Seems like the death of mainline protestantism in the US. You end up with the devote and the atheistic, and nothing in between.
This study betrays a complete lack of understanding - Hiloni (secular) is precisely atheists and agnostics, it's not a separate category of belief! I mean, I understand the confusion, since Judaism is both a religion and an ethnicity, so people will say they switched from being "Jewish Masorti" to "Jewish Hiloni", but they just mean they're still ethnically Jewish while becoming atheists. The graphic itself says "7% of all Israeli Jewish adults were raised Masorti and are now Hiloni", and the article says that "Fewer than 1% of Israelis who were raised Jewish say they belong to a different religion today, or to no religion at all". These are contradicting claims!
Haredi was the only one of those terms I had ever heard before.
Which type of Jewish person parks like an asshole? Because that's be main problem.
I don't recognize the words from the graphic. Which one is "goes to the JCC, but wears a long dress in the gym"?
And which one is "Does way too many sets on a weight machine without offering to let you work in"?
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Conclave is well made meh. The final vote was nicely done. The thing feels hollow, a film about faith that has no conception of what faith is. And, for the love of the Sistine Chapel, if the only black actor you can find is Zimbabwean, don't have him play a Nigerian.
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6: I like long shapeless dresses, as an apple Jew.
2: I think the logic is assailable but not nonsensical - that identifying as Jewish-at-all is inherently a partially religious identification without reference to beliefs, so they're distinguishing "I identify as non-religiously Jewish" from "I am not Jewish."
The article certainly doesn't explain that sufficiently if so tho.
That's a very interesting graphic and not what one would expect - I wonder how it would look if there was also a category for "born outside Israel"? It would be interesting to see how the secular category (and all the others) is made up of "born secular Jewish in Israel", "born in Israel as some other sort of Jewish and went secular later" and "immigrated to Israel".
Is Masorti - "traditional" - basically what the CofE would call the hatch, match and dispatch brigade? Going to church (synagogue) for major life events, liking the ritual, but that's about it?
It's also striking that there's healthy flow into and out of all the others, but the only way out of "Haredi" is straight to atheism. Barely anyone goes in from the other groups, and no one leaves to the other groups. That's quite cult-ish in a way.
11: No, that's just past me and therefore crazy.
There's an interesting subreddit called \ex-jew which is primarily ultra-orthodox raised young adults (mostly in the US, I think) trying to grapple with with their upbringing.
12.1: The second worst local Jewish person I know of did move to Israel.
Let's all list how we rank other commenters, subdivided by religion and ethnicity. Moby: well above the median... for a Catholic.
To be fair to me, the worst local Jewish person is bad in a way that involves being Jewish.
I didn't flood your fucking basement, Moby. That rock was gushing before I hit it.
the worst local Jewish person is bad in a way that involves being Jewish.
*Tomas de Torquemada has joined the chat*
Did he go start a "university" in Texas too?
I wondered if Megan Phelps-Roper was Jewish now, because I remember something about a Jewish guy on Twitter engaging with her and her getting married with someone else she met on Twitter. But it turns out those are two different guys on Twitter and she is now areligious. (And a professional Rowling defender.)
He was the best prime minister of New Zealand.
The interesting thing is here is the wide gulf between Judaism in Israel and Judaism in the US. In the US this kind of study would be comparing numbers of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstruction, and non-observant. In Israel, non-Orthodox synagogues pretty much don't exist.
23: The other thing is that in the US it's not uncommon for agnostic/atheistic Jews to go to synagogue at least a couple of times a year because that is how they express their cultural Judaism. That's much less common in Israel.
I wonder if the Hare Krishna Israelis I know consider themselves to still be Jewish. Of the American Hare Krishna I know, I'd say 30-40% still consider themselves Jewish simultaneously. As a completely separate category I wonder if there are any Hinjews who grew up in Israel or have moved there.
Not that's there's anything wrong with it. Some of my best friends bothered people in airports before the Supreme Court stopped them.
Is "deti" what Americans would call "modern orthodox"?
12.1: one key point there is 15% of Israel is Russian-speaking, and the vast majority of them are atheists. That's around 40% of the last category.
I think when I was a kid most fundamentalist Christian who deconverted became atheists (eg me), but that in the generation younger than me it's gotten a lot more common to stay Christian but find a gay-affirming church. Hence the rise of "deconstruction" as a term, kind of picking apart what parts you liked. But I don't think I've seen any kind of numbers on that.
12.2: my understanding is that Masorti is pretty close to conservative Judaism in the U.S., so pretty observant: Shabbat observed weekly, but not in a super hardcore way with all the prohibitions, kashrut but some individual variation on eating at restaurants and so on, kids have bar/bat mitzvahs. Not like the people who show up to shul for the high holidays, have a Passover seder, and that's pretty much it, which I think is more what you're imagining.
