Thanks for the link. Couple of things – Schultz is employing a tactic often used by Alan Dershowitz – you read the word “Israeli” and instead see the word “Jew”. Schultz charges M&W with arging that the lobby has a “uniform agenda”, when in fact M&W make no such claim. They point that Martin Indyk, formerly of the Clinton admin. and a member of the lobby, believes in a 2-state solution, as does Dennis Ross. However, he does not believe that American aid to Israel should be conditional. M&W argue It is this unconditional support that is more prominent among the lobbyists, than any specific policy.

Second, he charges M&W for lending support to the Arabs simply because of numbers. Again, they make no such claim, but rather say that Arab concerns should play some interest – demographics do not play much of a role.

As for Schultz’s choice of venue – U.S. News and World Report is published by Mort Zuckerman, who is a high-profile member of Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations – a very hard right group.

influenced by your interesting post, i went to the bookshop to pickup the book Israel Lobby. forgot the name and had to inquire and came across this recent book – The deadlies lies:The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control – which claims to be a rebuttal to Walt & Meirsheimer’s book. Then went to the newstand to pick up my weekly dose of USNews and came across this editorial: The Israel lobby myth

1) that site is mine

2) the studies are complicated, but if you want me to summarize it for you askhenazi jews seem to have had a few gentile founding mothers and near eastern fathers (according to the balance of the evidence). their admixture proportion is probably 50% western european and 50% near eastern. they expanded from a relatively small baseline population around 1400 and increased by orders by magnitude by 1800. so yes, they’re one people that emerged from a hybridization.

3) the examination of genetic markers implies 1% inmarriage per generation from outsiders if you assume 25 years and 1,000 years.

4) What I should have said, is that a Jew coming from Germany will be able to identify less with a Jew coming from Britain, since they were essentially members of non-interacting communities for hundreds of years

again, you don’t know the history. they aren’t parts of non-interacting communities, the jews of europe were famously transnational and cosmopolitan. they moved around quite a bit and fissured mostly along sephardic and ashkenazi lines. when jews were allowed back into england after 1650 they were mostly sephardic, but by the 19th century ashkenazi jews from eastern overwhelmed the earlier community of sephardic jews. in places like france you have two different communities, sephardic and askhenazi together, both of these are generally exogenous in origin.

5) again, you confuse the nationality issue. ashkenazi jews in places like hungary, poland and russia did not speak the local language, they spoke yiddish. if they were educated, secular and sophisticated quite often they spoke german and were part of the german-speaking culture of mittleeuropa.

roger, there’s genetic data on this. to make it short: you’re wrong. ashkenazi jews are genetically cohesive. the outmarriage into the group was on the order of 1% per generation according to genetic data. if you are curious about the jewish literature, go here. you also don’t know the history of jews as it is naive to talk about ‘russian jews 1,000 years ago.’ jews showed up in poland around the 14th century, and that is the community that exploded in population after 1600 and spread both east and west. so ‘how can i say’? because i know stuff. as for indian genetic similarity, it is on the order of europeans. that is, the typical gujarati related to a malayalee is like a swede related to a frenchmen. that is not a distant relationship, europeans exhibit some natural genetic cohesiveness, but it isn’t like ashkenazis. to make the math simple for you ashkenazi lineages tend to coalescene on the order of 1,000 years or less. south asian lineages on the order of 10,000 years or less.