Why Jews are fleeing the West
Over time, Jews attitudinal shifts will influence where they settle. According to Pew, 51 per cent of all Jewish immigrants are migrating to Israel. Many other more secular Jews are remaining, but simply melding into the general population and losing their religious identity. Given low birthrates and assimilation even among the large US Jewish community, some pessimistically project America’s Jewish population dropping by a third by the end of the century.Izabella Tabarovsky: Canceled ... in Finland
The Jewish diaspora in both America and Britain will become increasingly Orthodox, sustained largely by groups like the ubiquitous Chabad movement. For those who do not want to be led by pious rabbis, Jews will seek their community in places that they consider safe and welcoming.
This used to involve moving from the inner city to the suburbs. But the big move in America now is towards certain regions, primarily in the South, once considered the home of antidiluvian racism and religious prejudice. In the 1930s, 60 per cent of American Jews lived in the north-east. Today the north-east is home to barely 40 per cent while the percentage of Jews living in the South has grown from nine per cent in 1960 to 22 per cent today.
The largest growth has occurred in big metros like Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and Miami. Jews are also thriving in smaller southern cities, which often had small but well-established Jewish communities. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston is the nation’s second-oldest synagogue, and Savannah’s Mickve Israel was founded in 1735, shortly after the city’s founding.
Jews have long been prominent players in places like Charleston. Former police chief Ruben Greenberg, a half-Jewish, half-Black Houstonian, reclaimed the city’s streets during the 1980s. He also humiliated the white nationalists by personally leading the protection of a Ku Klux Klan march in the 1980s, something that was never repeated. Today one feels safer as a Jew in downtown Charleston than in Paris, London or even New York.
Jewish students are also headed south. Most schools ranked safest for Jewish students by the Anti-Defamation League are in the South, while Ivy League colleges and top University of California campuses rank least safe.
This shift in college attendance could accelerate the southward movement, as students often stay close to where they attend school. Already the first- and third-largest Jewish student populations are at the University of Florida and University of Central Florida. These Southern schools, known for viewpoint diversity as well as football and Greek life, are ascendant, attracting ever more students from the West Coast and north-east.
In the wake of the crisis initiated by the 7 October massacre, Jews across the Anglosphere are reassessing their politics and location. The most sustained anti-Semitic tide since the 1930s will continue to inflict both physical and psychological dislocation. But as they have done for millennia, Jews will have to survive and hopefully thrive by adjusting to changing realities.
In recent days, two Finnish universities canceled my scheduled appearances on their campuses, turning me briefly into a minor celebrity in the country. Åbo Akademi University, in Turku, barred me from delivering my keynote address at an international conference on antisemitism set to take place on its campus. The University of Helsinki killed what was supposed to be a public talk. The title of both lectures: “From the Cold War to University Campuses Today: The USSR, the Third World, and Contemporary Antizionist Discourse.” The two schools caved to a smear campaign orchestrated by a “pro-Palestinian” Instagram account that weaponized my pro-Israel social media posts for the purpose.Court gives Gazans right to settle in UK
In the U.S., the censorship of “wrong-thinking” speakers, including Jews who hold Zionist beliefs, has become so commonplace that it’s practically a nonevent. But this was Finland’s first major controversy of this kind, and my photo got splashed across the local press. It was also a first for me, forcing me to confront head-on the same cowardice, hypocrisy, and stupidity that the American academy has displayed for years—especially in the wake of Oct. 7.
That the incident took place in Finland was particularly ironic for me, given the topic of my lecture and my background as an ex-Soviet Jew. For former Soviet citizens, Finland is indelibly linked to the history of the Bolshevik revolution. Not only did Lenin spend extended periods of time there, but also he and Stalin first met at a 1905 Bolshevik conference in the Finnish city of Tampere.
During the Cold War, Finland—forced to maneuver to retain its independence in the shadow of the neighboring USSR (see: Finlandization)—adopted a servile stance toward the communist superpower. Criticism of the USSR was taboo and self-censorship was rife—all of which Finnish media helped to enforce. Soviet influence extended to the country’s intellectual, political, and cultural elites. In the 1970s, a scandal broke out when one of Finland’s municipalities successfully inserted materials from the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society—a branch of the USSR’s global “friendship societies” influence network—as well as from Soviet textbooks into the school curriculum for grades 1-9, teaching Finnish children that there was no pollution in the USSR and that socialist central planning was superior to capitalism.
When Moscow launched its rabid anti-Israel propaganda campaign in 1967 and started building its “Anti-Zionist International,” Finnish intellectuals were drawn in as well. In 1975, Finnish writer Matti Larni, whose book castigating the U.S. made him popular in the USSR, published a piece about Israel in the Literary Newspaper—the Soviet Union’s most influential cultural publication. Larni’s article echoed key Soviet talking points, branding Israel a Jewish supremacist, racist state and depicting Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel as miserable, regretful traitors longing to return to their Soviet motherland. In 1980, the article was republished in Zionism: Truth and Fiction, a collection edited by Yevgeny Yevseyev—one of the USSR’s most viciously antisemitic ideologues with close ties to the KGB, who played a pivotal role in shaping the key tropes of Soviet “anti-Zionist” ideology.
Another Finnish name appears in the Soviet 1984 propaganda pamphlet Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The pamphlet recounts, in English, a press conference staged by the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public”—a notorious KGB front designed to vilify Israel and Zionism to foreign audiences under the guise of representing Soviet Jews. The entire event was dedicated to spreading the toxic equation of Zionism with Nazism—a cornerstone of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda—to international audiences. Known as Holocaust inversion, this false equivalence is widely viewed by scholars of antisemitism as a potent tool of incitement against Jews, used by both the far right and the far left. As Deborah Lipstadt has noted, the trope contains a grain of Holocaust denial, exaggerating “by a factor of zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done,” while simultaneously diminishing, by the same factor, the acts of the Germans. The USSR and its Western enablers—including, it seems, the Finnish ones—played a significant role in embedding this inversion among the global left.
The cancellation of my lectures by the two Finnish universities, then, echoed in a weird way some of their country’s Cold War history. One of my Finnish contacts may have been right when she told me that Finland has yet to fully come to terms with that past.
Palestinian migrants have been granted the right to live in the UK after applying through a scheme meant for Ukrainian refugees.
A family of six seeking to flee Gaza have been allowed to join their brother in Britain after an immigration judge ruled that the Home Office’s rejection of their application breached their human rights.
The family had made their application through the Ukraine Family Scheme and the decision to accept their case came despite warnings by lawyers for the Home Office that it could open the floodgates to “the admission of all those in conflict zones with family in the UK”.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said the case showed changes to human rights laws were needed so that Parliament, not judges, controlled who could settle in the UK.









.png)