The best little-known Jewish holiday is Shavuot, where you eat cheesecake and stay up all night studying Torah (in some form or another). If you don't make it through the night, and definitely don't make it through the entire night studying Torah, and in fact maybe read some poetry or watch a vaguely relevant movie... well, how many other things did you do wrong this week? Exactly. With cheesecake this time.
I heard the Mennonites are just Amish people who got tired of the whole deal with the horses.
Ah wait, that's 15% of all Israelis, not Israeli Jews.
What's the holiday when you're supposed to drink until you can't tell the difference between Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders?
8. I really enjoyed Conclave. Beautifully shot, totally ridiculous, and so very fun. I could have happily watched Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci gossip and backstab for, like, ten more rounds of voting.
Here's a good article on ex-Soviet Jews. 80% are secular (though that goes down to 60% for second generation). It looks like that means around 14% of Israeli Jews are ex-Soviet secular, so around a third of all secular Jews. The assimilation to becoming more religious than their parents is interesting, I'd imagine marrying non-Soviet people is playing a big role there.
34: if I tell you it's Yom Kippur, will you do it? (Strictly speaking, I guess, it could be on the eve of Yom Kippur, so you wake up the next morning fully ready to atone.)
I don't think I would stay alive if I tried.
Both holidays have "pur" in the name, but you do not want to mix them up, especially if you only remember the no-water fast after you drank the drinks.
(I know you know this. I'm just riffing.)
I keep asking the same questions because I'm forgetful.
This topic is an excuse to boast about being the worst Jew ever. In the 30+ years I've lived in Columbus, I don't think I've ever been in a synagogue. And the one time I went to the Jewish Community Center it was for a talk by a Palestinean (Sayed Kashua).
The joke is that this doesn't make me a bad Jew at all. If I was a really bad Jew, I would take up the offer of my old college roommate to attend a service of his rabbi who practices Judaism with Jesus.
If you wanted to be really bad, you could try to destroy Columbia.
My Zen temple, like American Zen in general, is overwhelmingly Jewish and Catholic. The difference is that my co-religionists and I would call ourselves ex-Catholics, but the Jews are still Jews, and run the same gamut of observance to non- as in American life generally.
You're a group of Sunni away from Dune.
Is everyone consciously refraining from making an "Orange Julius" reference? Did I just ruin a joke?
Not a joke I had thought to make. You should have just made your own.
Some of my best friends bothered people in airports
I must talk to you about Lyndon LaRouche, sir. It's very important.
I was consciously refraining from a Jamba Jews reference, but I guess the horse is out of the barn now.
All the new stores are selling vapes, juice, or tea with little balls in it. None of it makes sense to me, unless, as someone told me, the vape stores are really selling weed as "Delta".
35: I trust that Lithgow reprises his role as Emilio Lizardo.
48/52: I can't tell if you all are elevating the OP title joke or just reprising it.
tea with little balls in it
Ethnic balls or religious balls?
I assume they come from pig gelding.
4: Hi, heebie!
12.2, 31.1: especially as self-identification and without more detail, Masorti can mean either of those.
That reminds me, before Freud came along "castration anxiety" referred to a gelder being nervous about being stepped on by the horse.
My peak bad Jewness was when I forgot it was Passover and had a bacon cheeseburger.
Speaking of Bad for the Jews, the Harvard statement in response to the lastest Trump bullshit threats (supposedly $9B funding cut, suck it Columbia) is pathetic. Basically "This would devastate our community, and maybe we deserve it."
61: I am enraged. I'm actually thinking of writing a letter to Harvard Magazine saying how ashamed I am.
|| I also found out that Tim's brother asked him when he was moving back to Canada. I have no idea where we would go if we had to leave this area, but I don't think the pharma jobs are in Canada. Tim has an MSc, not a PhD. I'm not sure that a European country would give him a work permit. What would I be able to do in Europe? And I don't think Tim would want to move that far away.
Apparently, some of the neighbors in his mother's apartment building also asked her why her son and daughter-in-law weren't leaving the US to move to Canada. That seems kind of nosy/pushy, and I bristle at it. I know his uncle said he never wanted to visit the US again, but that's different from assuming that we can just pick up and move.
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They do deserve it! Sucking up to power is Harvard's sole purpose! They should have been on this months ago!
This is the school that literally invented affirmative action just to keep the Jews out and the failsons in.
64: ok, but Princeton was way worse back then. I think they're kind of ok right now, actually. And I hate Princeton.
The FDA is being completely dismantled this morning. Former commissioner said it's dead. These are mainstream elite people.
I'm angry, it's not just the pandering, it's that it's stupid pandering. If you're going to pander, just give him a honorary degree and be done with it, caving on "antisemitism" doesn't actually do anything because he doesn't care about that.
FWIW, Cassidy found out yesterday she got into Duke.
