It’s sad to be Russian these days. The economy is swirling away softly down the toilet, we were unable to invade Georgia successfully, and Verka Serduchka, the Russian version of Dana International, still lives among us. The greatest misfortune Russia faces is that it has run out of Jews to oppress due to  immigration to Israel, Canada, and the Greater New York metropolitan area.

Russians are a hardy people, though. We know how to deal with hardships and surpass them.  Thus, we are innovating by dressing up monkeys as Jews in the Nikulin Circus, the most prestigious circus in Russia. And the monkeys had a WEDDING. WITH A CHUPPAH.

Micky Saidov, an Israeli businessman living in Russia never would have imagined that a trip with his daughter to one of the most talked about circuses in Moscow would go from an entertaining experience to a full-blown anti-Semitic one.

During one of the Nikulin Circus skits, the performers simulated a “Jewish Wedding,” with the leading roles being filled by four monkeys, acting as the bride, groom and their parents.

That present wagon looks like really nice Crate and Barrel silverware

These are some determined monkeys. Heck, even I didn’t want to have a chuppah, citing homegirl Golda’s reluctance to be married under one. Unfortunately, I was informed that seeing my parents’ only child being married partisan-style may result in a litany of medical conditions for my mom, including high fever, itchy eyes, sneezing, light heart murmurs, leprosy, and Unbearable Grief.  Which, I’m sure is the same thing Mama Meyerson told G. Anyway, back to these monkeys.

Apparently, the trainers consulted with the Jewish cultural center before they put on this show:

The monkeys’ trainer Aziz Askarian said, “We consulted with representatives of the Jewish cultural center and they approved of everything. Moveover, they gave us advice on lighting that was imported from Israel.”

I was unsure of how to react to this situation, given that A) In the past there was no cultural center and the most Russians would have consulted before making fun of Jews is the poem, “There’s no water in your hall? Then the Yids have drank it all.” and B) It seems the skit was done in a lighthearted way. At most, there should be a warning that goes out to Israelis living in Russia: Please do not live here if you don’t understand that Russia has always had anti-Semitic overtones. People, this is not Ramat Gan.

So I consulted with Mr. B, who is like a wise Latina, except that he is a Wise Russian Jew.

Mr. B: a lot of that depends on the context
Mr. B: I wouldn’t be pissed if this happened in a lot of other countries in the world
me: oh come on,  it’s anti-Semitic
me: at least they could have chosen giraffes. Jewraffes?
Mr. B: however considering how [when we lived in Russia] my mom was threatened by a drunk that wanted to carve a Star of David in her forehead and the cops said it was my mom’s fault, I tend to be more sensitive to these things
me: I tend to be more sensitive to Russians dressing up monkeys as Jews
Mr. B: would it be better if it was puppets?  it’s not like they dressed the monkeys to be money lenders
me: They could have. Maybe they just didn’t feel like making the costumes.
me: They got the peyot goin’ on
Mr. B: like the article said, they imitate many people including Russians, it’s not like this act is all the monkeys do
me: That’s true.
Mr. B: if we want to move passed being pogromed, humor needs to make a come back
Mr. B: I think it’s blown a bit out of proportion. I wouldn’t get offended if it was the Druze or something
me: cause you’re not Druze
Mr. B: so they shouldn’t do any imitation acts?
me: They can. Just not people that they tend to have killed a lot of. I wouldn’t mind it in America. Cause America doesn’t quite have a history of pogromming it up. It’s still a sore issue, and I don’t know that they approached it with the right amount of caution.

Mr. B has a valid point. But I am still uneasy with monkeys as Jews. Maybe giraffes for now.

This post originally appeared on Jewlicious.com

Jewlicious is also celebrating its 5th anniversary. Happy Anniversary, Jewlicious!

Nothing says, “You suck at life,” quite like landing at the top of the Failed States Index, compiled by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace (which sounds like something George Costanza would have come up with), except for possibly joining a Ron Paul dating website.

I was very interested in these rankings because A)I am immensely interested in international affairs B) The most failed states are a former part of the Great USSR or in the Middle East, my two particular areas of focus and C) I am  a proud former denizen of one of the countries that is rising on the failed states index, Russia.  I sure know how to party.

You can find an interactive map of the index here.  I wanted to find out more about how they compiled it, so I perused the methodology section, which states:

The 12 indicators are: Demographic Pressures, Refugees/IDPs, Group Grievance, Human Flight, Uneven Development, Economic Decline, Delegitimization of the State, Public Services, Human Rights, Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and External Intervention. Click here for more information.

A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community. The 12 indicators cover a wide range of elements of the risk of state failure, such as extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay. States can fail at varying rates through explosion, implosion, erosion, or invasion over different time periods.

What this tells me is that there is a crystal ball involved somewhere.

But, what I thought was really cool was that they take into account reading hundreds of thousands of articles over a 10-month period to really gauge the tempo of a particular country.  However, given how biased the press can be, I hope they take press clippings with a mountain of salt.  Here are some of the results they’ve come up with :

• Iraq and Afghanistan are in the top 10 (naturally).
• Bangladesh and North Korea are in the top 20, which is rounded out by small and violent East Timor.
• Israel (listed with the designation “Israel/West Bank”) is pretty high up on the list, at number 58.   Obviously this is surprising for me, because, even though I often write about how Israel is one big bowl of crazy, I can’t imagine the Middle East’s only democracy and one that seems to be surviving the global recession as a failed state.

