Posts

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
Was This Saul Bellow’s First Published Piece?

In my early age I wanted to be a street car conductor. Later I wanted to be a mountaineer. At the present I have better and higher ambitions, like being a professional man.
A Jewish-Russian Frontier Man

This is the story of Aharon Ya’akov Dukhan, a Jewish-Russian frontier man whose life spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. In Pale in Comparison, a paper that I am currently developing, I argue that even in as late a period as the one in which Aharon Ya’akov was active, Jews were, in a…
Migrant Self-Selection: Anthropometric Evidence from the Mass Migration of Italians to the United States, 1907–1925 (with Ariell Zimran)

Are migrants positively or negatively self-selected from within their populations of origin? Ariell Zimran and I study this question by collecting data on the heights of Italian passengers arriving in Ellis Island between 1907 and 1925, matching them to their places of origins, and comparing their heights to that of their cohorts of origin.
Pogroms, Networks, and Migration: The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States 1881–1914

The migration of one and a half million Jews from the Russian Empire to the United States during the years 1881–1914 is commonly linked to the occurrence of pogroms, eruptions of anti-Jewish mob violence, that took place mainly in two waves in 1881–1882 and in 1903–1906. Although the common perception that pogroms were a major…
Pogrom-Driven Migration: The Case of Kalarash

Were Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement to the United States really driven by pogroms? This is a question with which I deal empirically, using data on migration and on events of anti-Jewish violence. But before zooming out to the large statistical picture, it is important to verify anecdotally that one can find particular…
“Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews”: Reading a Cartoon

When I present my work on the Jewish migration, I like using this cartoon in order to illustrate the traditional thesis that the Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement was caused by the pogroms. It shows a Jewish town, on that right, that was hit by a pogrom, and a stream of Jewish refugees…
A Letter from a Jewish Surgeon During the Russo-Japanese War

A Russian Correspondent of The Times says that the mother of one of the Jewish surgeons who were sent from Warsaw to the war recently received from her son a letter written in the usual official Russian style and bearing the stamp of the censor. The letter stated that the writer was in good health,…