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aleija

Opinion | Ultra-Orthodox Jews' Greatest Strength Has Become Their Greatest Weakness - T... - 0 views

  • In Israel and the U.S., this isolated community is thriving. The coronavirus pandemic has shown why this may be its biggest problem.
  • Some of the schools refused, and the governor threatened as a consequence to withhold state funding.
  • At about the same time in Israel, a rabbi commanded his followers to open ultra-Orthodox schools, in defiance of government shutdown orders. Israel’s health minister warned these schools that they could face “heavy fines.”
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  • I will also state that I see much to admire in the ultra-Orthodox way of life: the sense of community and mutual responsibility, the emphasis on study, the devotion to tradition. And yet, I also feel an urgent need to advise ultra-Orthodox Jews to adapt to a new reality, one in which ultra-Orthodoxy’s great success — its ability to thrive in a modern world — has become its great challenge.
  • Ultra-Orthodox Judaism today is based on strict adherence to Jewish law, a highly conservative worldview and a rejection of many components of the modern world (from evolutionary science to television), with the aim of erecting a shield against secularization and assimilation.
  • eventy years ago, with the destruction of most ultra-Orthodox communities in Europe in the Holocaust, some assumed that the end of this branch of Judaism was near. However, with stubbornness and sophistication, high birthrates and social cohesion, ultra-Orthodox communities are growing and thriving.
  • Socially, Haredi neighborhoods and towns tend to be less than hospitable to outsiders, and as the neighborhoods expand, clashes with neighbors are common. So these communities are gradually becoming harder to ignore. And the pandemic might be the ultimate demonstration of the emerging problem. In Jerusalem and New York, where these Jews live in great and fast-growing numbers, a puzzled public begins to feel these communities have become too independent.
  • But the disobedience of a strong community — particularly one that could affect the health of the larger public — is more difficult to defend.
  • If Americans become hostile to the community, the consequences could be even graver. Anti-Semitism, already on the rise, feeds on fear and suspicion.
hannahcarter11

He Is Israel's 'Prince of Torah.' But to Some, He Is the King of Covid. - The New York ... - 0 views

  • Yet despite his seeming detachment from worldly life, Rabbi Kanievsky has become one of the most consequential and controversial people in Israel today.
  • The spiritual leader of hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Kanievsky has landed at the center of tensions over the coronavirus between the Israeli mainstream and its growing ultra-Orthodox minority.
  • Throughout the pandemic, the authorities have clashed with the ultra-Orthodox over their resistance to antivirus protocols, particularly their early refusal to close schools or limit crowds at religious events
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  • Twice, during the first and second waves of the pandemic in Israel, he rejected state-imposed antivirus protocols and would not order his followers to close their yeshivas, independent religious schools where students gather in close quarters to study Jewish Scripture.
  • If anything, he said, the pandemic made prayer and study even more essential.
  • Both times he eventually relented, and it is unlikely that he played as big a role in spreading the virus as he was accused of, but the damage was done.
  • Many public health experts say that the ultra-Orthodox — who account for about 12 percent of the population but 28 percent of the coronavirus infections, according to Israeli government statistics — have undermined the national effort against the coronavirus.
  • Ultra-Orthodox society is not monolithic, and other prominent leaders were far quicker to comply with antivirus regulations. Ultra-Orthodox leaders say the majority of their followers have obeyed the rules although their typically large families, living in tight quarters under what is now the third national lockdown, have inevitably contributed to the spread of the contagion.
  • But he has contributed to one of the biggest-ever showdowns between the Israeli mainstream and the ultra-Orthodox, also known as Haredim.
  • In the past, he said, ultra-Orthodox leaders have tried to avoid direct confrontation with the state.
  • His pedigree adds to his prestige: His father and uncle were legendary spiritual leaders. But it is his relentless Torah study that gives the rabbi his authority — his followers believe his encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish teachings endows him with a near-mystical ability to offer religious guidance.
  • It is this devotion to religious study that made Rabbi Kanievsky — sometimes nicknamed the ‘Prince of Torah’ — so reluctant to tell his followers to close their yeshivas at the start of the pandemic.
  • “There is now a great epidemic in the world, a disease called corona and it affects many people,” one grandson shouted in the rabbi’s ear last year, following a question from a visitor, according to a video of the conversation. “He asks what they should take upon themselves so this disease does not get to them and there are no problems.”
  • Several weeks into the pandemic, the rabbi ordered his followers to obey social distancing guidelines, even equating scofflaws to murderers. In June, he said face masks were a religious obligation. In December, he gave his blessing to the vaccine, not long after recovering from the virus himself. In recent days he condemned a group of Haredi youths who clashed with police officers trying to enforce coronavirus regulations.
  • It is usually Yanki who shapes the way questions are put to the rabbi, potentially influencing the way that he might answer them.
  • But without speaking to the rabbi directly, it is hard to know exactly what he thinks.
jlessner

