naraburns nihil supernum
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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.
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 -
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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