Chanukah 2009/5770

JERUSALEM — The Jewish holiday of Chanukah begins at sundown today. Here are two past writings of mine on the topic: Is Chanukah a Right-Wing Holiday? and Chanukah and Christopher Hitchens.

I also wanted to post another original writing. This is a short paper I wrote while I was a master’s student in Jewish Studies at Hebrew College in Boston. Enjoy!

When Secular and Religious Sources Conflict: Jewish Assimilation and the Maccabees

The story of Chanukah, detailed in the non-canonical books of Maccabees as well as in the writings of various secular historians, is one example of how different accounts — religious and secular — can cloud the history and memory of what actually occurred. The story related in Maccabees is essentially one of Jewish civil war. One faction wanted to adopt various ancient Greek customs since that culture was the dominant force in the Middle East (particularly when King Antiochus gained control of Judea). The other side viewed those practices as assimilation and heresy.

The writers of 1 Maccabees, when introducing the story, side with the latter group, portraying those who chose to assimilate as “wicked men” (1 Macc. 1:12) who profane the Sabbath and allow Antiochus to defile the Temple. When the Maccabees won, the writers viewed the victory in hindsight as a triumph of the faithful over the wicked. Right at the beginning of this account of the conflict, the pro-assimilation Judeans actively chose to side with Greek culture without any specific prompting or coercion:

In those days certain renegades came out from Israel and misled many, saying, ‘Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since we separated from them many disasters have come upon us.’ This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king, who authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they build a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil. (1 Macc. 1:11-15)

1 Maccabees paints the conflict in stark, black-and-white, religious terms. The fact that the writers portray the pro-assimilation Judeans as wanting to form a new “covenant” with the Greeks is especially damning since, to the Maccabees, the only covenant Jews should have is the one with God that was formed at Sinai.

The ancient historian Josephus Flavius, however, portrayed the account differently. To him, Antiochus originally treated the Jews well because they sided with him during the king’s war against Ptolemy over who would control Judea. To thank the Jews, Antiochus gave them appropriate animals to sacrifice, along with wine, oil, frankincense, silver, flour, wheat, and salt. More significantly, he wrote to Ptolemy to command that “all of that nation live according to the laws of their own country” (Antiquities, Book XII, Chapter III, Part III).

However, Antiochus eventually decided to invade Jerusalem following a failed effort to take Egypt. Josephus writes that the king, in contrast to his earlier policy of toleration, now wanted to impose Greek culture upon the Jews:

[Antiochus] compelled them to forsake the worship which they paid their own God, and to adore those whom he took to be gods; and made them build temples, and raise idol altars in every city and village, and offer swine upon them every day. He also commanded them not to circumcise their sons, and threatened to punish any that should be found to have transgressed his injunction. He also appointed overseers, who should compel them to do what he commanded. (Antiquities, Book XII, Chapter V, Part IV).

According to Josephus, the punishments for violating Antiochus’ decrees were harsh: “they were whipped with rods, and their bodies were torn to pieces, and were crucified, while they were still alive, and breathed. They also strangled those women and their sons whom they had circumcised, as the king had appointed, hanging their sons about their necks as they were upon the crosses” (ibid).

One of the differences between the accounts in 1 Maccabees and Antiquties is in the motivations they attribute to the Jews who choose to adopt Greek culture. In 1 Maccabees, the Judeans assimilate — for seemingly no other reason than because they were wicked — before Antiochus imposes his harsh rule. In Antiquities, the king forces assimilation onto the Judeans under pain of death, and then some Jews assimilate to save their lives.

This difference is an example of the difficulty in surmising accurate social histories from religious texts. History is written by the victors, and 1 Maccabees is one such case. One of the authors’ purposes was to demonize those Jews who chose to assimilate into Greek culture by adopting some of its practices. Antiochus’ decrees in occupied Jerusalem were of secondary importance. If the writers of 1 Maccabees had stated that the Jews who had adopted Greek customs were coerced, then that statement would have hurt their argument that any Jews who assimilate are inherently wicked.

All writers of history naturally have their personal biases, but authors of religious texts are less interested in communicating objective accounts at all — they want to convince their readers of certain theological points. Persuasion is primary; accuracy is secondary.

On Sarah Palin

BELLEVILLE, Illinois — I know more than a few conservative, hard-right women here in the midwestern United States, and many of them dislike the 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate as much as your typical Bostonian liberal.

I never understood why. But then I read this reader’s comment to Andrew Sullivan on why many women do not like Palin:

Sarah Palin is the peppy cheerleader in high school all the boys thought was so sweet but the girls knew was really a vicious shrew. She’s the new girl in the office who wears tight shirts and three-inch heels, is super-friendly to her male superiors, ignores the other women, and gets promoted sooner than her more capable and hard working peers. She’s the outgoing PTA mom all of the other women are scared to cross because they will find themselves put on the worst committees. Only a woman knows how to give another woman a sweet smile and at the same time cut her down to size with an artfully crafted “compliment” without male observers having a clue about what just happened. It’s like a dog whistle.

It sounds reasonable. Readers — especially those who are conservatives and/or women — what say you?

The Berlin Wall

I just watched a History Channel documentary on the night — 11 November 1989 — that the Berlin Wall fell. I was nine at the time. Here is a real-politik reflection on the event by Stratfor Global Analysis.

I was too young to understand the significance at the time, but I will always remember the event in hindsight as the start of millions of people gaining their freedom over the next several years, concluding with the fall of the Soviet Union. I would have given anything to be, like Tom Brokaw, a reporter at the scene. The closest I have ever been to a historically-significant event — regardless of how one feels about it personally — was when I covered the first same-sex marriage in Massachusetts when I was editor-in-chief of Spare Change News.

I will always prefer to associate 9/11 with the fall of the Berlin Wall — when written with European dating — rather than with the terrorist attacks in New York, which happened during my last semester of college. The most important historical event to occur in one’s lifetime should be something positive.

Baseball

Since my two favorite teams are the Boston Red Sox and Whoever is Playing the Yankees, I must say: Go Phillies!

Older Women, Younger Men

The New York Times looks at the supposed explosion of cougardom:

Newsweek, taking stock of the explosion of on-screen romances between older women and younger men, declared 2009 “the year of the cougar,” but then concluded in the June article that “by this time next year, the cougar will be extinct.”

Maybe so — if you’re talking about television or the box office. But behind the unleashing of cougars in pop culture is what a growing number of sociologists say is a real demographic shift, driven by new choices that women over 40 are making as they redefine the concept of a suitable mate.

The loosening of relationship conventions, which is not limited to age but also includes race, religion and economic status, appears to be particularly evident among female baby boomers, sociologists say, who are faced with the tightest “marriage squeeze” — the smallest pool of compatible men as conventionally defined, those two to three years older, of similar background and higher levels of education and income. The reason is that as women have delayed marriage, men still have a tendency to date and marry younger women.

I read this with equal parts amusement and understanding. Read this quote from the Times article by Christie Nightingale, the founder of Premier Match dating service: “There are younger men who are sick and tired of women their age — they want a woman who is more grounded and more mature.”

From the age of high school through most of their twenties, women are generally insane. They try to navigate the conflicting messages, hormones, and desires that come from their brains, their bodies, and feminist indoctrination. As I wrote in a lengthy essay, the modern dating world for young people in the West is increasingly complicated as a result of the unintended consequences of feminism over the past several decades. It is perfectly natural for men, as a result, to want to date older women, who generally create much less drama. Men are simple creatures. (I write this as someone who dated a 30-year-old in Boston when I was twenty-three.)