Ultra-Orthodox Newspaper Appears To Have Edited Women Out Of Paris March Image - 0 views

  • An ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Israel appears to have edited out female world leaders from a photograph of Sunday's anti-terrorism rally in Paris, Israeli media reported.
  • Israeli site Walla!, however, noted that when ultra-Orthodox paper HaMevaser (The Announcer) ran the iconic photo, female leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo were all of a sudden missing from the scene.
  • In fact, it's not the first time in recent years that an ultra-Orthodox publication has cut a female leader from a photo in its print. The New York-based paper Di Tzeitung decided in 2011 to erase then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from the image showing American leaders during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, The Telegraph noted.
Javier E

Ultra-Orthodox Israelis Are Joining the Army - WSJ - 0 views

  • Soon after the May 1948 birth of the state of Israel, a meeting took place between David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, and Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, a leading religious figure and head of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox (in Hebrew, Haredi) community. The result was the Status Quo Agreement, which charted two parallel lines: one for Jewish Israelis at large, whether secular or religious, the other tailored to the needs of Haredi Jews in particular.
  • Over the decades, the former “line” helped Jewish Israelis flourish in a modern state. The Haredi line restored the fortunes of a special religious world that, after being nearly destroyed in the Holocaust, was re-established. That world was upgraded with such institutions as Torah academies, synagogues, and Hasidic courts; in various subsects and religious activities; and in whole Haredi municipalities.
  • According to their political leaders, most Haredim hope to sustain their religiously devout and socially reclusive lives permanently under the protection of their longstanding civic exemptions. The rest of Israel demands and expects full participation.
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  • given the growth of Haredi society, from 3% of Israel’s population in 1948 to almost 14% today, profound challenges have arisen. Part of Israel’s recent social unrest is the product of tension between the Haredi and non-Haredi public over the military draft
  • Within two weeks, some 3,000 Haredi men had asked to join Israel’s armed forces.
  • In light of these developments, it is tempting to imagine that Israel has turned a corner and things will never be the same. People made similar predictions during the pandemic, and most of them weren’t realized. We need to ensure that this time, things won’t simply bounce back to where they wer
  • Israel’s calamity has sparked several awakenings. It’s obvious now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however talented he may be, isn’t the Jewish messiah
  • We have seen the face of the true enemy and reabsorbed the ancient lesson that there is no negotiating with evil. It must be destroyed.
  • We have discovered that the international left—at least when it comes to Israel—will largely support its favored “underdog” along with its unquenchable thirst for Jewish blood.
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
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  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Israelis and Americans Both Are Asking, Whose Country Is This Anyway? - The N... - 0 views

  • As Israel struggles to put together a ruling coalition, I was struck by a television report there that a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi and spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party said he’d prefer a government propped up by Israel’s Islamist Raam party than one with leftist Jewish parties, because Israeli Arab lawmakers were less likely to turn everyone secular.
  • This, understandably, added Seidman, is prompting a lot of Israelis and Americans to ask: “What is the unifying basis of our shared association going forward? What worthy journey are ‘we the people’ truly on together?”
  • Indeed, Netanyahu and Donald Trump were each so polarizing that they both stimulated breakaway factions within their own parties: “Anyone but Bibi” and “Never Trump.” But because their enemies hate each other as much as they hate Bibi and Trump, their ability to create broad-based alternatives has been limited.
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  • Already today, noted Ben-David, half of Israel’s adult population is so poor that they do not pay any income tax at all. In 2017, just 20 percent of the adult population supplied 92 percent of all income tax revenue, he said.
julia rhodes

