What Happened Today: March 2, 2023
Havana Syndrome remains a mystery; Is Trump a non-person?; Iranian schoolgirls are being poisoned
The Big Story
Havana syndrome, the mysterious condition that’s afflicted only diplomats and administrators working in Havana and other overseas embassies, is not the result of an attack by a foreign adversary, seven U.S. intelligence agencies said in a new report on Wednesday. The victims blamed the rapid onset of strange neurological symptoms, headaches, and vertigo—first documented in 2016 by U.S. and Canadian diplomats stationed in Cuba—first on Cuban and then Russian military operatives who they said targeted them with microwave-radiation devices.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines wrote in a statement that the intelligence community’s review of some 1,000 cases of “anomalous” health incidents has led them to “conclude that it is ‘very unlikely’ a foreign adversary is responsible for [Havana syndrome],” while other evidence cited in the report “points against” such a conclusion, according to an unnamed official familiar with the report, which has not yet been made fully public. It’s unclear if the new findings will impact the payments of up to $200,000 pledged by the Biden administration to the afflicted diplomats, though Haines says the investigation “will and must endure.”
For his part, Sen. Marco Rubio maintains that there is something behind the syndrome: “As I have said before, something happened here, and just because you don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen,” he wrote in a statement. An advocacy group of officials afflicted by the condition responded similarly, writing in a statement that the report “does not track with our lived experiences.”
In The Back Pages: Trading Places
The Rest
→ All those years of training Chinese scientists in U.S. universities is looking like a huge face-plant now, as a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows that China’s research apparatus is ahead of the United States in 37 of 44 key tech areas. Of particular note are China’s successes in military and space technology, including in hypersonics, which allows missiles to travel at six times the speed of sound. More than 1,400 Chinese scientists left the United States to pursue opportunities back home in 2021, and at least a fifth of co-authors on the top 1% of cited research papers by Chinese scientists studied at a Western university.
→ Quote of the Day:
Make Trump a non-person
That’s what media mogul Rupert Murdoch is alleged to have told an aide at his Fox News network after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Murdoch had been one of Trump’s biggest promoters until that point, offering the president plenty of network airtime in exchange for the healthy viewership boost. Now, as Trump runs again for election, Fox has largely left him in the cold. As opposed to challengers Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis, who’ve been all over Fox in recent weeks, the former president hasn’t been on since November. One Trump aide told Semafor that it’s a “soft ban.” A Republican operative added, “The Murdochs have made it pretty clear they want to move on from Trump.” The former president leads the primary polls, 43% to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 31%.
→ Israeli security officials are responding positively after the U.S. military moved Israel from its U.S. European Command to CENTCOM, the command that covers the Middle East and has been the dominant warfare sector for the United States over the past two decades. Adding Israel to the group is really a no-brainer, as Israel is not a European nation but a Middle Eastern one with Middle Eastern problems. As a new Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies report states, the attitude at CENTCOM more closely matches the Israeli approach: “USEUCOM has seldom engaged in military operations (the Bosnia and Kosovo Wars were rare exceptions). Like NATO, it prefers diplomacy and soft power solutions. The IDF, by contrast, is offensive-minded and prefers a direct approach.” The report comes in the context of an updated National Defense Strategy that takes the great power threats of Russia and China more seriously and looks to counter their influence in the region. Israel will also benefit from having more access to and cooperation with states in the region for potential “distant operations.”
→ A 2018 story is going viral yet again, and for good reason. In a rural Chinese village, local Su Yun bought what she believed to be a Tibetan mastiff pup in 2016, but the animal had a ravenous appetite. After two years, during which the dog would at times mysteriously walk on two legs, Yun started to doubt if her pup was a dog at all. Realizing she’d brought home a baby bear, Yun transferred the animal to the Yunnan Wildlife Rescue where, it seems, it’s living a happy life.
→ Schoolgirls in Iran are under attack, with an alleged wave of poisonings that have sent hundreds of young women to the hospital. Over the past three months, hundreds of students, the vast majority of whom were female, have been hospitalized with what appear to be symptoms of poisoning. The government is blaming extremist religious groups who don’t want girls in school, and opposition leaders are blaming the government, while teachers’ unions are explicitly accusing the government of using the attacks to intimidate and create panic among young women who have led the latest round of protests against the regime in Tehran. A government probe has so far uncovered nitrogen dioxide, a fast-disappearing poison gas that is difficult to detect, and the head of the government’s education commission, Alireza Monadi, has said, “Observations indicate that the enemy is behind these actions.” When in doubt, blame the Jews.
