Back to Basics

The circle of men whirls around the fire, hand in hand, hand catching hand, drawing in newcomers into the ring that races around and around in the growing darkness. A melody thumps through the speakers teetering unevenly with the bass, the sound is both old and new, a mix of the past and the present, like the participants in the dance, the traditional garments mixing with jeans and t-shirts until it is all a blur.

It is Lag BaOmer, an obscure holiday to most, even to those who come to the fires. The remnants of the Jewish Revolt against the might of the Roman Empire are remembered as days of deprivation in memory of the thousands of students dying in the war, until the thirty-third day of the Biblical Omer, part of the way between Passover and Shavuot, the day when Jerusalem was liberated.

Deprived of music for weeks, it rolls back in waves through speakers, from horns blown by children and a makeshift drum echoing an ancient celebration when men danced around fires and shot arrows into the air. The fires and bows have remained a part of Lag BaOmer, even when hardly anyone remembers the true reason for them.

The new Yom Yerushalayim, the day of the liberation of the city, is coming up soon,  but the old Yom Yerushalaim, came thousands of years ago and ten days before it on the calendar. Time is a wheel, and, like a circle, everything comes around again. Hands pulling on hands, years pulling on years, on and on like the orbits of planets and stars. The Divine Hand of G-d pulls us along, and we pull each other in the dance of life.

The circle speeds up, men racing faster and faster, the children left behind, as the flames sputter and night falls. The rebellion, although bravely fought, failed, and Jerusalem fell again, and then Betar. The joy of the celebration turned to ashes, but, even in the shadow of the empire, their spirit endured. The stories were changed a little, the rebellion encoded into a story of Rabbi Akiva, the pivotal scholarly figure in the war, and of his students who perished because they had not been able to get along with one another. The failure of unity had been the underlying reason for the Roman conquest and the Jewish defeats. It is the ancient lesson still unlearned that the circle of the dance teaches us.

Lag BaOmer is not the first Jewish story of physically and spiritual heroism to be encoded for fear of the enemy. There is much that we know, without knowing what it truly means, messages from the past, that exist only as echoes reminding us of our purpose. Few of those in the circle passing around the flame know what they are truly commemorating and yet the act is its own commemoration. Thousands of years later the echo of a fierce joy, the pride of a people emerging out of a momentary darkness in a burst of wild energy, is still here. Though the details are forgotten, the joy endures, the song is sung and the fire still burns.

In the darkness, there is nothing but the fire and the dark shapes racing around it, leaping with the guttering flames.

Every now and then the left discovers someone who tells them what they already think, but puts a glossier edge on it, and elevates him to the status of “Serious Thinker”. This is the office for which Peter Beinart has been briefly nominated.

The chief prerequisite for becoming a serious thinker on the left is to state what is obvious to the left without actually seriously considering its obviousness. This is what Peter Beinart delivers by providing an indulgence for leftist Israel bashing by telling the bashers that they aren’t bad Jews, it’s the Israelis who are bad Jews, bad Democrats and bad people all around.

As ideas go, this is about as original as old lefties reassuring each other that all the Kulaks had it coming or Bund members telling themselves that the Jews brought this on themselves. It’s the feeble mutterings of bad people trying to convince themselves that they are good people because their victims have it coming. And what’s a few more dead Jews in Tolouse, when Peter Beinart has a book deal.

There are two basic ways to resolve the “crisis” of liberal Zionism. One is to question liberalism, the other to question Zionism. The people most likely to screech “Israel Firster” at dinner parties and op-ed pieces have chosen their side. “Israel Firster” isn’t their denunciation of disloyalty to America, but disloyalty to progressive ideals. It’s an old charge delivered by Lenin and repeated by the left in its long crusade against Zionism.

Is there really a crisis of liberal Zionism? Beinart insists that there is a split between a conservative and liberal Zionism. It would be more accurate to say that there is a split within liberalism between the left and more traditional liberals. There is no crisis of liberal Zionism, there is a civil war among liberals, particularly Jewish liberal who are being edged out by the radical Anti-Jewish left.

