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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Both are also visibly happier living in the US

Ed Miliband doesn't live in the US, he's still an MP! He will likely be energy minister when Labour wins.

this is consistent with my experience of my school/university social circle where secular Jews who had the opportunity mostly moved to the US.

I would put it differently. Secular American Jews often retain some aspects of their particular ethnic identity because we don't live in a society with as much of a monoculture as the UK. The same was historically true of other groups in the diverse East Coast cities, like the Irish and Italians.

Secular British Jews assimilate very rapidly (even though the overall intermarriage rate is lower because of the higher level of Orthodoxy as you note). Those great Anglo-Jewish families of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Rothschilds, the Goldsmiths and so on, are pretty much entirely gentile now - the younger Rothschilds were raised and baptised in the CofE. Even the 20th century secular Jews of more recent shtetl heritage assimilate quickly - look at how quickly Gerald Ronson's and Philip Green's (who himself married a gentile iirc) children have deserted the faith. And Ronson is a committed Jew! He donates to charities, sat on the board of various things and so on. But even then, it wasn't enough.

There is almost a kind of standard assimilatory narrative for British Jews who make some money. The parents send them to Eton or Harrow or Cheltenham and then Oxbridge, they do well in the city (perhaps in a Jewish firm, perhaps not) or in the arts or something else, then they marry a gentile Sloane Ranger (or a male aristo in the case of the women). In two generations, any residual Jewishness is a family memory, they celebrate Christmas, they have essentially fully assimilated into the British upper-middle or upper class.

The same happened in a different way with working class secular Jews, who largely joined the white exodus out of East London and headed toward Essex. Those who remained religious still exist in large numbers in places like Gants Hill, but many who weren't had within one generation fully assimilated into normal southeastern working class English culture. An example of that is Katie Price's family, or even Stacey Solomon's to some degree. The secular Jewish intellectual culture that exists in the US doesn't exist in Britain. Jews who stay Jewish are overwhelmingly Orthodox, those who don't become English very quickly.