→ Russian aluminum billionaire Oleg Deripaska warns that without foreign investment, “there will be no money already next year” in Russia. While Western sanctions have been largely toothless, and attempts to crash the ruble have failed, the largest investments of foreign capital in Russia before the war came from European countries like the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and France, which have reduced the flow of money since the invasion of Ukraine. Deripaska, who has himself been the target of U.S. sanctions since 2018, advised Russians to focus on developing a market economy. “We thought we were a European country,” Deripaska said on Thursday at the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum. “Now, for the next 25 years, we will think more about our Asian past.”
→ Continuing a recent trend reported in The New York Times of Black playwrights canceling plays already in rehearsal, playwright Charly Evon Simpson pulled her show I’m Back Now from production at the Cleveland Play House after an actor in the show was assaulted in theater-provided housing by a stranger. When the theater didn’t offer to move the actor into different housing, Simpson pulled the rights.
This follows other high-profile cancellations across the nation by Black playwrights who feel that administrators aren’t doing enough to change the culture of mainstream American theater, which has been described as having “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values.”
The pulling of plays means a huge financial hit to the theaters; in one case, at Chicago’s legendary Victory Gardens, it kind of put the nail in the coffin of the embattled troupe, which no longer produces work.
“Here’s the thing: Writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service—that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” Tony-nominated playwright and Met Ball regular Jeremy O. Harris told The New York Times.
→ A civil lawsuit filed in November in Amarillo, Texas, could have huge implications for access to abortion across the United States. Anti-abortion groups are challenging the 2000 FDA decision to green-light the drug mifepristone, on the grounds that the agency exceeded its authority in fast-tracking the drug and did not adequately study safety. Opponents of the case, who worry about abortion access if the injunction were granted, are also saying such a decision would throw doubt on the entire drug regulatory process. “It opens the door for potential political or religious third parties to question and overturn the determinations of our nation’s drug regulatory and safety system,” said Jeremy Levin, a member of the board for a biotech industry lobby group.
Read More: https://www.ft.com/content/d8930734-8989-44e2-a1c5-0c9d0b9cf7ea
→ Another astounding coincidence in the small and incestuous world of the American ruling class: The new president of the Chicago Fed was chosen by a recruiting firm at which his wife is a managing director. Austan Goolsbee has all the right credentials—he has a PhD in economics from MIT and was a professor at UChicago for the past three decades—but his appointment has stirred the pot. The firm claims Goolsbee’s wife was not involved in the project to select him.
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Devastating Moment of Clarity in Ukraine by Jeremy Stern
Sanctions have failed to break Putin, and the West is running out of missiles and bullets
The Joy of Purim—Alcohol Not Included by Stuart Halpern
The holiday’s delights aren’t only found at the bottom of a bottle
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Trading Places
Asian Americans are becoming more liberal as they enter the elite, while downwardly mobile Jews are moving to the right
By Eric Kaufmann
Kanye West’s paranoia notwithstanding, Jews are slowly fading from the American elite. A few decades hence, we may look back at the age of Jewish prominence, from roughly the 1920s to the 2000s, as a relic from a bygone golden age. While Jews and Asians share much in common, the differences between these groups are more striking. The status decline of the former contrasts sharply with the rise of the latter. Relatedly, the two groups are also on different political trajectories, with Jews likely to become more conservative while upwardly-mobile Asian Americans move toward the Democrats, and become a larger share of the liberal establishment.
American Jews are bifurcating in two directions that will likely ensure that they become less prominent in American cultural life: towards assimilation and identity loss on the one hand, and towards ethnoreligious conservatism on the other. What is shrinking is the goldilocks zone wherein Jews retained enough of their identity and educational ethos to succeed in the secular world without veering toward the Scylla of career-limiting ultra-orthodoxy or the Charybdis of post-ethnic individualism.
Now it seems that Jews are moving toward both Scylla and Charbydis at the same time. On the one hand, Jews who are not Orthodox are embracing liberal secularism, intermarriage, symbolic ethnicity and post-ethnicity. Pew data shows that around half of non-Orthodox Jews have married non-Jews, rising to 72% among those tying the knot in the 2010s. 82% of Jews with one non-Jewish parent have married non-Jews compared to just 34% of those with two Jewish parents. While 91% of Orthodox Jews say it is very important that their grandchildren be Jewish, just 4% of non-religious Jews agree.
