Torah and having a bar or bat mitzvah. See the Reform movement’s March 15, 1983, Resolution on Patrilineal Descent.}

Jewish leaders say the new survey spotlights several unique obstacles for the future of their faith. You can wonder when even among religious Jews, most of them say it's not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish, and less than one in three say religion is very important to their lives. Like in Catholicism and protestantism in the Western World, the people living in a luxury world are more interested in material wealth than in spiritual richness.

Though Greg Smith, director of religious surveys for the Pew Research Center says:
"The fact that many Jews tell us that religion is not particularly important to them doesn't mean that being Jewish is not important to them."
The long-term decline in the Jewish by religion share of the population results partly from differences in the median age and fertility of Jews compared with the public at large. As early as 1957, Jews by religion were significantly older and had fewer children than the U.S. population as a whole. At that time, the median age of Jews older than age 14 was 44.5 years, compared with 40.4 years among the population as a whole, and Jewish women ages 15-44 had 1.2 children on average, compared with 1.7 children among this age group in the general public. {The 1957 Current Population Survey results were published in Goldstein, S. 1969. “Socioeconomic Differentials Among Religious Groups in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology, volume 74, issue 6, pages 612-631, and Mueller, S. A., and Lane, A. V. 1972. “Tabulations from the 1957 Current Population Survey on Religion: A Contribution to the Demography of American Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, volume 11, issue 1, pages 76-98. Unfortunately, raw data from the 1957 survey were destroyed, so it is not possible to reanalyze them using the various age categories used in the new survey. In the 1957 survey, completed interviews were obtained for roughly 35,000 households.}

Today, Jews by religion still are considerably older than U.S. adults as a whole, although they are similar to the general public in the number of children ever born. (See discussion of median age and fertility in the Age and Fertility sections in Chapter 2.)

Since 2000, the share of American adults who say their religion is Jewish has generally ranged between 1.2% and 2% in national surveys. 
The estimate from the new Pew Research survey that there are approximately 5.3 million “net” Jewish adults and 1 million children who are being raised exclusively as Jewish (or 1.3 million children being raised at least partly Jewish) falls roughly in the middle of these prior estimates – somewhat higher than DellaPergola’s numbers, somewhat lower than the Dashefsky-Sheskin figure and fairly close to the Saxe-Tighe estimates.

The estimate that Jews by religion make up 1.8% of U.S. adults also is consistent with the results of Pew Research surveys over the past five years and close to the findings of other recent national surveys (such as Gallup polls and the General Social Surveys conducted by the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago) that use similar, close-ended questions about religious affiliation. {A close-ended question provides the respondent with a list of possible responses to choose from. Pew Research’s typical wording is: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular.” Other studies, such as the National Jewish Population Surveys (NJPS) and American Religious Identification Surveys (ARIS) have used open-ended questions about religious affiliation – offering no specific response options – and the results therefore are not directly comparable. Open-ended questions about religious affiliation tend to find smaller numbers of Jews by religion. See, for example, Schulman, M. A., chair. NJPS 2000-2001 Review Committee. 2003. “National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001: Study Review Memo;” and Tighe, E., Saxe, L., and Livert, D. 2006. “Research synthesis of national survey estimates of the U.S. Jewish population,” presented at the 61st Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.}


In aggregated Pew Research polling, the Jewish by religion share of the population has ranged in recent years between 1.5% (in 2009) and 1.9% (in 2010). GSS estimates have ranged from 1.5% (in 2012) to 1.7% (in 2008). Combining its own surveys conducted since 2008, Pew Research finds that a weighted average of 1.7% of U.S. adults identify as Jews by religion, while the GSS and Gallup find 1.6% identifying as Jews by religion.

According to the survey, a full 16 percent of Orthodox Jews “attend non-Jewish religious services at least a few times a year.” The proportion is identical for Modern Orthodox Jews and what the survey describes as “ultra-Orthodox Jews” — 15 percent for both sub-groups. Shockingly, that’s slightly higher than the proportions of Reform Jews (15 percent) and non-denominational Jews (12%) who report attending non-Jewish religious services with similar frequency.

Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Daily Forward, said she is not surprised that the study found relatively low interest in Jewish religious beliefs.
"We are a people very much defined by what we do, rather than what we believe," she said.
But Eisner said she is concerned that millennials are less likely to donate to Jewish charities, care strongly about Israel or belong to Jewish groups.
"It's great that these non-religious Jews feel pride in being Jewish," Eisner said. "What worries me is their tenuous ties to the community."

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