Jews, France, and Identity Politics

On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I am joined by

An American in Paris

, who publishes here on Substack at Under Vine and Fig Tree.

AP is an Elder Millennial American Jew with the somewhat anomalous background of having grown up on an Iowa farm. She is married to a Frenchman and lives in Paris.

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Topics include:

• History of Jews in the South and Midwest

• Geographic distribution of Trait Openness

  

• Do Midwesterners have a propensity for Tall Poppy Syndrome

• Does AP think of herself as a “Midwesterner”

• In the Midwest the highs are lower and lows are higher

• Agricultural ecologies select for rhetorical simplicity

• Are Liberal Elites actually high in Openness?

• Cultural conflicts within Liberalism between Boston Puritans / NYC Pluralists

• How the Quakers/Pluralists were co-opted by Ellis Islanders

• Is NYC still a “Jewish city” and is it meaningfully representative of America?

• Walt and AP debate the idea of “Jewish Power”

• Walt argues that stigmatizing discussions of Jewish Power causes antisemitism

• Are there meaningful cultural differences between NYC / FL / Midwestern Jews?

• Can you have identity without identity politics?

• Should the state treat an “ethnoreligious group” as an ethnoi or religion?

• Walt argues racial variance in income / criminality is inexorably downstream of biological variance and racial heuristics are necessary to navigate the world

• AP argues for a race-blind approach to governance

• The French have a paradoxical love-hate relationship with America

• The centrality of language in France’s national identity

• AP argues that Macron dropped the ball on pension reform

• Why does France have one of the highest TFRs in Europe?

• The traditional respect for the public sector and civil servants in France

• AP explains the French love for protests

• Marine Le Pen vs. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Éric Zemmour

• Mass settlement of Algeria

• Does America or France handle multiculturalism better?

• The difference between the American and French attitude toward religious liberty

• Are France/Portugal better at assimilating non-Western pops than Germanics

• Is it even possible to “assimilate” into the more substantive aspects of culture?

• A lot of Maghrebi French are particularly fond of French values like secularism

• The French Jewish community, which is predominantly Sephardic

• The Dreyfus Affair

• Much like Walter and

  Robert Stark
  , historically France occupied a middle ground between Anglo philosemitism and German / Russian antisemitism

• AP speaks positively of vacationing in Israel

• Israel as an unusually family-friendly nation

• The Haredi in Israel—are they free riders?

• AP’s exploration of Americans being fat

• Europeans need to dunk on Americans for being fat because they are poor

• AP’s article re: America vs. Europe on air conditioning

  • Walt argues air conditioning exacerbates American obesity

• Fat chicks are massively discriminated against socially and professionally

• Do men actually like funny women?