Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

Jun 10, 2016 by

Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

As promised in an earlier post, I am presenting here an informal response to the article, published recently in Genome Biology and Evolution by Paul Wexler, Eran Elhaik and colleagues (henceforth, Das et al. 2016). To summarize my...

read more

Religiosity in Russia

May 6, 2016 by

Religiosity in Russia

[Thanks to Boris Denisov and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions of these issues.] A recent question from a student about just how religious Russians really are has sent me to look for statistics on this issue. As sociologists of...

read more

Why Did Yiddish Survive in Eastern Europe (for as Long as It Did)?

Nov 23, 2015 by

Why Did Yiddish Survive in Eastern Europe (for as Long as It Did)?

[Thanks to Martin Lewis, Michael Nosonovsky, Katya Shilova, and Elena Zusmanovich for insightful conversations that led to certain points in this post.]   In his essay “Yiddish? Why Don’t We Speak Judeo-French?”, George Jochnowitz...

read more

The Disappearance of Yiddish in Russia and Elsewhere in the FSU

Nov 22, 2015 by

The Disappearance of Yiddish in Russia and Elsewhere in the FSU

A century ago Yiddish was the predominant language of Jews in the Russian Empire; three of my four grandparents, born in 1900s-1920s spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue. Yet according to the 2010 population census, only about 30,000...

read more

On God, Politeness, and the T-V Distinction

Sep 22, 2015 by

On God, Politeness, and the T-V Distinction

This is another post inspired by a question from (and discussion with) David Benkof, who asks about the following “intriguing conundrum for the High Holidays”, when (religious) Jews are thinking “about what our relationship with God...

read more

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings...

Sep 8, 2015 by

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings

[Thanks to Martin Lewis for helpful discussions, for crafting the passages from our book cited below, and for excellent editorial comments on earlier drafts of this post.]   A recent article by a team of scholars led by Oleg...

read more