Jews were not the creators of modernity, Slezkine reminds us. To the contrary, they came to modernity late and unwillingly. They barely participated in the foundational events of modernity, such as the scientific and the industrial revolutions. They adapted to it extremely well but as latecomers and not as founders.

Jews embraced the nation-state, Slezkine says, because it made Christianity less relevant. Christianity in a nation-state is not THE thing. It’s A thing, one of many. It’s easier for a Jewto accept Shakespeare or Goethe as an expression of the most important values than it is to accept Jesus Christ. You can feel belonging over your admiration of Shakespeare where you can’t come together with others over the worship of Jesus.

In an aside, I want to mention that the destruction of the nation-state is accompanied by the devaluing of its canon of the Greats. The perjorative expression “dead white men” appears exactly at the time when Benedict Anderson publishes Imagined Communities, a book that became the Bible of anti-nationalist intellectuals everywhere.

One of the most provocative ideas in Slezkine’s book is that the nation-state is modeled on a Jewish community. It’s built out of alienated individuals who are attached to a larger group most of whose members they’ll never meet. It endows itself with ancient origins that are often entirely invented. The nation always sees itself as the Chosen people with a historic mission. It consecrates a bunch of national figures, writers, thinkers, etc whose existence proves that the nation is great. It also venerates a special way of eating that is specifically of the nation and is a source of pride and attachment that distinguishes its practicioners from everybody else. The fourth estate is crucial to the nation-state as are the professions that define the intellectual and the literary canon, and these are the most Jewish of all professions after bankers.

I thought I’ve heard every possible theory of nationalism but this one is new to me. The book was written in 2004, and I’d love to hear the author’s theory of the collapse of the nation-state model.

In modernity, everyone becomes a spiritual Jew, says Slezkine. The most prestigious professions are the traditional Jewish ones. Entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer, content creator who produces words. Everybody has a list of dietary restrictions from here to the Moon.

The concept of a soul falls out of fashion and loses importance, says Slezkine, so instead of hankering after the purity of the soul, modern people become obsessed with the purity of the food. Instead of going to confession, they take dietary supplements with religious fervor. To achieve eternal life, people look to technology instead of to the church.

I read so fast in Russian that I already read 100 pages of this 600-page book since this morning and in the midst of making breakfast, packing lunches, drop-off, grading and an hour-long taping. If I read more in Russian, I’d be really well-read because I can do a book a day easily.

Slezkine points out that every society since the beginnings of civilization had a group of migrant travelers who performed the functions that were necessary but considered inappropriate for the rest of the population. These were tradesmen and tricksters who cultivated their differences and were simultaneously needed and reviled for it. Gypsies and Jews are an example we know best but he gives a long list of examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Slezkine calls these outsider groups Mercurians and says that one of the characteristics they share is their interest in swapping gender roles within their groups. That’s why they are traditionally seen as not manly. They don’t fight in the armies of host populations. Their women are loud and pushy and their men don’t go to war to defend the homeland of the host society.

But what happens when the entire Europe becomes modern, that is, Mercurian? It starts loving gender-bending and gender-swapping for its own sake.

I haven’t seen such an explanation anywhere else, and it’s definitely original. This is a very interesting author, that’s for sure.

The EU stands with the people of Cuba in their hour of need.

We are stepping up our humanitarian aid to Cuba to help deliver food and safe drinking water, and to provide logistical support to humanitarian partners delivering urgent relief to the most vulnerable.… pic.twitter.com/rYIgMFjBCm

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) April 1, 2026

Cubans are fighting in Ukraine on Russia’s side. Helping the Cuban regime stay in power means prolonging the war. So who’s against Russia’s war effort in deed and not in words?

Modernity is when everyone becomes urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually complex, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling castes for the benefit of individuals, nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernity, in other words, is when everyone becomes a Jew.

Yuru Slezkine, The Jewish Century

The English translation is atrocious, so if you can read in the original Russian do that instead. I had to edit this quote to make it readable because the translation is so poor.

I read Masoud Pezeshkian’s open letter, and the following caught my eye:

Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants —educated in Iran — who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

According to this logic, the immigrants from the USSR, who were all accomplished and educated, are evidence that the Soviet regime was great. If your best people are desperate to run away from you, then you must be great? That’s a weird logic. 

By the way, when I was an undergraduate student in Montreal, one of my closest friends was Iranian. Her family hated the regime because the regime made it impossible for them to live in their own country.

The rest of the letter reads like a Russian propagandist wrote it. Which he probably did. All of these “fighting to the last American” verbal tics are recognizable and boring.

Let’s see what Trump says.

Another thing I dislike in terms of time management are meetings with no end time specified. Our Faculty Senate meetings start at 2:30 pm. No end time is ever given. When I asked, I was told that the meeting will go for “as long as it takes.”

Well, I don’t care how long “it takes”. I get up at the dot of 4 pm which is the end of my work day according to labor law. Everybody hates me but I don’t care. If people can’t finish whatever they planned in 1,5 hours, it’s not my problem.

People complain that they never manage to accomplish anything but they don’t actively manage their time. So whose fault is it?

I was at a meeting today that ran over the allotted time because one person was very inconsiderate and just kept talking. The other three people in the room with us were higher-ranking male administrators who were needed elsewhere. People kept peeking into the room to ask if we were done because they had their own meetings with the administrators.

I’m a very rude person and I recognize this openly. When the time allotted for this meeting ran out, I got up in the midst of the talkative colleague’s speech and said, “I apologize, but I’m expected at the Graduate Symposium.” Then I walked out. The polite administrators looked at me with longing.

It’s not ok to be rude, I get it, but what is one supposed to do in these situations? I had given a full hour to the meeting, which is what had been planned. I was, indeed, expected at the symposium. I always get up and leave when time runs out. Nobody else does it although it’s clear that many people really want to.

I was assigned to evaluate a graduate student’s dissertation. In a turn that was unfortunate for both of us, she opened the presentation by informing me that people with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder are often stigmatized as cruel and incapable of empathy.

Of course, by the end of the presentation the student conceded that NPDs aren’t stigmatized as cruel but actually are cruel. And if anything, the general public severely under-stigmatizes this behavior.

The second presentation I had to evaluate started with the words “America was built by immigrants.” It took even more self-control on my part not to start screeching that the concept of an immigrant cannot be used outside of the framework of a nation-state.