Young ethnic Jews are either more Orthodox or more secular-liberal than their parents. Those taking the liberal path place little value on their offspring identifying as Jewish or marrying a Jew. I’m a good example: as someone raised in a secular environment, with an ethnically Jewish father and a half-Chinese, half-Hispanic mother, I am married to a non-Jew. The net result of this process is to water down the distinctive Jewish identity and ethos. Affluence may also be playing a role in blunting Jews’ willingness to work, strive, and save as their ancestors did.
On the other hand, those who are Orthodox, notably the ultra-Orthodox, are growing rapidly as a share of the religiously observant Jewish population because they have a fourfold fertility advantage over non-Orthodox Jews. Some project that the ultra-Orthodox will comprise the majority of observant Jews by 2050. Ultra-Orthodox Jews value religious rote learning, not secular science and elite careers. Meanwhile, the trading and literacy skills that gave Jews an early advantage in the knowledge economy are now better exemplified by the fast-growing Asian population.
Consider the following:
In 1925, 25% of Harvard’s incoming class was Jewish. In 2020, according to Shira Telushkin, a mere 6 percent identify their religion as Jewish. The infamous 15% quotas placed on Jews in the Ivy League in the early and mid twentieth century would hardly be necessary today, when just 7% of Ivy League students in the 100,000-strong Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys of 2020-22 identify their religion as Jewish.
This is part of a wider change that extends well beyond the Ivies. According to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which samples 60,000 voters, the share of Jews with advanced degrees has been stagnating. Among those over 40, Jews are about 15% more likely to possess a graduate degree than Asians. But for Americans under 30, Asians are slightly more likely to have a masters or doctoral degree than Jews. The same pattern holds for income, with Jews well ahead of Asians among middle and older age groups, but level-pegging among those under 30. Put this together with the fact that Asians are the fastest-growing racial category and the result is a wholesale transformation of the country’s most educated elite.
As Figure 1 shows, among Americans 65 and over, 8% of masters and doctoral degree-holders are Jewish and a mere 4% Asian. By contrast, fully 14% of advanced degree-holders under 30 are Asian, dwarfing the Jews’ 5% share. A combination of rising diversity and the dynamics taking place within the Jewish population likely underlie the shift.
Now let’s consider a random sample of 1,100 elite American academics, mainly in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), from surveys I conducted in 2020. There is some statistical noise due to the relatively small sample, but the trend is clear. As Figure 2 shows, 18% of young professors aged 30 and under are Asian, while just 6% are Jewish. But among older elite SSH academics over 65, fully 24% are Jewish while none are Asian. The situation is probably more dramatic in the hard sciences, where Asians are known to especially excel. What this represents is an ethnic turnover in the composition of America’s colleges and universities.
The decline of Jews and rise of Asians partly reflects a wider diversification of university staff and students, with whites declining as minorities rise. Among those over 65, just 5% of these academics are nonwhite while among the youngest cohort the minority share approaches 30%. Richard Alba writes that the retirement of the Baby Boomers is creating more space at the top for minorities to take up places in the American elite. Even so, as Figure 2 illustrates, the lion’s share of minority growth comes from Asians while Jews have experienced considerably sharper elite decline than other whites. As we saw with elite students, here is evidence of a stunning change, akin to the de-WASPification of the American elite from the 1960s as Catholics and Jews poured into the C-suites and Congress.
It could be argued that surveys of elite students and professors are failing to capture ethnic Jews who no longer identify as Jewish by religion. It may be that among young elite students and academics there is a somewhat larger penumbra of whites like myself with fractional Jewish heritage. But even this broad definition, which encompasses many whose Jewish identity is episodic or attenuated, cannot account for the decline.
Why? Pew data show that 76% of ethnic Jews over 65 are ‘Jews by religion,’ while only 56% of young ethnic Jews are. The share who say they have no religion is twice as high (25%) among young ethnic Jews than among the old (12%). But this modest religious difference cannot explain the seismic two- to four-fold drop in Jewish presence among elite students and professors. Moreover, nonreligion has long been high among academics. In fact the share of the professoriate who claim they have no religion is stable across age groups in my data. White Christians, who should also have declined sharply if secularization was the culprit, show nothing like the drop across age groups that white Jews do. I am also not convinced that younger and older academics marking ‘Jewish’ in the religion box are radically different in outlook.
Bottom line: there are a lot fewer young Jews, religious or otherwise, in the educational elite than in the past. Asians, and, to a lesser degree, upwardly mobile white gentiles, blacks and Hispanics, have largely taken their place.