Israeli Secularists Find Their Voice in Yair Lapid - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Now, Mr. Lapid’s stunning success
  • is being viewed by many voters, activists and analysts here as a victory for the secular mainstream in the intensifying identity battle gripping the country.
  • the widespread draft exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, integrating them into the work force, and shifting the balance of who pays taxes and who receives government aid.
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  • “People say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t see myself as part of a society where women cannot sit in the front of the bus.’ People don’t want to be part of such an extreme society.”
    • julia rhodes
       
      BISMARCK!
  • But it is also code for a broader sociological shift,
  • 47 percent identified the religious-secular divide as the most acute in society, more than twice as high as the next ranked choice of politics, at 19 percent, followed by rich and poor, at 15 percent.
  • “The underlying issue is that there’s an ideological contest over the soul of the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
  • “There are elements in the making of a Kulturkampf,”
  • And in late 2011, an international uproar was set off when a group of Haredi men spit at an 8-year-old Modern Orthodox girl on her way to school, calling her a prostitute because her clothing was seen as not modest enough.
  • Beyond the draft, Mr. Lapid’s party platform said it would “work to promote” civil marriage, including for same-sex couples, and “rectify inequality in family laws.” On his Facebook page, Mr. Lapid wrote that “as far as women’s exclusion is concerned there can be no compromise or negotiation.”
Javier E

Can Islamists Be Liberals? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamists, who were long perceived as opponents of the democratic system, are now promoting and joyfully participating in it. Even the ultra-Orthodox Salafis now have deputies sitting in the Egyptian Parliament, thanks to the ballots that they, until very recently, denounced as heresy.
  • It was the exclusion and suppression of Islamists by secular tyrants that originally bred extremism.
  • as Fareed Zakaria warned in his 2003 book “The Future of Freedom,” there are illiberal democracies, too, where the majority’s power isn’t checked by constitutional liberalism, and the rights and freedoms of all citizens are not secured. This is a risk for the post-Arab Spring countries, and even for post-Kemalist Turkey. The real debate, therefore, is whether Islam is compatible with liberalism.
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  • The main bone of contention is whether Islamic injunctions are legal or moral categories. When Muslims say Islam commands daily prayers or bans alcohol, are they talking about public obligations that will be enforced by the state or personal ones that will be judged by God?
  • For those who believe the former, Saudi Arabia might look like the ideal state. Its religious police ensure that every Saudi observes every rule that is deemed Islamic
  • By contrast, rather than imposing Islamic practices, the ultra-secular Turkish Republic has for decades aggressively discouraged them
  • there are reasons to worry that illiberal democracy could emerge. For Turkey still suffers from a paranoid nationalism that abhors minority rights, a heavy-handed judiciary designed to protect the state rather than its citizens, and an intolerant political culture that regards any criticism as an attack and sees provocative ideas as criminal.
  • If Turkey succeeds in that liberal experiment, and drafts its new constitution-in-the-making accordingly, it can set a promising example for Islamist-led governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. All of these countries desperately need not only procedural democracy, but also liberalism. And there is an Islamic rationale for it as well: Imposed religiosity leads to hypocrisy. Those who hope to nurture genuine religiosity should first establish liberty.
Javier E

