"About one-quarter of Jews alive today (25 percent) have left the country in which they were born and now live somewhere else. By contrast, just 5 percent of Christians, 4 percent or Muslims and less than 3 percent of members of other religious groups have migrated across international borders."From a Pew survey discussed here. A propos of not much, I remember listening to an academic's discussion of census data on ethnic categories a few years back, in which the speaker told us that Japanese-Americans and Jews have the highest rate of out-marriage; Chinese the least. American blacks, so it was said, marry out less in this generation than before.
Friday, March 09, 2012
Never Thought it Before, but it Sounds Right
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2 comments:
Fascinating. I wonder whether a significant part of the reason for the Jews is that they were driven from their homeland more than 2000 years ago and, in fact, had been on slave/refugee status for centuries even before that (Babylonians, Egyptians). Living in Israel is not very appealing for a lot Jews either. The larger point is that insular (literally and figuratively) people tend to wander less.
In the case of the US, there are a lot o people who, for all sorts of reasons have adopted foreign children, frequently out of their racial and/or cultural background, which reinforces a kind of cosmopolitanism (which I think is a good thing).
Jews keep leaving the countries of their birth because other people in those countries keep trying to kill them. Seems sensible to me.
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