However, the natural reality is that older-woman-younger-man relationships do not generally last (a few celebrity couples notwithstanding). My 30-year-old girlfriend broke up with me because I was too immature and did not want to get married. The laws of evolutionary psychology cannot usually be broken. As the Times article itself notes, these pairings are still rare despite a small uptick in the numbers.

Cougars who date younger men are setting themselves up for disappointment and unhappiness. As a study referenced in the Times article notes, “men were more strongly drawn to the relationships at the start because of physical attraction.” In less-polite terms, younger men fancy these older women because it is kinky and exciting. It is not a stable foundation for a relationship.

Moreover, older women in this context — especially the generation of the Baby Boomers — are typically acting in a selfish manner. As Dr. Louann Brizendine notes in her groundbreaking book “The Female Brain,” most divorces in middle age are initiated by women rather than men. Middle-aged women are much more likely to focus on themselves and their needs by starting anew through divorce after years spent sacrificing their needs for those of their families. Hence the reason that more older women can be seen — as I did in Boston — in bars and clubs drinking and hooking-up with the boy-toy of the night.

The sad reality is that many of these women likely dumped their marriages and husbands — or they intentionally delayed marriage and serious relationships for too much time to get a husband — for the illusion of being a care-free twentysomething. From younger men who want to brag to their friends about nailing a cougar to older women who cannot let go of their youth, it is clear that this trend will quickly die. And that will be healthier for society.

Let’s Go, Red Sox!

Yours truly sounding the battle-cry for the 2009 baseball playoffs, Israeli-style. I had just bought my first shofar in Jerusalem.

Baseball from Israel

RISHON LEZION, Israel — On my first trip to Israel three years ago, I was leaving the Holocaust Memorial when a passerby in the parking lot yelled out, “Go Yankees!”

I was wearing my Red Sox hat at the time. It seems that the Greatest Rivalry in All of Sports follows you anywhere, even ten thousand miles away from the East Coast and outside the somber remembrance of the greatest massacre in human history.

[Conversely, the opposite happened when I was traveling in Egypt. Near the Sphinx, I saw a guy wearing a Yankees hat, and I yelled, "Go Red Sox!" He gave me a puzzled look. "Not American?" I asked. "Uh, no," he replied in a German accent. "Never mind," I replied. Evidently, he was one of those foreigners who wears a Yankees hat only because the team is supposedly synonymous with the United States. Talk about good branding.]

The baseball playoffs are occuring this month, and the Red Sox and Yankees have clinched the AL Wild Card and AL East respectively. But the games will be difficult to watch — night ones start between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. here. Still, I will be excited to see the Red Sox beat the Angels (as they always do in the playoffs) and then face the Evil Empire. But I will need a lot of קפה.

Eight Years Later

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred eight years ago. Here are my two posts on the causes and significance of the event. I was a senior in college in Boston at the time, but these reflections were written several years later.

The Upcoming Generational War

Sixth in a series of essays

Ruben Navarrette recently criticized young Americans who are lobbying the government for financial assistance in these tough times:

Young people usually don’t have mortgages to pay off, or spouses and children to support. That gives them an enormous amount of freedom whether they realize it or not. They also have an advantage in the job market because they can travel the country and go where the jobs are. Or they can simply follow their passions and build careers of their own designs. Instead of seeing obstacles, they should see opportunities.

And yet, when young people ask government to throw them a life preserver and save them from the choppy waters of a rough economy, they’ve all but given up. Even if they get the short-term economic aid they’re seeking, they’ll lose their self-sufficiency in the process and become dependent on an unresponsive bureaucracy. That’s not good. In fact, it’s dangerous.

So you have to wonder where young people picked up this distasteful and destructive behavior. It’s obvious. It was from watching their elders with outstretched palms, a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to see government as the solution to all sorts of problems. And to think there are people who actually believe that.

Navarrette misses the point. As he himself notes earlier in his column, young Americans are more disproportionately unemployed than other demographics. But the problem is much deeper than jobs.

Just like Generation X two decades ago, Generation Y is increasingly bitter and frustrated to the point of losing all hope that they will one day have a life at least as secure — and not even as prosperous — as the Baby Boomers did in their middle-aged lives. (For the record, my birth year — 1980 — is stuck between Generation X and Generation Y, so I can empathize with both.) It is hard to quantify the pessimism and anger that pervades the younger generation, but a writer named Squashed comes close:

The word “entitlement” has picked up a negative connotation it shouldn’t have. If you go to the bank and deposit $20, you are entitled to get your $20 from the bank. If you fulfill your half of a contract, you are entitled to the other party’s performance. Sure, its a problem when you feel you deserve something you don’t deserve—but there is nothing wrong with acknowledging a legitimate debt. So let’s ask why some people in their 20s might feel the older generation hasn’t kept its end of the bargain…

For those who just graduated, there was no job. That’s not technically true. There was a job—but somebody older has it and isn’t letting go. It turns out the whole system is rigged. Education and intelligence and everything we were told was important turn out to be worth nothing next to seniority and experience…

Take health insurance. Decades of pressure to lower wages for new hires and cut benefits means that the employer-provided system means that even if you can find a job, it probably won’t offer health insurance. Paying for insurance out of pocket is prohibitively expensive if you’re healthy and coverage is entirely unavailable if you’re not. And if you have a minimum-wage job serving coffee, you’re still getting a chunk taken out of your paycheck to finance a program that won’t be solvent by the time you’re old enough to use it. But any effort to change this system is met with seniors screaming about communists taking away their medicare. And if 20-somethings back a legislative initiative that would help them obtain coverage, they’re slackers living in their parents basements. And let’s not even get into the individual mandate in the health-reform bill that will require the healthy and young to subsidize the health-care of their older and generally wealthier parents.

Should twenty-somethings who have done everything asked of them their entire lives feel like somebody pulled one over on them? Probably—but bad things happen. And hopefully all those years of education taught us enough empathy not to be vindictive. Call us gullible—but don’t call us lazy or selfish.  If some of us push for a few reforms that could help us succeed even when our parents have dropped the ball—back them, and be thankful that we’re not talking outright revolution.

In an earlier essay, I also described the reasons that people my age are — to put it bluntly — pissed off. Please take a minute to read the post and its comments. Now, for the specific data from the Pew Research Center:

Now, what facts can be determined from this data?

• The percentage of workers who are approaching or older than 65 is increasing while that of younger people is declining or remaining static.
• Most workers who remain on the job past the age of 65 do so out of desire rather than need.
• Still, some older workers have delayed retirement due to the recession.

In a nutshell,  it is the Baby Boomers’ own fault that their children are working at McDonald’s or sleeping in their basements. For the most part, the older generation is refusing to retire simply because they want to work. Those who may need to delay retirement because their portfolios have declined either had idiots for financial advisers, or they made bad investments themselves. (By the age of 60, almost all of your investments should be in stable bonds rather than volatile stocks. And don’t get me started if you flipped houses or bought property during the height of the housing bubble.)

Critics like Navarrette usually say that every generation has had tough times and that younger people should pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Well, here is a secret: My generation has no bootstraps! The most extreme members of my generation feel that there is nothing we can do until the Baby Boomers literally die off.