The Crash That Failed | by Robert Kuttner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalism—the belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and with calamitous consequences. Gross economic imbalances of power and wealth persisted.
  • In the United States, the bipartisan financial elite escaped largely unscathed. Barack Obama, whose campaign benefited from the timing of the collapse, hired the architects of the Clinton-era deregulation who had created the conditions that led to the crisis. Far from breaking up the big banks or removing their executives, Obama’s team bailed them out.
  • criminal prosecution took a back seat to the stability of the system.
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  • the economic security of most Americans dwindled, and the legitimacy of the system was called into question. One consequence has been the rise of the far right; another is Donald Trump.
  • Germany insisted that the struggling countries had to practice austerity in order to restore the confidence of private financial markets. In a deep recession, even orthodox economists at the International Monetary Fund soon recognized that austerity was a perverse recipe for economic recovery.
  • Europe, because of Germany’s worries that these policies would lead to inflation, had no way to extend credit to struggling nations or to raise money through the sale of bonds, which would have allowed the ECB to provide debt relief or to invest in public services.
  • The political result was the same on both sides of the Atlantic—declining prospects for ordinary people, animus toward elites, and the rise of ultra-nationalism
  • Not so in Europe. Parties such as the German Social Democratic Party, the British Labour Party, and the French Socialists disgraced themselves as co-sponsors of the neoliberal formula that brought down the economy.
  • In nation after nation, the main opposition to the party of Davos is neofascism.
  • In his masterful narrative, the economic historian Adam Tooze achieves several things that no other single author has quite accomplished. Tooze has managed to explain a hugely complex global crisis in its multiple dimensions, and his book combines cogent analysis with a fascinating history of the political and economic particulars
  • when the collapse came, it was “a financial crisis triggered by the humdrum market for American real estate.”
  • the collapse reinforced the financial supremacy of Washington and New York. “Far from withering away,” he writes, “the Fed’s response gave an entirely new dimension to the global dollar.”
  • When the entire structure of borrowed money collapsed, the losses more than wiped out all the capital of the banking system—not just in the US but in Europe, because of the intimate interconnection (and contagion) of American and European banks. Had the authorities just stood by, Tooze writes, the collapse would have been far more severe than the Great Depression:
  • While insisting to Congress that the emergency response was mainly to shore up US finance, Bernanke turned the Fed into the world’s central bank. “Through so-called liquidity swap lines, the Fed licensed a hand-picked group of core central banks to issue dollar credits on demand,” Tooze writes. In other words, the Fed simply created enough dollars, running well into the trillions, to prevent the global economy from collapsing for lack of credit.
  • Bernanke instigated government action on an unimagined scale to prop up a private system that supposedly did not need the state
  • Using deposit guarantees, loans to banks, outright capital transfers, and purchases of nearly worthless securities, the Fed and the Treasury recapitalized the banking system. To camouflage what was at work, officials invented unlimited credit pipelines with disarmingly technical names.
  • The blandly named policy of quantitative easing, which drove interest rates down to almost zero, was a euphemism for Fed purchases of immense quantities of private and government securities.
  • The crisis, Tooze writes, “was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of the prevailing laissez-faire ideology.” And yet the ideology prevailed
  • In a reversal of New Deal priorities, most of the relief went to the biggest banks, while smaller banks and homeowners were allowed to go under
  • Banks were permitted to invent complex provisional loan “modifications” with opaque terms that favored lenders, rather than using their government subsidies to provide refinancing to reduce homeowner debts
  • How did a nominally center-left administration, elected during a financial crisis caused by right-wing economic ideology and policy, end up in this situation?
  • Turning to Europe, Tooze explores the fatal combination of Germany’s demands for austerity with the structural weakness of the ECB and the vulnerability of the euro.
  • Portugal or Greece now enjoyed interest rates that were only slightly higher than Germany’s, and markets failed to take account of the risk of default, which was more serious than that of devaluation.
  • instead of treating the Greek situation as a crisis to be contained and helping a genuinely reformist new government find its footing, Brussels and Berlin treated Greece as an object lesson in profligacy and an opportunity to insist on punitive terms for financial aid
  • A central player in this tragedy was the European Central Bank. Tooze does a fine job of explaining the delicate dance between the bank’s leaders and its real masters in Germany. Since Germany opposed continent-wide recovery spending, the bank could only pursue monetary policy. The model was the Fed. Yet while the Fed has a congressional “dual mandate” to target both price stability and high employment, the ECB’s charter allowed for price stability only
  • The ECB, with the consent of the Germans, came up with one of those bland-sounding names, Outright Monetary Transactions, for its direct purchases of government bonds. But the program, at the insistence of the Germans, was restricted to nations in compliance with Merkel’s rigid fiscal terms, which limited national deficits and debts. In other words, the money could not go to the very nations where it was needed most, since the hardest-hit countries had to borrow heavily to get themselves out of the recession
  • Reading Tooze, you realize that it’s a miracle that the EU and the euro survived at all—but they did so at terrible human cost.
  • the ideal of liberalized trade, and the use of trade treaties to promote deregulation or privatized regulation of finance, is a major element of the story of how neoliberal hegemony promoted the eventual collapse. But except for a passing reference, trade and globalized deregulation get little mention here.
  • he has almost nothing to say about Janet Yellen. Her nomination as Fed chair in 2013 to succeed Bernanke was an epochal event and an improbable defeat for the proponents of austerity, deregulation, and bank bailouts who influenced Obama’s policymaking. Yellen, a left-liberal economist specializing in labor markets, was the only left-of-center Fed chair other then FDR’s chairman Marriner Eccles. She also believed in tough regulation of banks. The extension of quantitative easing well beyond its intended end was substantially due to Yellen’s concern about wages and employment, and not just price stability, since low interest rates can also help promote recovery.
  • Tooze ends the book with a short chapter called “The Shape of Things to Come,” mainly on the ascent of China, the one nation that avoided all the shibboleths of economic and political liberalism, though it also, of course, does not have a political democracy.
Javier E