There is no crisis of Liberal Zionism. There is a crisis of Jewish Leftist Islamism, that horrible chimeric beast which insists that cheerleading for the Muslim terrorists is somehow the essence of Jewish values, while supporting Israel is a betrayal of those values. That is the crisis which is being articulated by serious Jewish liberal thinkers. That is the crisis that Peter Beinart is covering up under a cloud of Israel bashing.

The left rejected the Jewish national project before the modern state was even created. The Beinarts can pretend that the latest round of their rejection is somehow premised on settlements and civil rights, but that’s a shameless lie. The left’s rejection was based on a constellation of reasons, some of them anti-Semitic, some anti-nationalist, but that rejection did not derive from Palestinian rights cooked up much later in Moscow by the machinery of the same Communist state which had  outlawed Zionism.

The liberal Zionists believed that Israel had a right to exist and defend itself, as they also believed that America had a right to exist and defend itself. They saw Islam and Communism as totalitarian ideologies. There was no contradiction between liberalism and Zionism, because they measured both Jews and Arab Muslims by the same standard, and chose between the two.

They did not agree with everything that Israel did, but they saw it in a larger context.

“I’m sick of the Israelis, the Americans—everybody talks too much! If you’re going to attack Iran, you attack it! You don’t talk about it endlessly, obnoxiously, ad nauseam-ly.” So said, Bernard Shapiro, founder and chairman of the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies and editor of The Maccabean Online, in a recent interview with Accuracy in Media. “This has been going on for how many years?,” added Shapiro. “You’d think the Israelis didn’t know that the Iranians were building this five years ago? Ten years ago? Every day they sit and talk about it and question it and endlessly debate it, the Iranians dig deeper, more Israeli soldiers are going to be killed, the more dangerous it will be to put it out of commission.”

Shapiro has been a fierce advocate for Israel for more than 50 years. He is the author and editor of the new book, The Battle for Eretz Yisrael: Jews, G-d, and Israel, 1992-2011, which documents Israel’s attempts to find and gain its identity. Shapiro is a native Texan, but he attended Berkeley in California where he obtained degrees in political science, communications, and public policy. He moved to Israel, where he lived for several years. I have known Bernard for nearly 50 years. He was a fixture at the House of Books in Houston—where I also grew up—and which his family owned and ran for many years.

In addition to his concerns about the current confrontation with Iran, Shapiro gave his views on Zionism, his beloved grandfather who was the inspiration for his love of Israel, the so-called “Oslo peace process,” the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. He also delved into media bias and double standards when it comes to Israel, and what he describes as Barack Obama’s “big, pro-Muslim offensive.” While his views at times are controversial, his knowledge of these subjects is unquestionably vast. He has brought together some of the great analysts and thinkers on these subjects, whose articles and reports appear regularly on Shapiro’s websites.

Below, in italics, are excerpts from the interview. You can listen to the entire interview or read the transcript here.

I used to be very upset about the Holocaust.  I used to have a certain amount of anger at God because He let the Jews die so easily during the Holocaust, and religious Jews didn’t seem to revolt against the Nazis.  But when I began to learn about Zionism and Israel, I saw a whole new dimension to my political and ideological beliefs.  I saw that Jews on their own soil—that means in the land of Israel—were much stronger than their arms and men.

My grandfather was Harry W. Freeman, and he lived between 1886 and 1959.  He died when I was eighteen years old, but he raised me like his son.  He taught me to write, to love poetry, to love music—but most of all, he had a certain passion for the Jewish people, and he was one of the founders of the Zionist movement in Houston.  Of course, he was in constant dispute with the German Jews who were in Houston and were anti-Zionist.  You know, the German Jews felt like, if Israel existed, then they would lose their status as Americans, they would be accused of a double loyalty.  Of course, my grandfather never believed that.  He was a rebel all his life.  He was born in the Russian-Poland area of Europe, he rebelled against the czar, and ended up being driven from Europe by the czar’s secret police back in 1907.  But it was fortunate for me, because he ended up in Texas, and I didn’t get killed during the Holocaust.  He was a strong believer in social justice, women’s rights, education for everyone.  He argued the case before the Supreme Court that got blacks the right to sit on Texas grand juries.  He was a remarkable person.