But even that might pose a problem. Read this insightful — and scary — article in the Atlantic Monthly on how the “longevity boom” will wreak havoc on American society:

In the scientists’ projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward “engineered negligible senescence”—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have “a good chance of success in mice within ten years.” The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. “In ten years we’ll have a pill that will give you twenty years,” says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. “And then there’ll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born…”

From religion to real estate, from pensions to parent-child dynamics, almost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations. Every quarter century or so children take over from their parents—a transition as fundamental to human existence as the rotation of the planet about its axis. In tomorrow’s world, if the optimists are correct, grandparents will have living grandparents; children born decades from now will ignore advice from people who watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Intergenerational warfare—the Anna Nicole Smith syndrome—will be but one consequence. Trying to envision such a world, sober social scientists find themselves discussing pregnant seventy-year-olds, offshore organ farms, protracted adolescence, and lifestyles policed by insurance companies. Indeed, if the biologists are right, the coming army of centenarians will be marching into a future so unutterably different that they may well feel nostalgia for the long-ago days of three score and ten.

“[A]lmost every aspect of society is based on the orderly succession of generations.” This is the most important line in the Atlantic article. When an older generation dies off, its wealth, jobs, and responsibilities are transferred, through inheritance and other means, to the younger generation. The next generation uses this capital to obtain jobs, get married, buy homes, raise families, and create more wealth. Then they will die off, and the circle continues. This is how society must function.

Now, however, the circle is broken. Instead of the Baby Boomers transferring their wealth to Generations X and Y, they are getting more money by staying at their jobs and spending their existing wealth on vacations as well as life-extending medicines and procedures (see here and here) rather than passing it onto their children and grandchildren. (I would have added the adverb “selfishly spending,” but I am not sure the natural, inherent desire to prolong one’s life can fairly be described as “selfish.”)

Generations X and Y have yet to have the collective wealth, rights, and responsibilities transferred and assigned to them from the Baby Boomers. As a result, young people are stuck in their often-criticized state of perpetual adolescence because we cannot afford the trappings of so-called maturity: marriage, home, and family. (See here, here, and here.) What else can we do but wait?

Still, Navarrette is correct on one point: My generation has more mobility because most of us do not yet have good jobs, spouses, mortgages, and families even though many of are pushing the age of thirty or beyond. As a result, we may need to start looking elsewhere than the United States.

For example, I moved to Israel and found a wonderful job since international marketing experience and native English are in great demand. I am not paying part of my salary into Social Security, a program whose benefits I will likely never see. The government provides universal health-care. My job provides both an employer-matched pension and a retirement fund along with disability and life insurance. (My standard of living is much higher relative to other Israelis than it was in Boston relative to other Americans.) I write this not to brag but to ask: How many young people in the United States have this today?

It is no wonder than Generations X and Y are so upset.

Related: Cancel Student Loan Debt (to Save the Economy). Hat tip: Anya Kamenetz. Next essay: On the Jewish-Girl Fetish.

Elsewhere: Columnist Dennis Prager apologizes on behalf of the Baby Boomers, though mainly for reasons other than economic ones.

Bad Hair Days

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Hairstyles from the 1980s are reportedly returning to the United States. (Twenty-year cycles, and all.) Although the eighties had many good things, hair was not usually one of them. See here.

And for my readers living here, do you ever feel that sometimes the decade never seems to have left? I see women with ponytails spouting from the side of their heads, tops with one shoulder-strap around the upper arm to create a slanted angle across the chest, and a layer of spandex leggings under their outer-clothes all the time. If I see any leg-warmers, I’m shipping out back to Boston.

Peter Pan, Meet Harry Potter

The New York Times reports that the children who grew up reading the “Harry Potter” books are now graduating college and entering the workforce:

Indie rock bands have sprung up inspired by their obsession, with names like Harry and the Potters, the Half Bloods, and Voldie and the Wiz Kidz, playing songs inspired by Potter lore.

Last fall, teams from Princeton, Vassar, Boston University [my alma mater!] and a dozen other schools competed in the Quidditch World Cup, in which students play a real-life version of the soccer-like contact sport featured in the books and films. (They can’t fly, but still compete with brooms between their legs.)

The continuing pull of all things Potter is a testament to the franchise’s enduring sway. But it also seems like something else: the advent of Generation Y nostalgia.

Chronologically, I am sandwiched between Generations X and Y since I was born in 1980. As a result, I came to “Harry Potter” later than most people. I was living in London and interning for a magazine in the summer of 2001, and I decided to pick up the first book to see what all the fuss was about. I never looked back. (I discovered later that the American books had been changed slightly — “mum” became “mom” and “lorries” became “trucks.” I guess the publisher decided that children are too stupid to learn words from other countries.) I am excited that the latest film adaptation should be coming to Israel soon.

Still, the Times notes an interesting aspect behind Pottermania:

Even though nostalgia hits every generation, it seems awfully early for 28-year-olds to be looking back. One possible explanation, say authors who focus on generational identity, is the impact of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The political and economic climate of the late ’90s had been as soothing as a Backstreet Boys ballad: no wars, unemployment as low as 4 percent, a $120 billion federal surplus.

Neil Howe, an author of several books on what he calls the Millennials (another term for Gen Y), draws a parallel between this nostalgic wave and the one boomers embraced with the film “American Graffiti” in 1973. That movie depicted the recent past, the early ’60s, which seemed to have vanished forever.

“It’s instant nostalgia before a huge change in the nation’s mood,” Mr. Howe said. “ ‘American Graffiti’ was nostalgia for the boomers for a world before everything changed after J.F.K.’s assassination.

“Millennials see the world before Sept. 11 as a period of innocence. Our biggest worry was the Y2K bug. That all seems a world away now.”

I completely understand. An uncle of mine always told me that college would be the best years of my life, and I am afraid that he might have been correct. I entered college in 1998 — close to the height of the dot-com craze and the Nasdaq. The world looked to be my generation’s digital oyster.

And then, September 11 occurred four months before I graduated in January 2002. I entered the journalism world after the dot-com bubble had burst and newspapers were starting their downward trajectories. Along with everyone else my age, I was burdened by crushing debt from student loans and credit cards at a time when decent job prospects looked — and still look — incredibly remote. And then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the re-election of one of the worst presidents in modern times, the housing-bubble collapse, and the current financial meltdown.

I could use a nice game of Quidditch. “Harry Potter” was the last pop-culture sensation that I experienced before my college-student dreams and optimistic outlook were shattered.

Related: Why My Generation is Pissed Off

Death of Nation-States

Coming Anarchy offers a hypothetical map of how Europe may look in ten years:

Even if only a few of these microstates were to be born, it could have serious consequences regionally, transatlantically and globally. In Europe, it would suddenly create a host of rich and poor states, which their previous host states balanced out. Northern Germany will get poorer and the two southern states stay very rich for example. Over time, the lack of wealth transfer from southern to northern Germany, or from northern to southern Italy will likely create less developed and poorer states within Europe no longer able to stay afloat. As an Italian friend once joked, without the north, southern Italy would turn into a Catholic Pakistan. As reader DJ noted, now more than ever, regions of today’s states are trying to maximize the economic benefits of globalization while minimizing the social costs, leading to richer regions breaking from poorer ones.