65: What's happening at the FDA? My work is pharma-adjacent, but my newsfeeds aren't picking anything up yet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/trump-federal-layoffs-health-food.html
Thanks, tho I get no further than the headline and subhead, which I guess is enough. On the other hand, I did check my Times password, which is now old enough to rent a car.
unblocked link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/01/health-human-services-hhs-mass-layoffs-updates/82754402007/
57: Anonymizing by using their next-door neighbor's name, the first to open in my neighborhood is Ramirez Bubble Tea & Guatemalan Coffee. (There's now apparently also Michoacán ice cream and several sorts of elote. I'm game.)
But really commenting just to say AWL!! (Who has probably been commenting the whole time I haven't been keeping up and so I just didn't notice.)
71: Unblocked thanks!
And congrats to Cassidy!
69: The NIAID director (Fauci's replacement) was forced out. I don't think they laid her off. They just told her that she had to join the Indian Health Service which would entail relocating.
72: Thorn!!! It's nice to see you too! I've been popping in occasionally, maybe a bit more in the past few weeks.
I'm still not sure if my job is in danger because of what's happening at the FDA. We're budgeting as if I'll be laid off this year, just defensively. But that's been the case since the election.
Literally every single thing in my industry is built around federal regulation and specifically interaction with the FDA. Nobody has the tiniest idea what's going to happen.
A couple people at work are talking about opening foreign bank accounts just in case. Anyone know how it works with Switzerland? Are those a thing for people with normal amounts of money or is there like a $1M minimum for foreign account holders?
78: No idea, but by the same token I've started putting my extra investment contributions into non-US stocks only.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/swiss-bank-account.asp
The western hemisphere version appears to be Uruguay, but it's a highly dollarized economy.
(Most Swiss bank require a $1M minimum, but there are a few as low as half a million)
The Swiss Banking Act of 1934 made it criminal for Swiss banks to disclose the name of an account holder
I didn't know that factlet. More for refugees, or more for Nazi officials depositing looted pelf, I wonder? Probably both.
Or maybe more for the latter since, as I recall from Tooze, while Hitler wanted the Jews out, he also didn't want them taking their foreign exchange with them, which was a big self-obstacle for some time.
All is fair in love and war and banking.
77: And yet the consultants who email me daily aren't trying to give a training on that.
No one is offering me ketamine and a primer on racism in white professionals. Just how to use Excel more better and other bullshit.
What's the advantage of a swiss bank account? I feel terribly dumb asking. Like, I can imagine investing in European index funds instead of the American counterparts, but that's different. Is this so that if you have to suddenly move, your money is somewhere international? Or is this because we think that the American banks might break down? Or?
82: In practice, both. Various Holocaust restitution organizations broke Swiss secrecy, thanks to robust representation from the Clinton administration. US Treasury sanctions are extremely potent.
77: Our software helps research pharma companies ensure that their data (and auditable chains of data possession) are compliant with FDA standards and regulation. EMEA, too, but secondarily. We're a couple of steps removed from the trumpfuckery, but I don't think our higher-ups have even begun to wrap their heads around what an FDA blow-up could mean for us.
Several of our guys were at a trade conference week before last, and I'm glad they didn't run into the new-definition-of-work-in-the-US stuff that has snared some Germans and some UK people. We've got another six months or maybe a year heads over there again, by which time there's bound to be a different kind of craziness afoot.
78: Tim still has a Canadian bank account, but he lived there when he got it.
Tim said that at today's Town Hall leadership was saying that the US was only one market....
Some of my best friends are Americans, but I'm glad there are other markets.
87- Given the general fuckery they're pulling with border enforcement and tariffs, I wouldn't be surprised if they start messing with international transfers. So if there's a chance you want to move abroad and need to move rent and living expenses for a decent period it's best to already have an account in place and some savings stashed there. Why Swiss instead of any other country? That's probably a higher level of paranoia if they decide to try seizing people's accounts. Which seems crazy but so did deportations of innocent people to foreign labor camps.
Some things happened circa Obama that made it more annoying for US citizens to maintain foreign bank accounts. In theory the measures were supposed to crack down on tax evasion by the wealthy; in practice I think they just set up more hoops that the wealthy have means to jump through. Some European banks won't deal with US citizens because of FATCA reporting requirements, and you have to file additional tax forms for the benefit of whatever neural net running in the trunk of a Tesla is now handling such matters.
There's been some noise about gutting the FDIC. Maybe not a bad idea to see who has functioning deposit insurance outside the US.
For my retirement savings, I'm not seeing what I can do except hope that things will look ok financially if I'm still around in 20-25 years and I haven't been sanctioned for wrongthought. I'm probably not being imaginative enough with what I can do.
When I moved out of Canada, I withdrew the remaining funds from my Canadian account.* They handed me cash and seemed surprised that I wanted a receipt with an official record of the account being closed. They seemed to think the cash was sufficient to prove the account was closed.
