naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
It seems relevant that the current Israeli government is a large coalition agreement and Israeli political parties are split partially on ethnoreligious lines, though, doesn’t it? Major confound there.
I’d bet a list of every Jewish Fortune 500 ceo in the G7 plus Israel would be pretty heavily Ashkenazi, maybe a Sephardi or two. Likewise for professors at the top universities in each major economy.
I checked what the Shas party is about and it "primarily represents the interests of Sephardic and Mizrahi Haredi Jews", which explains their prevalence in its ranks, but even many Likud ministers are Mizrahi/Sephardi.
I’d bet a list of every Jewish Fortune 500 ceo in the G7 plus Israel would be pretty heavily Ashkenazi, maybe a Sephardi or two. Likewise for professors at the top universities in each major economy.
G7 is a pretty big confounder itself, given than none of the countries there are Muslim. I don't know where to find a good list of Israeli Jewish CEOs detailing their ancestry. I casually browsed the list of scientists from TAU, Hebrew University and Technion, and it does look like they are mostly Ashkenazi, with random interesting exceptions like Moshe Many, who's an OG Israeli from the Old Yishuv.
My understanding of Israeli politics is that you see lots more mizrahi Jews, and sometimes more Sephardic Jews, in political appointee positions than would get in by pure merit for the same reason there’s lots of black political appointees in the US- it holds up parts of political coalitions- except with the confounder that Israel doesn’t have longstanding coalition agreements, and ethnic minorities are spread out across the spectrum instead of being all democrats except for Vietnamese Cubans and tejanos. So I wouldn’t read too much into ministers and political appointees.
Obviously, most Jewish CEOs in Germany and Russia are Ashkenazi. Equally obviously there are very few Jewish ceos in Muslim countries, or Japan. So G7 is a confounder but US/Canada/Australia might be a better comparison(maybe add France, which I believe has both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews and/or Brazil, which has a lot of every ethnic group you could care to name). Of course I’m not sure that finding their ancestry is easy, but I’d bet that a representative sample would show that Sephardi Jews are barely overrepresented, if at all, while Ashkenazi Jews are very overrepresented. Open to corrections, of course, but HBD is a pretty big confounding factor that comes down on one side of the equation.
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Notes -
I updated my original comment with the members of the cabinet.
It seems relevant that the current Israeli government is a large coalition agreement and Israeli political parties are split partially on ethnoreligious lines, though, doesn’t it? Major confound there.
I’d bet a list of every Jewish Fortune 500 ceo in the G7 plus Israel would be pretty heavily Ashkenazi, maybe a Sephardi or two. Likewise for professors at the top universities in each major economy.
I checked what the Shas party is about and it "primarily represents the interests of Sephardic and Mizrahi Haredi Jews", which explains their prevalence in its ranks, but even many Likud ministers are Mizrahi/Sephardi.
G7 is a pretty big confounder itself, given than none of the countries there are Muslim. I don't know where to find a good list of Israeli Jewish CEOs detailing their ancestry. I casually browsed the list of scientists from TAU, Hebrew University and Technion, and it does look like they are mostly Ashkenazi, with random interesting exceptions like Moshe Many, who's an OG Israeli from the Old Yishuv.
My understanding of Israeli politics is that you see lots more mizrahi Jews, and sometimes more Sephardic Jews, in political appointee positions than would get in by pure merit for the same reason there’s lots of black political appointees in the US- it holds up parts of political coalitions- except with the confounder that Israel doesn’t have longstanding coalition agreements, and ethnic minorities are spread out across the spectrum instead of being all democrats except for Vietnamese Cubans and tejanos. So I wouldn’t read too much into ministers and political appointees.
Obviously, most Jewish CEOs in Germany and Russia are Ashkenazi. Equally obviously there are very few Jewish ceos in Muslim countries, or Japan. So G7 is a confounder but US/Canada/Australia might be a better comparison(maybe add France, which I believe has both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews and/or Brazil, which has a lot of every ethnic group you could care to name). Of course I’m not sure that finding their ancestry is easy, but I’d bet that a representative sample would show that Sephardi Jews are barely overrepresented, if at all, while Ashkenazi Jews are very overrepresented. Open to corrections, of course, but HBD is a pretty big confounding factor that comes down on one side of the equation.
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