So what will independence look like? It won’t have the same meaning that we think of today. At the local level, these newly minted states will enjoy previously unparalleled independence, flexibility and likely prosperity. However, at the same time, they will be subservient to the European Union on international matters such as defense, some foreign policy, trade agreements, transportation and environmental issues. Also and perhaps most importantly, a credible Europe wide defense would have to exist to make the creation of new states viable.

As I have noted in prior posts here, here, and here, the nation-state is dying a slow death as the two forces of globalization and localization pull it in opposite directions. The intertwining of all countries’ economies necessitates that all nation-states work with each other, and another result is that all governments can fall victim to forces beyond their control as well. The Internet is also creating an infinite number of niche markets and communities within societies worldwide through the mass-segmentation of the cultural market. Mass immigration — Latin Americans into the United States as well as Arabs and eastern Europeans into western Europe are two prominent examples — is changing the ethnic characters of nation-states as well. France is becoming less “French,” and the United States is becoming less “white” and Protestant.

As one example, the United States — a country that was never entirely a nation since its population has always been comprised of people from various ethnic groups — is slowing being ripped apart on religious, ethnic, and political lines. People who are conservative and Christian get their news from Fox News and other right-wing outlets; liberals and others watch MSNBC and read The New York Times. Two collective groups of people are creating entirely different mindsets and worldviews based on the specific media each group consumes. Texans denigrate Bostonians as intellectual, liberal elitists; Bostonians view Texans as gun-touting, evolution-denying extremists. Is such a cultural situation tenable? If Coming Anarchy is correct about Europe, then the United States might follow in the continent’s footsteps.

Update: A commenter, Jeff, asks a question that I should have answered earlier: “Clearly, you think this half-millennium old system is about to die, but what do you THINK about that?”

Well, I have several thoughts. The first is the present international order of large, complex nation-states is giving way to a globalized world consisting of hundreds of small, ethnic republics or regions. Think of the planet as becoming a gigantic, patchwork quilt.

On an idealistic level, this is something beneficial. People have a subconscious desire to live among those similar to them (cities, for example, self-segregate themselves into ethnic neighborhoods), and they want the right to choose to do so. Russia is a perfect example. The country is comprised of dozens of ethnic peoples essentially held together by force — first by the czars, and then by the communist dictatorship. When Russia breaks apart — and its demographic decline is a accurate precursor — the people in the resulting republics will be much happier, and life will be more free. The same holds true for the Basques in France and Spain as well as other peoples elsewhere. Liberal nation-states always champion the freedom of democracy enjoyed by their citizens — as long as some do not want to use that right to demand a country of their own.

So, in the end, such a devolution will be beneficial. But the path there is fraught with danger and instability. Nation-states, like people and corporations, are individual entities writ large that place a primary emphasis on self-preservation. The United States had a civil war when several states wanted to secede. Russia uses force to keep a death-grip on Chechnya while the far-flung eastern part is increasingly under the influence of China. The United Kingdom does not want Scotland or Wales to become independent from England even though no one can explain what it means to be “British” any longer. Modern-day Iran consists of several peoples who were united by the sword of the ancient Persian empire. Israelis, after more than sixty years of independence, are intensely divided and cannot reconcile their three competing desires to be a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state in all of so-called Greater Israel. (I would not be entirely surprised if the the county ends up dividing itself into a secular and religious republics in forthcoming decades — though this would eerily resemble biblical history repeating itself.) All of these countries are facing crises of identity, and many may not survive as they currently exist.

A globalized order consisting of a patchwork quilt of ethnic enclaves may lead to greater peace and prosperity — why, after all, would Wales go to war with England to conquer territory that was not Welsh — but the path to that end will be very unstable as complex nation-states fight a doomed battle to save themselves.

Building on one of my favorite subjects, devolution, the decline of the state and the proliferation of microstates, I’ve put together a map of the future of Europe in 2020. It is purely speculative and in no way a firm prediction, but rather a sketch of the possibilities and list of the most likely cases. It is by no means exhaustive and you’ll notice seemingly obvious states such as Wales, Sicily, Crete and others are not listed. This is in part because I will argue that two local conditions are necessary for a viable movement and successful independence.

Live Sports

Rick Reilly posts the top ten sporting events that people should see in person. I’ve seen the Boston Red Sox play at Fenway Park (though not against the New York Yankees) during the nine years that I lived in Boston, and I went to Wimbledon when I lived in London in 2001. But I have yet to see the rest.

Still, I am skeptical of some of his choices. Golf, at least to me, is boring enough on television. Is it any better live? And how can Reilly not include the World Cup? International soccer is essentially warfare by other means.

Inhuman Resources

Jack Welch offers some cutting thoughts on HR departments:

In the wide-ranging Q-and-A with Claire Shipman, Welch took HR professionals to task for playing the victim a little too often. “I’ve seen too many organizations where HR whines about their role,” Welch said.

If you want senior management to take you seriously, he said, “get out of the picnic, birthday card, and insurance forms business.”

Instead, he told the crowd, their focus should be on building trust throughout the company and developing recruitment and retention strategies that attract the best workers in good times and bad. “Your job is to raise the quality of the team.”

I have frequently been very underwhelmed by the personnel human-resources departments at many companies — large and small — for whom I have worked in the United States and Israel. Too many of them have been essentially useless, if not downright harmful.

It starts, perhaps logically, with the hiring function. One Massachusetts hospital fired me from my marketing management position on my second day because I had the audacity to ask a few pointed questions during the orientation rather than be a nice, little sponge like everyone else and absorb the cliche speeches and videos. (They hired a former journalist, for crying out loud.) “The hospital” had “determined” that my personality was not good match for the corporate culture. And don’t get me started on the farcical sexual-harassment video.

At one high-tech company in Tel Aviv, a person in HR took me and another new hire out to lunch. Officially, it was a getting-to-know-you thing, but I was sure the manager went back with a full report on our personalities and capabilities. The hiring interviews were enough pressure — HR should leave the schmooze-based analysis for my boss. They did not even know what I did on a day-to-day basis. HR managers usually cannot do what the employee of a given department does on a day-to-day basis, especially in fields like high-tech and finance.

But it goes beyond my personal experiences. I recently read an article (which I cannot find now) reporting that people were dumbing-down their resumes because many large corporations have changed their resume-filtering software to exclude former C-level employees because are overqualified. (In this economy, even erstwhile CEOs need a job!)

HR usually makes the first cull of potential job applicants, whether through computers or eyeballs. But they always stick ruthlessly to pointless checklists — no one, for example, without a college degree is worthy of an entry-level position — that may rob a department of someone who could be tailored into a great asset and resource. When a person looks at dozens of resumes every day, it is too easy to see the person and instead reduce every CV to a collection of yes-he-has or no-he-does-not-have checkmarks.

When I was the director of a sales department here in Israel, I went through every CV myself. I made the time to do it. The manager of a department knows exactly what he needs; HR does not.

But if HR should not play a significant role in hiring, what is left for them to do? Every HR person I have ever known has told me that they went into the field because they like working with people. But, in reality, their jobs seem to involve looking at pieces of paper, keeping abreast of labor law, and acting as enforcers of company codes. What fun.

I have always envisioned HR departments as being something similar to the ombudsmen that most major newspapers have. In journalism, the ombudsman represents the readers. He is appointed by the editor or publisher to a specific term of office, investigates complaints about stories (or whatever), and writes an impartial critique of the situations. Most importantly, he criticizes the newspaper — and even individual writers and editors — whenever he thinks it is justified.

