Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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B'nei B'rak, July 16 - Residents of this entirely-ultra-orthodox city, the second-most-impoverished in the nation according to Central Bureau of Statistics data, possess no knowledge that by dint of their membership in the Jewish people they control global finances, and media, a new study reports.
B'nei B'rak, population just under 200,000, boasts many of the poorest households in Israel, lagging just behind Jerusalem - which only accounts for so many more poor households because of its much larger overall population. Researchers at Bar Ilan University observed that none of the hundreds of random B'nei B'rak residents surveyed displayed any awareness that as Jews they enjoy a share of the cabal that dominates entertainment, news, banking, and other crucial industries all around the world.
"It's a little bizarre," noted lead researcher Adel Sheldenson. "You'd think that as members of a tribe that has sat at the crux of global finance for generations, they might have some clue as to their status, but none seem to. And so many of them live lives of abject poverty."
"Some of that poverty is a function of lifestyle choice," explained researcher Ed Rothschild. "These communities value simplicity and sacrifice for the sake of full-time Torah study. Still, you'd think that, given what everyone out there assumes about the Talmud and the evil stuff it contains, at least some of the folks here might have caught on to its teachings about dominating the subhuman goyim by whatever means, and whatnot. But none of them seem to know about those parts of the Talmud, either."
The same holds true in other poor cities where Haredim form the majority of the population. Jerusalem, as noted, features tens of thousands of poor ultra-orthodox families, though large-scale studies of their involvement in international banking and rootless cosmopolitanism have not taken place. Smaller Haredi population centers, however, such as the towns of El'ad, Kiryat Sefer, and Beitar 'Illit, show identical numbers of Jews who know they and their cohorts have controlled global finance for hundreds of years: zero. That figure surprised researchers as well, given the relative prosperity of those towns compared to the ultra-orthodox in B'nei B'rak and Jerusalem, and thus the greater chance, researchers had assumed, that some might have a hand or tentacle in the vast Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to rule the world.
Researchers intend to follow up the current study with an exploration of how scholars with encyclopedic knowledge of Talmud appear completely unaware of passages in that set of documents that antisemites are fond of quoting.