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Bits and Pieces of My Work and Interests
Browsing All posts tagged under »Jews«
“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 fleeing it on their way to become immigrants in the United States. The cartoon is interesting in its own right, and I wanted to share my thoughts on how I understand it.
The King is Dead, Long Live the… Wait, is it Good for the Jews?
May 8, 2013
"Is it Good for the Jews?" is a generations-old criterion for making sense of world events. Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, something colossal has happened, at the bottom line we want to know the only thing that matters - is it, or is it not? For the occasion of the abdication of Dutch Queen Beatrix and the inauguration of her son Willem-Alexander, I translated with the help of my friend David Nortman a 1890 article from Ha-Melitz reporting the death of King Willem III of the Netherlands. I found this article randomly while looking for materials on the Jewish migration overseas, and thought that it was worth presenting as a pure demonstration of this analytic tool in action, a hilarious combination of cosmopolitanism and provincialism. It reads as "The King is Dead, Long live the… Wait, is it Good for the Jews?".
Yannay Spitzer 
January 20, 2014
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