Since labor unions are increasingly irrelevant, HR departments could transition to being the ones who represent the employees. If a manager treats an employee badly, HR could investigate in a neutral manner and make a ruling. Most importantly, HR could have the power to decide that the company or manager acted wrongly — even if making such a decision would go against the best interests of the company as a whole. The CEO or chairman of the board could appoint the vice president of HR to a specific term of office during which he could not be fired (except in special cases, like doing something illegal). Now that would inspire workplace morale! And HR managers would finally fulfill their dreams of working with people rather than pieces of paper.

I hate seeing HR managers as the police as much as anyone, but employees frequently have nowhere to turn when the boss slams any given door in their face. Perhaps a revolution in human-resources is needed.

West Bank Settlements

A reader sent me this link to a Boston Globe photo essay on Israeli settlements in the disputed West Bank. The two pictures I have posted above are the most moving.

The first is a group of Israelis in the settlement of Bat Ayin reacting to the news that an axe-wielding Palestinian militant went on a rampage there, killing an Israeli 13-year-old and wounding a 7-year-old boy before fleeing the area. The second is an Israeli policeman arresting a Palestinian for illegally building a water canal on his land near the Israeli settlement of Qiryat Arba’a in Hebron.

The more you study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more you realize that it might just be a בלגן (balagan) — the Hebrew word for “a complete mess.” I don’t see any realistic way that it can be solved right now.

For more coverage on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, read this, this, and this.

Female Rabbis

The Jerusalem Post reports on the increasing presence of female leaders in liberal st reams of Judaism:

Jewish leadership is beginning to show a softer, more feminine face, with women flocking to the pulpit and much of the Jewish world becoming more comfortable with the notion of female religious leaders.

The recent ordination of Alyssa Stanton as the first black female rabbi [pictured above] was indicative of the growing number and diversity of female rabbis worldwide…

“In our American program we have 33 entering students, and 50 percent are women. In our Israeli program, we take much fewer students. Now, there are three men and two women, and we may accept another woman,” said Kelman.

Naama Kelman, the newly appointed dean of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, is the first woman to be appointed to this position in Israel. She was also the first woman to be ordained in Israel. The number of women and men entering the reform seminaries in the United States is now equal, but in past years there have been slightly more female students, Kelman said.

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RCC) noted that the numbers of rabbinical graduates in the Reconstructionist school are approximately equal: 170 men, 161 women. In recent entering classes, though, the number of women exceeds the number of men, approximately 2 to 1.

Leaving aside the issues in traditional Jewish law in regards to female rabbis, I am skeptical about whether the increasing presence of women in leadership roles in the Jewish world will be beneficial for the community as a whole.

First of all, more and more men becoming disillusioned with a Jewish community that is increasingly feminized and alien to them. As I wrote in this post on this article:

Men are disengaging from Jewish public life. It is a real phenomenon, affecting our rabbis, cantors, and educators; our teenage males. and the adult men of our community. While there are several complicated causes, one that cannot be denied is the fact that the temple culture in many locations is increasingly seen by many men as out of balance. By that, I mean it favors the needs and interests of women to such an extent that it can be perceived as ignoring men’s spiritual needs and interests… (emphasis added)

I personally observed this when I lived in Boston and attended a Reform synagogue there:

Although I only attended my Boston synagogue for two years, I can see, in retrospect, what the study meant. Every Sukkot, the synagogue’s group for twentysomethings and thirtysomethings would organize an event named “Salsa Under the Sukkah.” I was never interested in attending because, like most straight, white, young men, I have little desire to dance. I would guess that the only men who wanted to go were: gay, Latin, or badgered into attending by their wives or girlfriends. Men, in general, have no interest in dancing. But since it was largely organized by women, they instinctively decided to have an event that interested women. And I’m sure more guys were turned off. I would have loved to have seen an event like a softball or tennis league.

There were other issues as well. As a Reform synagogue, the congregation focused much of its time on liberal politics and social activism. These are two aspects that appeal mainly to women. As much as I support the right of gay people to marry — the law cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, just like it cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity — I don’t want to deal with politics in my religious life. There is no religious duty to advocate for gay marriage; I would have preferred to learn Torah. I would bet that other men felt the same way. (Since men are typically more conservative than women, I presume that many generally opposed such actions altogether)…

I was most surprised by the female-centric orientation of the synagogue during the High Holy Days services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur over the past two years. Two readers — usually teenagers — are brought up to chant a Torah portion twice during each holiday. Out of the eight people I heard chant the Torah in these two years, six or seven of the selected participants were girls. I would have expected it to be divided in half. I don’t know whether the increased presence of girls was intentional or whether only girls volunteered in the first place, but the implicit message in such a service — intentional or not — was that girls were favored over boys. Of course, this is another reason that men may have been turned off.

As this other article notes, liberal Judaism does indeed have “a boy problem.” Men and women are fundamentally different on so many levels — physical and emotional ones as well as regarding their general interests — that the organizational behaviors of most groups will always tend to favor one or the other. (For example, corporations are more “male” while non-profit organizations are more “female.” Think about it.) Liberal Judaism seems to have made a collective decision to focus more on women without realizing that doing so would hurt men.

It is a self-perpetuating cycle. The more that women become rabbis and lay leaders and subconsciously feminize Judaism, the more that men will vote with their feet and leave. When rabbinical schools and synagogues recruit students and lay leaders, they have little choice but to select women because few men are around. And the circle continues.

Perhaps more importantly, I worry that women who became rabbis will face situations like this:

“What do you want to do with your degree in religion?” [my date] asks.

“Become a rabbi,” I say.

If I like him, or think that I might, I’ll do whatever it takes not to tell him that.

“Oh,” he says, and goes quiet. He’s now picturing the rabbi at his home synagogue, comparing me to the bald guy with a gut who dresses up as a baseball player every Purim. “That’s intense,” he says. The R-bomb, it’s fail proof. It always shuts them up…

As I wrote earlier, the author is a victim of her own success: “Men do not want to date women who are significantly more intelligent, richer, or successful than them. Men have an evolutionary impulse to want to be the one who provides and protects. We like this role; it makes us happy.”

I do not have any fundamental or theological issues with women becoming rabbis, but just because they can does not mean that they should. At least not when so many men are leaving Judaism as a result.

Guilty Bystanders

This incident shakes my faith in humanity:

A 26-year-old convenience store clerk was shot and killed in broad daylight in Gary, Ind., and police say witnesses stood by and did nothing…

But Titus says what’s even more senseless [than the murder] is the apparent inaction of bystanders standing near the front door almost the whole time.

Police say there were several customers walking around the store after the crime. But only one called 911 for help.

When asked what he finds most disturbing about the surveillance footage, Titus said, “The fact that people went in and out of the store and didn’t call police. There is a man laying there. Nobody thinks to dial 911 or check to see if he’s OK or anything.”

I was mugged twice when I lived in Boston, and no one did anything each time. Something like this would never happen in Israel.

Female Unhappiness

Ross Douthat comments on a recent study that many women will denounce angrily while secretly agreeing with it:

…all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness. In the 1960s, when Betty Friedan diagnosed her fellow wives and daughters as the victims of “the problem with no name,” American women reported themselves happier, on average, than did men. Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women.