In Israel, police shooting of Solomon Teka prompts a Black Lives Matter moment - The Wa... - 0 views

  • Ethiopian Israelis have taken to social media to share stories of discrimination. In posts on Facebook, with the hashtag #Face_It, they describe racist experiences in every sphere of life — at the workplace, in the education system, on the street and even in stores. 
  • One woman, who did not reveal her name, recalled inquiring as to the price of a pair of shoes in a Jerusalem store only to be told, “This is not the same for people like you!” Another wrote about overhearing a conversation in her local grocery store, with comments such as “Israel should never have allowed the Ethiopians to come,” “they’re animals” and “they should all be sent back to Africa.”
  • Most Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel in secret immigration operations that took place in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. In Operation Moses, during the 1980s, about 8,000 people were smuggled out of Ethiopia via Sudan and taken to Israel on clandestine flights organized by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. In Operation Solomon, in 1991, about 14,500 people were airlifted to Israel in less than 36 hours.
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  • While Israel’s operations rescued thousands of Ethio­pian Jews from poverty, famine and war, the country has struggled to integrate the immigrants into its society. Successive government and private panels have found serious flaws in the absorption process, uncovering policies of forced segregation in schools, unfair housing plans that sent many Ethio­pian families to live in ghetto-like neighborhoods, mistreatment in the health-care system and deep-rooted suspicion of their Jewishness by Israel’s strict ultra-Orthodox rabbis. 
  • “Many people in the community thought it was just a matter of time and if we tried to be like everyone else, not to focus on the differences but on the similarities, then it would pass. But we always got the message from the other side that we were different.” 
  • Baraku, also an immigrant from Ethiopia, was called to the park on the night of June 30. He said none of the teenagers were armed. “All the children are in shock and still very angry,” he said. “They are confused. We tell them this is their country and they want to serve in the army, but the police label them as problematic.”
cartergramiak