The world looks quite different from an ethnic vantage point of exceptional success and growth than it does from one of decline. Throw in an inhospitable ideological climate and the ingredients are there for resentment. For example, at George Washington University, flyers with the words, ‘Zionists f** off’ were affixed to the local Hillel chapter. At Harvard, the university newspaper The Crimson penned an editorial in support of ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine.’ The rise of institutional identity politics based on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) that excludes Jews is also well in train. While there is little question that Jews and Asians both bear the brunt of affirmative action, the anti-white focus of the contemporary DEI agenda in organizations and CRT in schools and universities places Jews more squarely in the firing line. Anti-Zionist sentiment adds salt to the wound for many Jewish academics and students.
Might Jews begin to tilt right, toward a more populist conservatism? There is little concrete evidence of this as yet. As Figure 3 shows, Jewish Ivy League students are more likely than their non-Jewish white peers and about as likely as their Asian classmates to lean liberal and Democratic. That is, young Jews attending elite universities continue to lean left by an overwhelming margin. This is less apparent among young Jews in less prestigious colleges, where they are about twice as likely to be Republican. Even so, exit polls in 2016 and 2020 still show Jews overall voting 70-30 for the Democrats over the GOP.
What is likely to shift the dial, however, is the evolving theological composition of American Jewry. Pew data shows that 17% of Jews under 30 are Orthodox, of which 11% are ultra-Orthodox. This compares to just 3% Orthodox among the over-65s. When we factor in the markedly higher rate of non-religion (40%) among young Jews compared to the old (16%), this suggests that a third of young observant Jews are Orthodox compared to only 4% of older observant Jews.
Pew’s breakdown of partisanship by theology shows that Orthodox Jews lean 75-20 Republican while non-Orthodox and nonreligious Jews incline towards the Democrats by a similar margin. As the composition of American Jewry shifts - one funeral and one birth at a time – we should see a steady political transformation of the nation’s Jews from blue to red, much as Israel’s electorate has shifted right over time.
In addition, a considerable number of those with part-Jewish ancestry have converged with the white American mainstream in their partisanship. Pew data show that there is a group that is half as large as the Jewish population made up of those who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but no longer consider themselves to be so. Among this group, the proportions of Republican and Democratic supporters are close to even. To the extent intermarriage creates more of these quasi-Jews, we might expect the Democratic inclination of Jewish descendants to erode.
It’s also worth noting that Jews in America are now relatively unique among global Jewry in leaning left, and that their British, French, Israeli and Canadian counterparts now tilt right. Demography is the most predictive of the social sciences and as a result we should be able to see these trends emerging among the youngest cohort of American Jews in the coming years.
To wit, Pew data show that the Democrats’ advantage over the GOP among Jews is slightly narrower among the under-30s than those 65 and over. This is in marked contrast to young adults overall, who are far more likely to be Democrats than their parents and grandparents. Meanwhile, comparing Asians and Jews in Figure 4 shows that among respondents under 30, Asians are more likely to identify as Democratic than Jews, whereas in older age categories, Jews are considerably more Democratic than Asians.
The realignment of American politics has seen cultural questions such as immigration or the culture wars eclipse free market vs. welfare state considerations when it comes to sorting people into parties. Wealthier voters are trending Democratic while working-class and traditional voters are migrating toward the Republicans. With this in mind, Asian upward mobility is producing a more Democratic orientation while traditionalism and assimilation are shifting Jews to the right.
In the twentieth century, Jews played an important role in reproducing and enriching the American tradition. One of the big stories of the next half-century will be how the transition from a Jewish- to an Asian-inflected elite will affect the country’s culture and identity.
I found Kaufmann’s piece quite insightful, having heard discussions from Asians about this exact topic. There seems to exist a pattern in many ethnic groups where the offspring of immigrants go off to college and assimilate into the dominant liberal milieu. So now we have working-class Asian immigrants voting Republican, and their educated children going voting Democrat, as being Democrat is a key component of being in the affluent educated cosmopolitan managerial class. I've discussed this paradox of valorizing higher education yet hating the loss of culture that results from it myself: https://societystandpoint.substack.com/p/immigrant-valorizing
And as for intermarriage, the rates among Asian Americans are also enormous. Much of that is to Jews. The mixed Asian-Jewish child is commonplace in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and other neighborhoods full of affluent professionals. In fact, this dynamic was mentioned in a Tablet article years ago: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/tribalism-trumped-love