The longer that I lived in the Western world, the more I noticed that an increasing number of twenty-something and thirty-something women — at least on the urban, East Coast — who were angry and bitter. I had a long day at work, so I’ll refer to several posts that I have written on this topic.

Women go against their natural impulses by intentionally delaying marriage and motherhood into their thirties and forties. They know — but will not admit — that feminism sold them a false bill of goods. After they finally won their entry into the workforce, they realized that no one really likes to sit at a cubicle all day in a high-pressure environment that makes women more aggressive, manly, and less attractive to the opposite sex. They understand that the mass entry of women into the job market lowered real salaries — an increase in the supply of labor with the same level of demand — and turned children into latch-key kids. More women are buying small dogs and carrying for fake babies since they waited too long to have children and men can still date twenty-something girls when they are in their thirties or forties. Women are also catching on to the fact that many men are increasingly suspicious of marriage in a world of no-fault divorce proceedings that routinely strips children from fathers and gives their money to their ex-wives.

As I wrote in a lengthy essay, modern society has essentially devolved as a result of the unintended consequences of feminism in the dating scene. As women became more successful, they became more picky. (In general, women want to date “up.”) They decided to focus on their careers and educations while remaining sure that they could eventually marry quickly after a given age. Well, the unpleasant reality is that men become more attractive with age while women do not. As game theory dictates, the women who win at the marriage auction are those who find a good guy and marry early. Those who wait will see only the leftovers and exclaim: “There are no good men left!”

Why are modern, single, feminist women so unhappy? Let’s break it down by decade:

Twenties — Women have an intense, biological desire to settle down, get married, and have children while they are in their prime. But society tells them to get master’s degrees and have fulfilling careers while getting drunk every night, having casual sex with immature barbarians, and destroying their souls. So they are conflicted on physical, mental, and spiritual levels.

Thirties — Women have advanced degrees, educations, and resumes, but they are rapidly losing their looks. At the same time, men in their thirties — whose market value in the dating world has only increased as a result of wealth and looks — can routinely have casual sex with the women who are now in their twenties. The thirty-something women find it harder to meet someone who fulfills their unreasonable expectations.

Forties — Get a small dog or a fake baby, a tub of ice cream, and rent “Thelma & Louise.”

Now, I expect that some readers will think that I am being misogynistic. Far from it. I am reaching logical conclusions from what I observed in the United States in the context of evolutionary psychology and economics. When society messes with nature, bad things result.

In the study cited by Douthat, men are reportedly happier then they were decades ago. It is easy to understand why. In today’s post-feminist world, men have beer, video games, sports, sex with no strings attached, and free, Internet pornography. Men are simple creatures — what more could they possibly think that they need?

I write this post with extreme sadness at the state of Western society. I want men and women to marry, have children, and be truly happy. (I personally consider it a holy, spiritual action.) But feminism, albeit unintentionally, harmed the relations between the genders that had worked for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I am not sure it will ever be repaired.

My earlier essay: The Battle of the Sexes

Journalism Versus Marketing

SEOmoz offers some humorous jokes through which people can know whether their writings are influenced by the Internet. The comments are amusing, but I wanted to address one related conflict that I have found between my prior career as a journalist and my current one as an Internet marketer.

I have written this blog since 2006, when I was a newspaper editor and publisher in Boston. By using various Internet utilities, I have always known the common search terms, links, and keywords through which people have found this blog. But, after I know this information, I have a conflict over whether to use it.

For example, here are the top-three search terms through which people have found my blog since I started writing three years ago:

holocaust — 53,261 visitors

universe — 22,187 visitors

dollar — 20,108 visitors

If I merely wanted to increase my traffic (in pursuit of advertising or fame), then I would write more posts about the relevance of the Holocaust to today, the science the Big Bang versus the creation of the universe in the Bible, and the future of the dollar in relation to today’s financial crisis. But the journalist in me, of course, might rather want to write about other subjects that are timely or about which I am passionate. The subjects that are popular are not always the ones that are desirable.

Traditional media outlets have always faced a similar dilemma. I cannot remember any specific data or a source because it was years ago, but I heard this story from a journalism professor back in college at Boston University: Whenever the Boston Herald, the major tabloid in the city, would publish a picture of Ted Williams on its front page, the newspaper would sell something like tens of thousands of more copies. So the editor, of course, would face a dilemma: publish a picture of Williams even if it was not timely (and please his boss, the publisher, by selling more papers) or put something else on the front page the was more relevant and timely to the news of the day even though fewer copies would be sold.

SEOmoz was making a joke in its post, but the issue raised by the writer is actually quite serious. When bloggers and other Web 2.0 writers decide what content to publish and what headlines to put on their posts, they must choose whether to discuss interesting topics and use “punny” headlines (as newspapers have always done) or publish content that draws as many readers as possible and use simple headlines consisting solely of popular keywords that attract search engines.

In more ways than one, new media providers are facing the same delimmas faced by traditional outlets. It is a choice between authenticity or popularity, between journalism and marketing. It will be interesting to see which route the Web 2.0 world takes.

A New Dark Age?

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Parag Khanna predicts a return to a “neomedieval” world in the near future:

Many see the global economic crisis as proof that we live in one world. But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries…

The fragmentation of societies from within is clear: From Bogotá to Bangalore, gated communities with private security are on the rise. This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries…

The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. Even during this global financial crisis, multinational corporations heavily populate the list of the world’s largest economic entities; the commercial diplomacy of emerging-market firms such as China’s Haier and Mexico’s Cemex has already turned North-South relations inside out faster than the nonaligned movement ever did.

When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Europe fell into anarchy. The vast apparatus of a global, bureaucratic order disappeared. Faced with invading barbarians from various Germanic tribes to the Mongols from Asia over decades and centuries, early Europeans were desperate for order, security, and even food. As a result, people throughout the continent clung to local strongmen for assistance. The strongmen were the forerunners of nobles and kings, and the lowly classes became the peasants and serfs.

The causes are different, but the results might become eerily similar today more quickly than people realize. As I wrote in a prior post, the nation-state is losing its foothold as the basis of international relations:

Nation-states, which Stratfor rightly defines as governments that rule a piece of land in which people of a common ethnicity live, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The United States, a state that is increasingly not a nation (if it ever was), is facing an influx of immigrants from non-European countries — namely, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. For years, western Europe has attempted to absorb immigrants from eastern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. These governments have encouraged immigration out of economic necessity and as a solution to labor shortages, but one consequence — whether positive or negative — is that the ethnic compositions of these countries are changing…

France is becoming less ethnically French. England is becoming less ethnically English. The United States is becoming less ethnically “white” and religiously Christian. As I have also noticed in Egypt and Israel, everyone in the world is increasingly moving around for work, higher education, and personal reasons. The world is now less of a collection of nation-states — individual nations of people living under the jurisdiction of a sovereign, state governments — than a patchwork quilt of nations scattered throughout the globe that are under the jurisdiction of the government under which they happen to live. States may continue to exist, but nation-states may be slowly disappearing.

One of the first things that people learn in business school is the reality of segmentation-based marketing — targeting specific groups of people with different marketing strategies based on their personal demographics — because a mass audience no longer exists. (This is also a reason that major, urban newspapers that target a general audience are suffering immensely.)

