An interesting post by a woman claiming to have once established the first, and so far only, Jewish CSA contains this rumination on Jewish urbanism:
My point is, rather, that the pressure of Jewish culture pushes us strongly towards dense concentrations of other Jews - not just dense in a suburban sense, but because most observant Jews don’t drive at all, walkably Jewish neighborhoods. In many ways, this is good - observant Jews eschew commerce once a week, they do not drive on the Sabbath, they tend to congregate in tight knit commities[sic], usually walkable…
Against the counterpoint:
The other force pushing Jews towards urbanization is historical - Jews have lost their land in every place they lived in for thousands of years. As a minority, diaspora population, Jews have always been vulnerable and anti-semitism always prevalent - taking Jewish land was something of a hobby of most governments through most of Christian history, in large part because it was hugely profitable. Jews would settle on a farm, improve the land, and then, when the next round of scapegoating came about - and it always did - the powers that be would displace Jews and take over their land and wealth. For thousands of years, Jews were taught, over and over and over again that land in the diaspora was tenuous, that other forms of wealth, the kinds you can take with you in hard times in the forms of coinage or metals, were far more valuable and secure than land.
Not being observant of much beyond my toes, I don’t take the first point to explain altogether much. Certainly Jews could have “gone Amish” if it were so determining. Although, moving en masse to a desert nation and reclaiming a ritual language is something like “gone Amish”ing on the large scale.
The second point, why build a house of cards in a hurricane?, strikes me as more acceptable. You can’t smuggle acreage out of Germany the same as you can Albert Einstein’s ideas.
Another game to play reading this post is the “How many times can she use some formulation of the word Jew/Jewish in any given sentence/context”? Answer: a whole bunch of a lot.
Found via John Schwenkler by JL Wall.
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