* Less than $500 because I never had much in the first place and I'd shifted almost everything back to my US account by then.
In the US, of course, carrying significant amounts of cash without proof of where you got it means it's subject to seizure, so that might be a fairly common request. Although I think usually you get a cashiers check not cash when closing an account.
Tidbits from the world of international wire transfers:
*There's a bank on St. Helena that has 35 employees, and a branch office on Ascension.
*Various international financial bodies issue country risk ratings for wire transfers to administrative divisions that have no permanent population and no financial institutions
*Those same bodies make a distinction between the relative risk level of wiring funds within the US and between the US and its territories and possessions.
*If you wire money from a smaller US financial institution internationally, at a minimum there's 7 or 8 people actually reviewing the transaction on the US side, and very likely a similar number looking at it on the foreign side. The fees for domestic wires heavily subsidize the processing of international wires.
87/93: I think the key to painlessly depatriation of your money is to do it early and often. If I'm looking at your account history and I can see wire transfers for even small amounts to the same international account over the space of a couple of years, I'm going to be giving far less scrutiny to a large transfer versus seeing it come through going to a brand new destination.
98:
1. Bad countries -- you can wire money to North Korea, assuming it's not going to some entity on the OFAC list, but it's going to be referred to upper management right off the bat, and you better have an ironclad explanation.
2. Bad recipients -- people* on the OFAC list, of course, but also anyone that has negative news items or sounds suspicious.
3. Large or repeated amounts without an obvious explanation, or with an explanation that sounds fishy. That's quite often indicative of the disbursing party being the victim of a scam.
4. Basically anything else that seems out of character for the type of account and account holder. Goes to my point about frequency, the more you move money without any blowback, the easier it's going to be to move money in the future.
*Entities on the OFAC list include companies, individuals, government departments, non profit corporations, individual ships and a bunch of other stuff.
Thanks. I've never wired money in my life, so I suppose it would look funny.
We recently had a presentation, via videophone, from a nice young African American woman who worked in the DHS office that is responsible for enforcing the financial components of anti-human trafficking laws. I'll bet you anything her department is on the chopping block, if it hasn't already been doge-ified. Even if they just cut it in half, your talking about a group that is already massively understaffed for the tasks they are assigned. I don't know how much good that area actually does, but whatever they've been doing is going to be reduced to almost nothing.
I'm pretty sure many rich people want to be able to traffic in humans.
Well here's the thing about money laundering: you can launder money in all kinds of different ways, people are thinking up new tricks every day, but whatever sleight-of-hand you use -- cryptocurrencies, casino chips, layers of front companies -- all that money eventually ends up in the pockets of the same rich people. Doesn't matter if it's from the Triangle Trade or the Golden Triangle or what-have-you, the same people always win. All that changes is slight adjustments in who gets to use little bits of it while it travels upwards. The mediasphere would have you believe that great fortunes are won and lost, because that's exciting and sells Coca-Cola, but realistically, how many of the power elite ever lose their wealth? Whatever the little hypocrisies are, that seem so outrageous to people at our level, however they might change and shift the distribution of little slivers of the pie, the same pyramid is always there. So, eliminate the trade in illicit drugs tomorrow -- sure, some people in middle management are going to suffer a bit, and you could see a few strategic realignments here and there, but the same people will benefit from whatever new order of vice emerges.
FWIW, Cassidy found out yesterday she got into Duke.
she found the perfect way to rebel
Speaking of terrible Jews, I just got the monthly newsletter from the Rabbi of my kid's preschool. We were boycotting their afterschool program due to their execrable stance on Gaza but I was starting to waiver. Anyways, this newsletter reaffirmed that we'd made the right choice.
One of my son's best friends has a mom who was a conservative Jew from Pittsburgh and a dad who was Yemenite Haredi from Israel. They compromised on modern Orthodox. I get the sense from meeting the extended families at birthday parties that when the mom's parents wanted their daughter to like Israel they didn't mean marry a Haredi.
One of my son's other best friends has a mom raised ultra orthodox and a dad raised reformed. They compromised on not really being religious at all, except the mom was much more sanguine about having surprise twins (4 kids total) in NYC than someone raised more secular would be.
I was NOT too bloody sanguine about the mom who wants to finagle some way to get ahold of her twins' inheritance before they turn 18 next year. Especially since there was an indication that she was specifically bypassed as the custodian of the accounts because the dead grandparent didn't trust her. I suppose it was at least a change of pace from the usual situation where kids, caregivers and sometimes spouses are circling the client who is in hospice care, waiting impatiently to get their hands on the money. At least vultures have the grace to wait until you're actually carrion before they feast.
106.2: Probably not impressed with the Squirrel Hill dating pool.
107: People who steal from their kids are the worst.