If a mass audience — or population — no longer exists, then it is increasingly hard for a unified nation to exist as well. From the United States to Israel, for example, people are living a localized existence that is increasingly separated from people in other parts of the country. Despite the overemphasis on so-called Red States and Blue States in the United States during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the fact remains that people who live in Boston, as I did, have increasingly less in common with people from the small-town Bible Belt. In just one, small, cultural example, Bostonians shop at Whole Foods while rural Midwesterners go to Wal-Mart.

In Israel, a comparatively small place, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv seem like two entirely-different countries. Jerusalem is extremely traditional and religious (there are several bus lines that segregate men and women) and conservative while Tel Aviv is cosmopolitan and modern. The one-hour bus ride sometimes seems like it should require a stop at passport control. Fundamentalism is increasing throughout the world’s major religions, and Israel is no exception. This is another fact that might prove Khanna’s point — religion, after all, was a dominant force in medieval Europe.

But the possible future of international relations involves more than the breakdown of complex countries — including, perhaps, Russia, China, and Pakistan as well — into localized worlds. The Internet has combined hyperlocalism with hyperindividualism. In an age of Web-based social networking, people can choose to befriend anyone they wish from anywhere in the world. Bob Smith in Boston might find that he has more in common with Sivan Goldsmith in Tel Aviv than his own neighbors. An individual’s social network depends less and less on geography, thereby weaking the bond of a unified nation further. As Khanna notes, individuals are wielding an increasing amount of power. After all, a group of cave-dwellers in Afghanistan provoked the most-powerful country in the world to wage war from Iraq to Indonesia.

The early Middle Ages became a hyperlocalized world out of a necessity for security. If a neomedieval world comes to pass, it will be a result of personal choice and technology this time. While the world is becoming more globalized, it is becoming more localized and individualized at the same time. The middle ground — nation-states — will be lost. The globalized world will likely be populated and increasingly influenced by localities, corporations, and individuals.

Liberal Judaism

RISHON LEZION, Israel — The days of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism might be numbered as a result of demographics and education:

The Reform and Conservative Movements are disappearing, Yeshiva University Chancellor Rabbi Norman Lamm said over the weekend.

“With a heavy heart we will soon say kaddish on the Reform and Conservative Movements,” said Lamm, head of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.

“The Conservatives are in a mood of despondency and pessimism. They are closing schools and in general shrinking,” he said.

“The Reform Movement may show a rise, because if you add goyim to Jews then you will do OK,” added Lamm, referring to the Reform Movement’s policy, starting in 1983, of recognizing patrilineal descent.

The monopoly of Orthodoxy is one the aspects of Israeli culture that is difficult to accept for many American Jews here. Nearly everyone is either “religious” (meaning Orthodox) or “secular” (meaning not observant at all). In comparison to the United States, where there are streams including Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanist, religious life in Israel is extremely polarized (just like everything in the Middle East).

At first, this religious reality is difficult to accept, but I have noticed several benefits. Even secular Israelis know a great deal about Jewish religion because they live their day-to-day lives in a Jewish country. People take pride in their Judaism, at least ethnically if not religiously as well.

When I attended a Reform synagoge in Boston, I noticed that few people knew the difference between the Mishnah and the Gamara, spoke more than a few words of Hebrew, or knew anything about Lag B’Omer, the holiday that begins at sundown tonight. Religious life involved pretty much attending synagogue on Friday evening, and that was all. My synagogue, to its credit, started Torah study sessions for people in their twenties and thirties, but there is only so much that a person can learn in a hour twice a month. Moreover, I noticed that liberal Jews were much more likely to date and marry non-Jews, meaning that their children and grandchildren, truth be told, will likely have a conflicted identity even if they will be Jews at all.

As I have written in several posts, the world is experiencing an upsurge in the fundamentalist wings of all the major religions. This is both positive (people are learning more about their beliefs) and negative (the conflict with extremist Islam). As far as Orthodox Judaism, I see nothing inherently bad with its increase in popularity. In comparison to fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, Orthodox Jews make no attempt to influence or convert non-Jews throughout the world. They do not force their beliefs on their surrounding societies. If Rabbi Lamm is correct, a decline in liberal Judaism might just help Jews reclaim and remember who they are.

Hate-Crime Laws

A U.S. state has become the first to provide special protections to homeless people:

Maryland became the first state in the nation to extend hate-crimes protection to homeless people under a bill signed Thursday by Gov. Martin O’Malley.

The bill adds homelessness to the protected categories under Maryland’s hate-crimes law, which allows prosecutors to seek tougher penalties for those who target people because of factors such as race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation.

Between 1999 and 2007, there were 774 violent attacks on homeless people in the United States, and 217 people died as a result, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

As the former editor and executive director of Spare Change News, a non-profit newspaper in Boston, it might be surprising to read this: I oppose hate-crime laws in general, even against homelessness. Hate-crime laws dehumanize the groups they are supposed to protect and make them seem inherently more vulnerable and weak.

Moreover, the statutes make one murder seem less wrong than another just because of the identity of the victim. The death of any human being is the death of a human being.

Immigration and Assimilation

A divide in the conservative world raises some interesting philosophical and political questions:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States…

But in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right — including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson’s fellow travelers…

Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Johnson’s disgust with the terrorism-focused conservative blogosphere has had a traumatic effect on a dogged and dogmatic community of bloggers and scholars. When Johnson began blogging about Islam and terrorism after 9/11, he inspired untold other supporters of an aggressive war on terror to start their own Websites, link up, and push back against “Dhimmitude” — organizations and foreign policy decision makers that were “soft” on terrorism. Now, some of his followers have started blogs that track Johnson’s “madness,” while a video that portrays Johnson as Adolf Hitler going mad in his bunker makes the rounds.

Many conservatives — most famously, Mark Steyn — have long argued that Europe is becoming increasingly Islamic due to immigration from Muslim countries, low birthrates among native Europeans, and high birthrates among the new arrivals.

My point here is not to argue whether this is correct. I have not lived in Europe for years, so I have no first-hand observations. (Steyn’s anecdotes and demographic data are convincing, but a recent report may indicate that native Europeans are now having more children while European Muslims are having fewer, seemingly as a result of assimilation.)

But many on the right, justifiably or not, still believe in their thesis of a forthcoming Eurabia. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that they are correct. Now, two questions arise: 1.) Is a Europe comprised of a majority of Muslims a bad thing? and 2.) If so, what is the proper response?

The idea of the nation-state — the cornerstone of international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 — is based on two ideas: the nation and the state. The nation refers to a population of people based on common ethnicity (such as the Franks in France and the Jews in Israel). The state refers to a government that has the sole right — known as sovereignty — to rule within its borders. When these two terms are combined, what results are the sovereign nation-states of countries like France and Israel. (Interestingly enough, the United States is a state but not a nation since it has historically been comprised of various ethnic groups as a result of immigration.)

The nation-state made practical sense for hundreds of years. Following the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, the idea that each country should be left alone to determine, among other things, its religious policy has likely saved many lives. Moreover, people of a common ethnicity have tended to live among themselves since the dawn of humanity. The nation-state was a common-sense method to incorporate these two principles.

But the core questions are: Is the idea of a nation-state inherently better than any other conceivable system? Is it worth fighting to preserve? Do peoples, through their governments, have the right to enforce some degree of a homogeneous society?

