Uncategorized – Yannay Spitzer

How Israel Defied the Second Demographic Transition—Thus Far

Israel’s extreme demographic exceptionalism can be summarized in the following figure: Each point in the chart represents one of the OECD countries, a group commonly used as a reference for Israel in socio-economic comparisons. Along the horizontal axis, the countries are ordered by their total fertility rate (TFR) in 1960. The TFR is the standard…

Ostjuden: a review

Shalom Boguslavsky’s book, Ostjuden: The Forgotten Story (published in Hebrew as הסיפור הבלתי סביר והלא מספיק זכור על עלייתה ונפילתה של מזרח אירופה היהודית) is not only a wonderful, captivating, and enjoyable work of popular history. It is also a serious and important book that can contribute to our collective historical memory and to the…

The Short-Run Impact of the Judicial Overhaul on Israeli Financial Assets

With Itai Ater and Tzachi Raz The following is a modified version of a chapter from our paper on the economic consequences of the proposed judicial overhaul in Israel, also published as “The Short-Run Impact of the Judicial Overhaul on Israeli Financial Assets“, in Assaf Razin (ed.), The Transition to Illiberal Democracy: Economic Drivers and…

Piketty’s Bare-Bones Argument

This diagram represents what I understood to be the bare-bones argument of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century

A Hebrew Book Travelling from Berlin To Baghdad

A Hebrew book printed in Warsaw, kept in a library in Berlin, probably immigrated to Mandate Palestine, shipped to Baghdad, and returned back to Israel.

A Mother’s Obituary for Her Fallen Son: The Pogrom of Orsha 1905

For fourteen years I had been a childless Jewess, I prayed God for a son, and he gave him to me in the fifteenth year of my marriage. It was my long-awaited yearned son. God has blessed me, for I had a pure and noble son, full with love for his family and passion for…