Reading The Jewish Century made me wonder if Jewish Americans (Mercurians) are less likely to "love the soil" than other groups (Apollonians) because non-agrarian occupations have been a big part of their history (notwithstanding Fiddler on the Roof). I've noticed that people with farming backgrounds often have a real affection for gardening.
The General Social Survey asked people if they've done any gardening in the past year:
Percent who garden (N = 1,242)
Irish Protestant 71.0
German 67.8
Scandinavian 65.0
Scottish 64.0
English/Welsh 63.0
Italian 62.7
Polish 59.0
Irish Catholic 57.4
Mexican 53.6
Black 43.7
Jewish 39.4
Jews are less likely than other groups to garden, but it looks like living in urban areas is a factor. I ran a logistic regression model with gardening as the dependent variable and Jewishness and population size of residence as predictrors. Even after taking into account the effect of population size--and it does matter--Jews are still significantly less likely to garden.
Where people choose to live seems to depend on a love of the land. My dad grew up on a farm and moved us out of a town of 50,000 people when I was 13 because there wasn't enough elbow room! He liked cornstalks for neighbors and was willing to commute to work for the privilege.
In a similar vein, Jews aren't into guns and hunting either. (This is a trend for all Americans--as Slezkine wrote, we're all becoming Jews.) It was cool (and weird) that the guy who taught me to target shoot was Jewish, and he berated me for not being sufficiently anti-gun control.
Are gun owners mentally ill?
Some anti-gun people think owning a gun is a sign of some kind of mental abnormality. According to General Social Survey data, gun owners ...