Tonight begins the celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim commemorating a historical incident of little relevance to the present day, involving a plot to exterminate the Jewish people. It is one of those holidays, that like most Jewish holidays, is inconvenient for liberal clergy because it involves violence and nationalism. And unlike Chanukah, on Purim, the Jews did not wait around to be massacred for a decade or two before they fought back, instead they carried out a preemptive strike.

During the winter, liberal pundits occasionally write horrified articles about the origins of Chanukah in a violent rebellion and a civil war between nationalists and internationalists, a handful of narrow-minded fanatics who wanted to keep their rituals and customs and were willing to die for it– and the enlightened elites in the capital who were on the board the imperial train and eager to reeducate the barbarians in the settlements out of their beliefs.

Purim summons up fewer of these articles as if the revisionists are too tired to even deal with the actual story and throw up their hands and make up their own. At the Huffington Post, a liberal clergywoman explains that the holiday which culminated with bloody street fighting and public executions actually teaches us to forgive other people and not to take revenge on them. Another suggests that the message of Purim is speaking out against prejudice. The head of the radical left wing group, Uri L’Tzedek, explains that Purim is really about promoting progressive taxation. I’ll spare you the transgender Purim which turns out to be a metaphor for coming out of the closet.

Jewish holidays often make a poor fit with liberal pieties. Three of them end with mass bloodshed, not with reconciliation commissions, suggesting that life is a zero sum game and that those who try to kill you, deserve what’s coming to them. There is nothing vague or ephemeral about those holidays, they mark historical events and the constant presence of death as a reality in the lives of men and nations. They testify to a G-d of history who is less concerned with feelings and tolerance than with justice and truth.

Some accuse Jews of being obsessed with the Holocaust. It would be more accurate to accuse of us being obsessed with Egyptian slavery, the Amalekite raids, the Philistines persecutions, the Babylonian holocaust, the Syrian-Greek repressions, the Roman holocausts and on and on for more pages of history than most would care to hear until we reach the present day.

Like old men we feel our history in our bones, we can chart our injuries, locate our frailties and then advance slowly but surely into the future. We have been doing this for a few thousand years, we may yet do it for a few thousand more. We are the turtle winning the race with those who would kill us, plodding on with fresh wounds that will scar over in time, while they sit down, gasp and cannot go on any longer.

The more liberal a Jew is, the less likely he is to celebrate the substance of his people’s holidays as they conflict with his worldview and virtues.

On the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Adar (a lunar calendar), Jews around the world will celebrate Purim. This year it begins at sunset on Wednesday, March 7 and concludes the following day. If I was an Iranian ayatollah, I would be worried.

Like Passover that celebrates the liberation of Jews, their exodus from Egypt in the days of the pharaoh, Purim celebrates a victory over the evil prime minister of the Persian empire ruled by King Ahasuerus. Haman was the archetype anti-Semite and, as the story of Esther relates, he was angered by the refusal of Mordechai, the leader of the Jews, to bow to him. Haman convinced the king to issue a decree for the extermination of all the Jews on 13 Adar.

At various points in Jewish history, leaders, prophets, and fate—some would call it God’s intervention—have occurred to protect Jews from those who hate them and seek their destruction. In the case of Purim, it happened that the king had ordered the death of his wife, Vashti, who had failed to follow his orders. He held a beauty contest to find a new bride and Esther was chosen. She soon found favor with him, but she had prudently not revealed that she was Jewish.

When the Jews faced extermination, however, she invited the king and Haman to join her for a feast where she revealed she was Jewish to save her people. Haman was hanged and Mordechai was appointed the prime minister in his stead. A new decree was issued, granting the Jews the right to defend themselves and, on the 13th of Adar, they dispatched many of their enemies. On the 14th, they rested and celebrated.

Among Jews is a joke, a lighthearted parody of grace before dining that goes “They tried to kill us. They didn’t. We won. Let’s eat.”