Opinion | Face Time With Eight Mayoral Candidates - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Running for mayor of New York City once involved, well, some running — from shaking hands on the Staten Island Ferry to schmoozing with donors at fund-raisers and awkwardly dancing in parades across the five boroughs. This year, the candidates have spent a lot of their time on Zoom. It’s been weird.
  • It isn’t only the pandemic that makes this year’s mayor’s race different. This year’s primaries are in June instead of September, as in years past. This will also be the first mayoral election in which New Yorkers use ranked choice voting to cast their ballots. Paying attention now is all the more important since Primary Day is just a few months away, on June 22. Because Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly seven to one in the city, the winner of the primary is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor. Time is ticking.
  • The lack of attention on the race might be one reason early polls have Mr. Yang, who came into the race with high name recognition after his presidential bid, far ahead of his rivals.
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  • For all their good ideas, there are bad ideas, too. A suggestion to build a casino on Governors Island is silly, for instance. An even worse idea floating around is to ease up on enforcement of a group of ultra-Orthodox yeshivas suspected of failing to give students a basic education as required by state law.
  • Serious candidates in this race are laser-focused on how to create good jobs and improve schools, build affordable housing and better transportation, and give New Yorkers cleaner air and safer streets. There’s a lot at stake and a lot to consider, if voters would only take a look.
Javier E

As Coronavirus Mutates, the World Stumbles Again to Respond - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Denmark, which has invested in genetic surveillance, discovered the variant afflicting Britain in multiple Danish regions and recently tightened restrictions. The health minister compared it to a storm surge, predicting that it would dominate other variants by mid-February.
  • And as countries go looking, they are discovering other variants, too.
  • With the world stumbling in its vaccination rollout and the number of cases steeply rising to peaks that exceed those seen last spring, scientists see a pressing need to immunize as many people as possible before the virus evolves enough to render the vaccines impotent.
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  • “We do know how to dial down the transmission of the virus by a lot with our behavior,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We’ve got a lot of agency there.”
  • The vaccine alone will not be enough to get ahead of the virus: It will take years to inoculate enough people to limit its evolution. In the meantime, social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing — coupled with aggressive testing, tracking and tracing — might buy some time and avert devastating spikes in hospitalizations and deaths along the way. These strategies could still turn the tide against the virus, experts said.
  • “It’s a race against time,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist and a member of a World Health Organization working group on coronavirus adaptations.
  • Yet in the course of the pandemic, governments have often proven reluctant or unable to galvanize support for those basic defenses. Many countries have all but given up on tracking and tracing. Mask-wearing remains politically charged in the United States, despite clear evidence of its efficacy.
  • The spread of the variant lashing Britain has left some countries vulnerable at a time when they seemed on the brink of scientific salvation.A case in point: Israel. The country, which had launched a remarkably successful vaccine rollout, tightened its lockdown on Friday after having discovered cases of the variant. About 8,000 new infections have been detected daily in recent days, and the rate of spread in ultra-Orthodox communities has increased drastically.
  • experts had warned from the start that it would only be a matter of time before the virus became an even more formidable adversary.
  • “Every situation we have studied in depth, where a virus has jumped into a new species, it has become more contagious over time,” said Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. “It evolves because of natural selection to get better, and that’s what’s happening here.”
  • Experts say that countries should focus instead on ramping up vaccinations, particularly among essential workers who face a high risk with few resources to protect themselves. The longer the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, the more mutations it might collect that can undercut the vaccines’ effectiveness.
  • The variants that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil are a particular threat to immunization efforts, because both contain a mutation associated with a drop in the efficacy of vaccines. In one experiment, designed to identify the worst-case scenario, Dr. Bloom’s team analyzed 4,000 mutations, looking for those that would render vaccines useless. The mutation present in the variants from both Brazil and South Africa proved to have the biggest impact.
  • Still, every sample of serum in the study neutralized the virus, regardless of its mutations, Dr. Bloom said, adding that it would take a few more years before the vaccines need to be tweaked.“There should be plenty of time where we can be prospective, identify these mutations, and probably update the vaccines in time.”
  • Dr. Rambaut and colleagues released a paper on the variant discovered in Britain on Dec. 19 — the same day that British officials announced new measures. The variant had apparently been circulating undetected as early as September. Dr. Rambaut has since credited the South Africa team with the tip that led to the discovery of the variant surging in Britain.
  • Public health officials have formally recommended that type of swift genetic surveillance and information-sharing as one of the keys to staying on top of the ever-changing virus. But they have been calling for such routine surveillance for years, with mixed results.
  • Britain has one of the most aggressive surveillance regimens, analyzing up to 10 percent of samples that test positive for the virus. But few countries have such robust systems in place. The United States sequences less than 1 percent of its positive samples. And others cannot hope to afford the equipment or build such networks in time for this pandemic.
Javier E