Regarding Eurasia, the news doesn’t look so good, either.  While none of the Eurasian states are in the top twenty, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Iran show up in the top 40. Other than their ranks, there is little mention of any of the Eurasian states in Foreign Policy’s analysis of the situation.  In fact, Uzbekistan’s rank has improved, from rank 28, to 31 over the past year.  So has Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

The hotspots, predictability, continue to be Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.  The only two countries with a borderline stable rating were tiny Armenia and Kazakhstan, which is surprising, given the crisis in Kazakhstan’s banking sector.

I could play around with this index forever, but anyway, go look for yourself.  There’s interesting data and implications there, paritcularly if you analyze year-over-year growth rates in the index.

This week’s contribution is by blogger and international economist Vicki Boykis (@vboykis), whose self-descriptive tagline reads: “Snark. Economics. Post-Soviet. Jewesque.” She was kind enough to add her thoughts to this series.

1. Why Are Artists Poor? (a great question, and the title of a book by economist Hans Abbing)

a. Why are so many people who pursue “art” for a living poor, or simply unable to lead a stable financial life?

There are several answers to this question, from my experience as a part-time freelance writer with a steady daytime economist gig.

The first is that writers and other artists are not in demand. That is, literature, writing, analysis, etc. is important as part of humanity, but it is not as an essential need as healthcare, food, water, transportation, etc. So, from an economic perspective, the elasticity for art is very high.

The second is that there is an oversaturation of supply of artists in the marketplace. Many people (myself included) feel a pull to create. Not as many feel the pull to astrophysics or, say, dentistry, which is why artists often have trouble leading a stable financial life.

b. What do you think is the greatest roadblock to artists being able to make a steady living in their craft? Do they trap themselves into thinking financial success=selling out?

The greatest roadblock is the inherent nature of the artist, which lies in inspiration. How many allegorical stories have we heard of the artist not being able to create unless he was inspired? In fact, I just read an interview today with Alasdair Gray (who I’ve never heard of, by the way,) who said that he did his best writing when he was in the end of a miserable first marriage.He says, ” I was writing various chapters of Lanark throughout that time and what I can remember is that near the end of the marriage, I could only relax by describing the horrible state of the city of Unthank and the institution under it. Because what I suffered…”and went on to write a remarkable series. Often, us artists think that we can only paint after a surrealist dream or sing after listening to Susan Boyle or write after having a delicious jar of Nutella and thinking we want to describe the creamy hazely goodness for an audience.

Steady living involves something else entirely: having your nose to the grindstone. So, often, this involves writing copy or affiliate marketing articles or constantly pimping out your writing on Twitter, which creates the selling out feeling that many artists sneer at, equated with a steady living. You don’t need to “be in the mood” to add up an Excel sheet. You do to write the Inferno. In fact, that’s why the patronage system was so awesome. You could pretty much just sit around in your 12th cenutry boxers, go to Ye Olde Starbuckes at noon and crank out The Sun Rising whenever you felt like it. So yes, artists do trick themselves into this model these days, and if anyone is coincidentally intersted in patronaging a plucky economist, please contact me asap.

2. A recent article “Chinese Graduates Increasingly Drawn to the Arts” highlights a significant shift in Chinese culture and art.

a. Based on what you’ve read, what is your opinion of the recent surge of contemporary art in China? What has allowed this to happen?

The less a society is merely trying to survive, the more arts, which are, as I wrote above not necessities, evolving. Something I think about is China as that island in Lost. I pretty much have no idea what goes on in that show, but my husband watches it on Hulu in the same room I have my computer, which means I’m doomed to watching it. I remember seeing some sort of doctor in it, and he was pretty much hot stuff the first couple episodes because everyone kept coming down with some kind of plague or having babies or what have you. No one needs artists in the basic stages of society, which is what China was going through as it struggled to recover from the Great Leap Forward and into an industrial society. Now that things are going much better, its economy is growing exponentially, there is more focus on the more refined aspects of culture, expressed in art.

3. Property rights are a hallmark of a free society. How do property rights affect an artist’s ability to make a living? How can we balance the freedoms of globalization and technology and protecting artist interests online?

a. Is “crowd-sourcing” killing the individual artist?

If you’re talking about things like taking ideas from social media, I would say yes and no. Perfect example of how it has? Saving Face, a chick-lit novel written in real-time and with help from Facebook and Twitter by Dahlia Lithwick. She basically wrote a chapter a day and asked for input on legal terminology, mom terminology, and writing from Facebook fans and on Twitter. I helped out, along with hundreds of other people. Did her novel turn out great? Yeah. But she couldn’t have done it if she didn’t have the legal background on her own and writing talent to boot. So I’d say there are two sides to the coin.

b. How has creative commons changed art, music, and social media?

TONS. Just speaking from my own experience, it allows me to remix things on my website that I would never have been able to before. For example, I make a comic out of creative commons pictures based on current events. I would never have been able to desecrate great photographs in the same way before. At the same time, many great works are still not remixed. So, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in earlier contributions to the series: read Take 1 and Take 2 as well!

One of my first paid book reviews, for Interfaithfamily.com

Everyone Suffering From the Same Toothache