Given the events of this week as the President spoke to the convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), followed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the fate of Israel again hangs in the balance due to the repeated threats of annihilation by the Iranian regime and the prospect of their acquiring nuclear weapons. Both leaders stressed their opposition to this. Both stressed it was not just a threat to Israel, but to the entire world.

The ayatollahs would be wise to read the “Megillah”, the scroll of Esther, an integral part of the celebration of Purim. Reportedly, Netanyahu give Obama a copy when they met to discuss the Iranian threat.

Netanyahu’s speech stressed the right of the sovereign nation of Israel to defend itself and the President’s speech affirmed that Israel has the right to defend itself “by itself” while promising that “I have your back.”

In a Wall Street Journal commentary, “The ‘Jewish’ President”, columnist Bret Stephens cast great doubt over Barack Hussein Obama’s trustworthiness. “Here is a president who fought tooth-and-nail against the very sanctions on Iran for which he now seeks to reap political credit. He inherited from the Bush administration the security assistance to Israel he now advertises as proof of his ‘unprecedented’ commitment to the Jewish state.”

“His defense secretary has repeatedly cast doubt on the efficacy of a U.S.

For the eight days of Chanukah, it is common to see a candelabra with eight lights and one light above it, shining here and there, in the windows of stores and hallways, in people’s homes and even on intersections. Some are filled with oil, while others are topped with candles. Some tower high overhead and some are child sized. But all have eight lights and one above it, and all commemorate the same occasion.

Many nations have religious holidays and days of national liberation and independence, however rarely do the two come together quite in the way that Chanukah does. That is because Chanukah is a commemoration of national liberation from the rule of the Syrian-Greek empire ruled by Antiochus IV and a commemoration of the hand of divine influence in  inspiring and accomplishing that liberation.

The Jews throughout history have had a way of getting in the way of great empires. The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians,  Babylonians and Persians had all tried to enslave and destroy the Jewish people. A few thousand years ago after an Egyptian Pharaoh had first gotten the bright idea to clap chains on the Jewish refugees who had been serving as his faithful shepherds and send them off to build the pyramids, Antiochus IV, like so many kings before him, decided that ruling over his empire would be simpler and easier without the Jews in it.

Where Pharaoh had embarked on that process by throwing male Jewish babies into the Nile, to please one of his many gods while carrying out a genocide that was meant to destroy the Jewish people and integrate what was left into Egypt– Antiochus IV focused not on physical extermination, but cultural annihilation. The fundamental books of Jewish life, the scriptures that gave the Jewish people meaning and identity were destroyed.and banned. Some accepted the decree out of fear or even with enthusiasm. Others however rose up and resisted.

War came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in that same land and those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations. The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were the sons of the priesthood living in the backwaters of Israel, members of a nation that had not been independently ruled since the Babylonian hordes had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path. Since then a shifting mass of nations and rulers had sat on their thrones while the Jews had bowed their heads.

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. That no alien ruler would hold sway over the earth and water of their homeland, and none would be permitted to take away the legacy of their fathers and the books of their God. And while empires may and do laugh at such oaths, that band of brothers went on to destroy and wreak havoc against the might of an entire empire.

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of a Roman Idumean governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom was a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander’s empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

Israel was free only to the extent that the prowess of the Maccabees had made it too expensive to properly reconquer. Playing off the Syrian-Greeks against Rome allowed a temporary independence that ended when one of the players dropped out. Even as Rome’s power was growing, its headlong collapse into decadence led to heavy spending, corruption and barbarism.

The fall of the Roman Republic made the end of Israeli independence inevitable. The civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by empowering the Idumean murders of Jewish kings, which made the Jewish crowds weeping over his death in Rome all the more pathetic. After Caesar’s death, his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money by squeezing the populace. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome’s tax collector, Herod.