Opinion | Understanding the True Nature of the Hamas-Israel War - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In a country of nine million people where 21 percent of Israeli first graders are ultra-Orthodox Jews, the vast majority of whom grow up with virtually no secular education, and another 23 percent are Israeli Arabs, who attend chronically poorly funded and poorly staffed public schools, Ben-David noted, “fewer than 400,000 individuals are responsible for keeping Israel in the developed world.”
  • We’re talking about the top Israeli researchers, scientists, techies, cyber specialists and innovators who drive the start-up nation’s economy and defense industries. Today, the vast majority are highly motivated and supporting the Israeli government. But if Israel cannot maintain stable borders or shipping lanes, some of these 400,000 will emigrate.
  • “If a critical mass of them decide to leave, the consequences for Israel will be catastrophic,” Ben-David said. After all, “in 2017, 92 percent of all income tax revenue came from just 20 percent of adults” — with those 400,000 responsible for creating the wealth engines that generated that 92 percent.
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  • such an alliance will not come together if Netanyahu sticks with his policy of undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — essentially driving Israel and its seven million Jews into indefinite control of five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The pro-American forces in the region and Joe Biden himself cannot and will not be party to that.
  • three things are totally clear.1. The keystone for winning all three wars is a moderate, effective and legitimate Palestinian Authority that can replace Hamas in Gaza, be an active, credible partner for a two-state solution with Israel and thereby enable Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim states to justify normalizing relations with the Jewish state and isolating Iran and its proxies.2. The anti-keystones are Hamas and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition that refuses to do anything to rebuild, let alone expand, the Palestinian Authority’s role.3. Israel and its U.S. backer cannot create a sustainable post-Hamas regional alliance or permanently stabilize Gaza while Benjamin Netanyahu reigns as the prime minister of Israel.
Javier E

As World's Gaze Shifts to Gaza, Israel's Psyche Remains Defined by Oct. 7 Attack - The ... - 0 views

  • When Israel was founded in 1948, the defining goal was to provide a sanctuary for Jews, after 2,000 years of statelessness and persecution. On Oct. 7, that same state proved unable to prevent the worst day of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
  • “At that moment, our Israeli identity felt so crushed. It felt like 75 years of sovereignty, of Israeliness, had — in a snap — disappeared,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli novelist.“We used to be Israelis,” she added. “Now we are Jewish.”
  • For now, the assault has also unified Israeli society to a degree that felt inconceivable on Oct. 6, when Israelis were deeply divided by Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce the power of the courts; by a dispute about the role of religion in public life; and by Mr. Netanyahu’s own political future.
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  • Nearly 30 percent of the ultra-Orthodox public now supports the idea of military service, twenty points higher than before the war,
  • Perhaps surprisingly, 70 percent of Arab Israelis now say they feel part of the state of Israel, according to a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. That is 22 points higher than in June and the highest proportion since the group began polling on the question two decades ago.
  • Roughly a third of voters for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, have abandoned the party since Oct. 7, according to every national poll since the attack.
  • “Something fundamental has changed here, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. “What we do know is that this is kind of a last chance for this country.”
  • But for others, the scale of the Oct. 7 atrocities has left them struggling to even empathize with Gazans, let alone retain hope in a peaceful solution to the conflict.In 2018, Mr. Klein Halevi, the author, wrote a book addressed to an imagined Palestinian, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” in which he attempted to set out a vision for a shared future between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.Since Oct. 7, Mr. Halevi said, he has found it hard to even consider what such a future looks like. An observant Jew, he still prays for Palestinians, but more from duty than empathy, he said.“I spent years explaining the Israeli narrative and absorbing the Palestinian narrative — and I tried to find a space where both could live together,” Mr. Klein Halevi said.“I don’t have that language right now,” he said. “It’s emotionally unavailable to me.”
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