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10 Ellul 5761 - August 29, 2001 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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NEWS
Observations: Fears of the Future in Israel and in America
by T. Yehudai

Taglit, a company that arranges educational trips in Israel for Jewish students from the Diaspora, has conducted an interesting survey: What do Israeli citizens think about the security situation in Israel? Does the impaired state of security threaten the well-being and the existence of the State of Israel, and can they point to other threats to the peace and future of Israel?

Five hundred and eight people, both men and women, responded to these "questions of existence," and the results were surprising: Israeli women tend to believe that national security problems threaten the future of the Jewish people, while men pointed to other sources of danger, not necessarily directly connected to the security situation.

Among younger respondents the answers were more focused: shaky security headed the list of dangers facing the Jewish people. Older respondents felt differently.

Respondents' familial status also had a direct impact -- although not a surprising one -- on where they laid the blame: unmarried men living alone view the lack of security as the foremost danger, unlike parents and other single people. Of course lifestyle also had a clear effect on the responses. People with even a slight connection to Judaism did not point to the shaky security situation as the leading threat to the well-being of Am Yisroel.

The survey also showed that assimilation among the younger generation of Jews in the Diaspora ranks in second place on the list of potential dangers to the future of ha'am hayoshev beTzion. In third place was the outbreak of antisemitism in various countries around the world.

Israel is not the only country whose citizens are losing sleep over the lack of security as well as physical and spiritual instability. In the U.S. people are also living in fear day and night.

Kali Balkali is a famous dream researcher in San Francisco, and the findings she manages to extract from the deep waters of her patients' dreams are of far-reaching significance at her prestigious clinic for dream interpretation.

A special study conducted by Balkali revealed that Republican supporters were at least three times more likely to have nightmares as Democratic voters.

Balkali attributes these surprising results (which she claims are unbiased) to the fact that people on the Right are very alert to dangers prevailing in the world today, and look for ways to defend themselves against these dangers. "People with left-wing leanings tend to believe more in utopia," the researcher noted in the San Francisco Sleep Clinic's scientific journal, which is how she explains how only 18% of Democrats suffer from nightmares.

 

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