RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/HksD7TBkU

Police in the town of Monsey, where the attack occurred, say they apprehended the suspected attacker; Jewish organization tweets images of large emergency response near a house of a Hasidic rabbi, next door to a synagogue.

A man attacked a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home north of New York City late Saturday, stabbing and wounding at least five people with a large knife or a machete before fleeing in a vehicle, police said.

Although police said the extent of the injuries was unclear, sources told The New York Post that at least one victim was in a critical condition. Between 50 and 100 people were reportedly inside the house when the attack occurred.
According to the report in the Post, the attacker slashed five people inside the rabbi’s house and attempted to enter a local temple, but failed to gain access. The rabbi’s home is next door to the synagogue.

https://www.ynetnews.com
From parliaments to campuses, verbal and physical assaults on Jews are increasing, showing that ‘The Longest Hatred,’ deemed taboo for much of the second half of the 20th century, is once again being mainstreamed and normalized
The Simon Wiesenthal Center this week released its annual list of Top Ten Worst Anti-Semitic & Anti-Israel Incidents at a press conference in New York.
The index comes amid an upsurge in violent anti-Semitic attacks throughout the globe, including in the United States, long considered the foremost safe haven for Jews.
When factoring in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, a trend seemingly emerges: “The Longest Hatred” that for much of the second half of the 20th century was deemed taboo and therefore suppressed, is once again in the process of being mainstreamed and normalized.
“The bottom line is that it was a terrible year, by virtue of the fact that Jewish houses of worship have been targeted with murderous actions,” says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean, Director Global Social Action Agenda at the Wiesenthal Center.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-genius-iq.html

An eminent Lithuanian rabbi is annoyed that his yeshiva students devote their lunch breaks to playing soccer instead of discussing Torah. The students, intent on convincing their rav of the game’s beauty, invite him to watch a professional match. At halftime, they ask what he thinks.

“I have solved your problem,” the rabbi says.

“How?”

“Give one ball to each side, and they will have nothing to fight over.”

I have this (apocryphal) anecdote from Norman Lebrecht’s new book, “Genius & Anxiety,” an erudite and delightful study of the intellectual achievements and nerve-wracked lives of Jewish thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs between 1847 and 1947. Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

But the “Jews are smart” explanation obscures more than it illuminates. Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.

But as the story of the Lithuanian rabbi suggests, Jewish genius operates differently. It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.

Where do these habits of mind come from?

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-populist-decade/

History doesn’t follow a schedule. The events that define an era often happen before or after the onset of a new decade. It’s been said that the Sixties didn’t begin on January 1, 1960, but on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. They didn’t end on January 1, 1970, but on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president.

Keep this in mind as you look at retrospectives of the 2010s. The calendar decade may be drawing to a close, but the tendencies, ideas, movements, sentiments, and personalities associated with the past 10 years may not be quite ready to leave the stage. The underlying causes of national populism have not disappeared. Our times continue to be shaped by immigration, terrorism, and the cultural distance between voters without college degrees and the credentialed elites who govern them. It would be a mistake to follow the advice of the Bloomberg editor who wrote in a recent headline, “Populism Will Probably Just Go Away Soon, So Relax.” On the contrary: The populist epoch may be only beginning.

To say that the ’10s began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, doesn’t tell the whole story. The first shoots of national populism were visible by the time of the Wall Street panic. In 2005, the Dutch and French both voted against a proposed European Constitution in an expression of discontent with the EU. In 2006, massive rallies of immigrants to the United States, some waving the flags of their countries of origin, sparked a backlash against proposed immigration reform. That was also the year that Congress, against the wishes of the Bush administration, blocked a proposal to transfer management of six American ports to a company in Dubai. And on August 29, 2008, John McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his running mate.