The instability of the Roman Empire made it perpetually hungry for money. Gold and silver were the lubricants of empire. The loyalty of armies, ministers and nations could be bought with enough of the stuff. Ruling meant collecting revenues. Whatever promises had been by the Senate to the Maccabees had ceased to matter long ago. A Rome where loyalty meant nothing between senators and aspirants to the throne, meant even less to the descendants of a small foreign kingdom.

Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, and when Jerusalem was liberated and stayed free for several years, it led to the holiday of Lag BaOmer, which when Rome finally crushed the revolt and the Jewish state, had to be disguised with symbolism and code words. There were more revolts and while Jerusalem was freed again, that freedom never endured until 1948 and 1967.

The real lesson of Chanukah is in the dreidel, that wooden or plastic spinning top, which lands to reveal a single letter. Freedom is a game. If you play well, then you might win it. Play badly and you lose everything.

The miracles of the war and of the oil that burned for eight days showed the Hand of G-d in these events, but as always it was the hands of men that the problem lay.

From David Solway, at PJ Media, “Resisting the Obvious“:

In much of my recent work — books and articles — I have addressed the issue of antisemitism in the contemporary world. That the beast is once again slouching, not only towards Bethlehem as in the Yeats poem, but towards Oslo, Paris, London, Stockholm, Malmo, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Washington, Toronto, Sydney, Caracas, Brussels, Amsterdam, and many other cities and regions around the globe, should come as no surprise. From biblical times to the present moment, in their own homeland or “scattered among the peoples,” Jews have never been safe. This is precisely what distinguishes the Jewish people from the rest of humanity, the specific nature of their “chosenness.” Wherever they may find themselves they are always at risk, whether actively or potentially, targeted for slander, exclusion, or extinction.

In developing this argument in such books as The Big Lie (2007) and Hear, O Israel! (2009), I have been condemned by a number of my critics, who accuse me of exaggeration, self-pity, or a sort of obsolescence, as if my gaze were fixed on the past at the expense of a more amenable or complex present. The fact that many of these detractors are themselves Jewish is only to be expected, for Jews have a long history of wilfully ignoring the signs and rejecting the self-evident. It is not only the JINOs (Jews in Name Only), the “non-Jewish Jews” flagged by Isaac Deutscher, or the apikorsim (“wicked sons” of Jewish public life) enamored of their enemies who are blind to the historical fatwa against them. It is also those whom I refer to as the “good Jews” and whom author and Sun Media columnist Ezra Levant calls the “official Jews” — that is, a significant number of Jewish communicants, as well as their secular counterparts — who refuse to read the writing on the wall even when it is in their own language, inscribed in block letters, and blazoned on every street corner.

These Jewish critics — I have in mind people like Richard Just, editor of The New Republic, éminence grise Clifford Orwin of the Hoover Institution, and Canadian poet Harold Heft, among others who share their inveterate myopia — assailed my analysis as, variously, hyper-inflated, unfair to Islam, scare-mongering, one-dimensional, and so on, as if I refused to align my perspective with the mores of the enlightened and democratic West.

But the enlightened and democratic West is no longer what it very intermittently was — or rather, it is certainly not what it presents itself as being. The legacy media, academia, the political class, and an alarming proportion of the public have made common cause with the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign of the growing Islamic hegemony in the realms of ideology and practice. This is especially true of Europe whose Jewish population is increasingly under threat.

by BurtPrelutsky

Nothing that I have ever written has provoked as huge a response as a piece I wrote some years ago called “The Jewish Grinch That Stole Christmas.”

In the article, which brought me roughly ten times as much e-mail as I’m accustomed to receiving, I suggested that my fellow secular Jews (aka atheists and agnostics) were at the forefront in waging war on the values and traditions of Christian Americans.

Predictably enough, the response from gentiles was uniformly positive. The feedback from Jews was somewhat less favorable, roughly split between those who admired my courage while questioning the legitimacy of my birth and those who accused me of being a turncoat. What I found most telling was that those who damned me didn’t, as a rule, refute what I had written; they were merely angry that a Jew had written the piece. They accused me of lending aid and comfort to bigots.

Because I make it a rule to write back to anyone who writes me, and because I assume that those who took the time and trouble to write were representative of many more who didn’t, I’d like to share some of my responses.