Yes. Despite what well-meaning idealists believe, people tend to want to live among their own. Most neighborhoods in cities are self-segregating. In Boston, for example, Brookline is the Jewish neighborhood, the North End is the Italian neighborhood, and Southie is the Irish neighborhood. I am sure that the same is true for all major American cities. When I graduated from Boston University, I ended up moving to Brookline because that was where I felt comfortable: my synagogue was there, and my favorite Jewish deli was there. And so on.

When most places become ethnically diverse, there is an increased likelihood of tension and conflict. It could be racism, it could be anger over the public benefits that the poorer community receives, or it could be the service jobs that the immigrants are likely to receive. When I lived in East Boston, residents of the formerly Irish and Italian neighborhood would frequently grumble about the increase in Hispanic and Latin American immigrants in the neighborhood, as well as about the increase in drug use, violent crime, and prostitution that they associated, fairly or not, with them. As a recent study by noted sociologist Robert Putnam revealed, an increase in diversity generally leads to a decrease in the closeness of a civil society. (The most notorious example is Africa, a continent where the national boundries of many countries were foolishly drawn by European colonial powers to include competing tribes and ethnic groups. The result, of course, has been endless civil war and conflict.)

Societies formed of people of a common ethnicity make sense. Governments, in a sense, have always known this, and they have always tried to preserve their characters as a result. Israel grants automatic citizenship to anyone who is at least one-quarter Jewish by ethnicity. In the heyday of the 1990s economic boom, Ireland offered an easy path to citizenship for anyone who was at least one-quarter Irish and wanted to move there. Many European countries have laws favoring immigrants who share the destination country’s ethnicities.

Of course, the United States is an exception, of sorts. It is the one country in which immigrants, for the most part, have helped the country grow and prosper. But this is because the United States is the only country on the planet that never intended to be comprised of a single ethnicity. Anyone can assimilate because the country was founded on ideas, not on a national peoplehood. Problems, like my East Boston example, arise only when a significant immigrant community arrives and does not assimilate into the greater culture. But in nation-states, an increase in diversity inherently creates problems. (This is why the idea among many left-wing Israelis to create a binational state — in which all Jews and Arabs from the Gaza Strip to Israel proper to the West Bank have a single vote — would certainly lead to civil war.)

However, the problem arises when one must determine how to preserve a society that is ethnically homogenous, and this is the debate that is occuring between center-right and far-right conservatives who see the problems that may occur in a Europe that is increasingly Muslim. Those on the far-right seek to emulate neo-Nazi parties by expelling Muslims (and probably Arabs as well) from European countries. This, of course, is a horrendous idea.

But those on the center-right have few solutions of their own. Commentators like Steyn seemingly have thrown in the European towel and wish to build a Fortress America to protect against the forthcoming Eurabia. But I would argue that there are other centrist solutions that Europe can take — namely, enforce the rule of law, take legal action against any potentially violent or treasonous behavior, and show that any intimidation by extreme Islamists will not be tolerated. In such an environment, those Muslims who are radical will likely leave Europe — or, if they are immigrants, be deported — and then the number of Muslims will decline, creating relative peace. In a globalized world, the labor force, through immigration, will always ebb and flow in every country, but that does not mean it needs to be a sociological problem.

Related: The Future of the Nation-State

Emasculated Men

Doug Barden correctly notes that men are taking their Jewish marbles and going home:

Men are disengaging from Jewish public life. It is a real phenomenon, affecting our rabbis, cantors, and educators; our teenage males. and the adult men of our community. While there are several complicated causes, one that cannot be denied is the fact that the temple culture in many locations is increasingly seen by many men as out of balance. By that, I mean it favors the needs and interests of women to such an extent that it can be perceived as ignoring men’s spiritual needs and interests…

There is no question that the Reform Movement has placed a legitimate emphasis on egalitarianism. It has responded—appropriately—to previously underserved female membership in our community. However, for too long the increasing absence of men actively participating in temple life has been obscured for various reasons, and it’s time to acknowledge that there has also been a profound misreading of feminist ideology confusing gender stratification with gender differentiation.

I wrote most of my thoughts in a prior post on my experience at a Reform synagogue in Boston, so I will address the counterpoint raised in this article in the Forward newspaper:

Women have maintained their involvement in a Judaism dominated for centuries by men, but the minute women get a toehold in leadership, men pick up and leave? Pollack, the boys’ development researcher heading up Moving Traditions’ major new initiative, refutes the inherent sexism of this argument, insisting that women’s leadership is not responsible for boys’ retreat from Jewish life.

“Boys haven’t found a way to” adapt to the sharing of power with girls and women in Judaism, he argued, “because men haven’t found a way to change.” If Jewish men, young or old, are turned off by women’s leadership, then our commitment to justice requires that we call this what it is — sexism — and work to change the attitude instead of accommodating it.

Men and women are different. Men — or at least those who are so-called alpha males — have an innate, subconscious desire to take command and lead. Men want to be successful and obtain resources because evolutionary psychology taught them to become providers for their wives and families. Moreover, women are naturally impressed by men who do this well. Men want to be leaders.

So, when women began assuming more and more leadership roles, men became increasingly uneasy. When women obtained a majority of them, they began to bolt for the door. There was no longer a way for men to do what they naturally desire to do — lead and take charge. Men, in a sense, were emasculated by the community.

The author of the counterpoint quotes a counter-viewpoint that “men haven’t found a way to change,” but the fact remains that men cannot change in this regard. It is impossible to change something as innate in human nature as the gender roles created and ruled by evolutionary psychology for 100,000 years. Is this sexist? Of course. But it is also the truth.

Selling Shoes

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Al Bundy would be proud of Ben Stein:

Even after all these years, and after many other jobs, my mind often returns to my brief stint as a shoe salesman [after high school]. It was then, amid that tangle of sandals, sneakers, oxfords, high heels and brogans, that I discovered the ballet that is sales. Forever after, I have had a deep respect for selling and for salesmen and saleswomen.

Sales — when done right — is more than a job. It is an art. It is a high-wire act. It is, as Arthur Miller immortally said, being out there “on a smile and a shoe shine.” It is learning the product you are selling, learning it so well that you can describe it while doing a pirouette of smiles for the customer and talking about the latest football scores. It is knowing human nature so well that you can align the attributes of your product or service cleanly with the needs and wants of your customers.

At its best, selling is taking a doubt and turning it, jujitsu style, into a powerful push. Selling is making the customer feel better about spending money — or investing it — than he would have felt by keeping his wallet zipped.

When I grew up in southern Illinois, I worked in high school as a waiter in three restaurants, a clerk in a movie theater, and an after-school telemarketer. I worked twenty to thirty hours per week from when I was fifteen until I left to study journalism in college in Boston, where I also worked in a cafe part-time until I found my first newspaper internship. When I studied journalism and wrote for a magazine in London in the summer of 2001, I worked part-time as a bartender as well.

Now, here in Israel, I am a part-time MBA student and business consultant who is looking for a full-time job. Yet I have no shame in admitting that I have picked up shifts here and there working as a dishwasher for a local falafel stand and a local bar. Hard, honest work is always better than sitting and watching television (except while blogging, natch).

Everyone should work a low-level service job at least once in his life. Teenagers from families without a lot of money can use the cash, and children from rich families can use the worldly perspective. I have always known the value of a dollar (or shekel), and I have met many nice, interesting people outside the world of white-collar, cubical dwellers.