The term that nearly every Jew used in condemning me was “a self-hating anti-Semite.” A few accused me of not really being a Jew. That didn’t mean they thought I was a Catholic or a Baptist flying under false colors; no, they meant that my sole claim to being Jewish was that my ancestors were Jewish. The fact is they’re right.

As I have written on other occasions, I am not a religious man. I do not keep kosher. I do not help make up the morning minyan at the local synagogue. I do not even attend High Holiday services. So what? I’m Jewish because I say I’m Jewish. And because, quite frankly, with my face, who would believe me if I bothered to deny it? Furthermore, most Jews in America are not orthodox and can not read Hebrew or even speak Yiddish. For the most part, American Jews are circumcised, have a bar mitzvah, attend a reformed or conservative temple once or twice a year, frequent delis and Chinese restaurants, and vote the straight Democratic ticket.

Also, I say I’m Jewish because I don’t wish to offend the memory of my parents by denying their religion and the religion of their parents.

Finally, I say I’m Jewish because Hitler would have said I was Jewish, and then sent me off to Auschwitz, if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to have been born in America.

That was my whole point. I was lucky to have been born to a Jewish family in a Christian nation. It was, in the main, Christian soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps. Even if I’m not as Jewish as some of my critics would like, I still believe it behooves us to be openly grateful to our Christian neighbors — not because we fear future pogroms — but because it’s the decent thing to do.

One of the very few points for which I was specifically taken to task was for referring to America as a Christian nation.

Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University wrote a commentary in the December 2 issue of The Wall Street Journal lamenting the “American Jewry’s Data Problem.” It might as well be titled “Where’d all the Jews Go?”

According to Prof. Sarna, there hasn’t been a census of American Jews for a decade and the last one was not particularly accurate for a variety of reasons, but the most hilarious problem of all was the dilemma of determining who was a Jew. The 2001 survey divided respondents into three categories, “Jews”, “People of Jewish Background” and “non-Jews.”

Non-Jews? Or maybe some great Sanhedrin of rabbinic scholars got together, went through the responses to the census (the U.S. Census is not permitted to ask one’s religion, so this was an independent survey) and put them into three stacks.

“This one could be a Jew because his mother is Jewish, but his father is a Korean and, according to his response, he’s into Buddhism. Definitely not a Jew.”

“This one is married to a shicksa, (Christian) but raising their kids as Jews. Definitely a Jew.”

“This one says he hasn’t been inside a synagogue since his bar mitzvah, but gives to his local federation every year. Definitely a Jew.”

“This one converted, keeps kosher, and is a big shot in B’nai B’rith. How much more Jewish could he be? Definitely a Jew.”

As Prof. Sarna points out, right now there is no way to know where self-identified Jews live, who they are marrying, and whether they adhere to a particular Jewish religious movement such as Reform, Conservative or Orthodox.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The last time it was possible to know who a Jew was, they got rounded up and shipped to concentration camps. The other side of the coin may well be that among Americans it just doesn’t mean all that much whether one is Jewish these days. It used to be a very big deal.

“Different demographers estimate America’s Jewish population today at anywhere from fewer than 5.3 million to more than 6.5 million,” said Prof. Sarna. That’s barely the population of New Jersey where I live. We’re elbow to elbow in the Garden State to the tune of 8.6 million.

In my youth, New Jersey had a thriving Jewish community and, in 2010, there were just over 500,000 Jews or 5.8% of the population of the State.

I would have thought the largest concentration of Jews, other than in Israel, would be in the Sunshine State of Florida, but according to the “Jewish Population in the United States, 2010” by M. Sheskin and Arnold Dashefsy, Florida has an estimated 613,235 Jews or a mere 2.1% of its population

Not surprisingly, New York State is home to 1.6 million Jews. Most presumably can be found on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in the outer boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Orthodox are easily identified by garb that hasn’t changed since the bad old days of the Eastern European and Russian Jewish villages called shtetls (think “Fiddler on the Roof”).

So where are the Jews hanging their yarmulkes these days?