Youtube hearted comments of Sam Aronow (@SamAronow).

  1. I think it's worth noting that a major reason only 40% of Americans have passports is because no US state has paid vacation time and some even lack unpaid vacation time. Even then, the time usually allowed is no more than two weeks. "But what about the gap year?" You may ask. Well, no such thing exists in the US as all university degrees require four years of study, including 50% general and elective studies outside one's major, instead of the three years required in the UK. And that's not even factoring in the lack of increase in real wages that's been plaguing the median American worker for the last twenty years. Finally, there's the proximity issue. The US is big and far away; the distance between New York and Los Angeles is equal to that between London and Baghdad; I'd be curious to see figures for the percentage of Europeans who have traveled that distance from their own homes in their lifetimes. And given the financial and time burdens I've already mentioned, most Americans don't even see that much of the US itself. I've visited 30 US states plus DC, and I'd venture a guess that that's more than most of my countrymen. tl;dr most Americans have neither the time nor the proximity nor the disposable income to be able to travel for leisure.
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  2. Fun fact about Esther: like a lot of literature relegated to the Deuterocanon (except for Maccabees), Esther was probably originally performed as a play after theatre was introduced by the Greeks– meaning that the way we read it aloud today, with audience participation, has probably changed very little from its original use!
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  3. I'm so happy to see Jabari getting more attention from bigger channels; he's one of my favorites.
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  4. Those are some fine-looking posters! Kudos to whomever designed them!
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  5. Congratulations! And Courland is present-day Latvia.
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  6. I bloody knew it'd be Jack.
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  7. I think we all know that the Merovingians were best known for lecturing protagonists about causality and baking exceptional chocolate cake.
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  8. I'll be doing a Hebrew evolution series on my channel.
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  9. Meanwhile, Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion are hanging out in the hospital like "what if we had a Workers' Soviet and a Constituent Assembly?"
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  10. Bold move, UsefulCharts. Let's see if it pays off.
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  11. Oh no. You put Hebrew words into Adobe's creative suite and "Tanakh" came out backwards.
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  12. "Another sucker punch from the Campbells!" –Possibly Mad Men's greatest moment
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  13. Internet Explorer can also be traced back to King Solomon.
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  14. Sardinian being the closest language to Latin is a dubious claim, as it is the last remnant of the Afro-Romance family, which was the first group of languages to diverge from that Latin spoken in Europe. Polymathy has a video somewhere explaining that the Latin of 5th-century Italy was written the same as Classical Latin but pronounced much more similarly to modern Italian.
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  15. What a coincidence! I just updated the count for my own script. Of course it wouldn't be a video on the Russian Revolution if no one could agree on the totals: 346 SR 180 Bolshevik 110 Ukrainian SR 18 Menshevik 16 Kadet 12 Alash Orda 10 ARF 7 Musavat 79 other 30 never elected
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  16. Back when I was in school in California, we didn't learn about local nations and tribes (this has changed), so we basically studied the four most stereotypical cultures that everyone had heard of, and the Kwakiutl were always my favorite for the artwork, northwestern landscape, and delicious salmon. I think northwestern peoples were having a big moment of cultural relevance in the 1990s due to the popularity of Northern Exposure, which prominently featured Tlingit and Haida characters. Tangent: it was also the first time most Americans had ever seen First Nations people depicted in a non-historic setting. I think seeing them in a modern context, still maintaining a thriving tradition but not being singularly defined by it, had a big impact on American culture that's too often overlooked.
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  17. 7:29 I'M IN THE AD
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  18. Even after our recent video, I remain stymied by friends who think Old Egyptian is a Semitic language.
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  19. It's interesting how much ire is directed at Richard I for supposedly being an antisemite, especially among people who aren't Jewish, a la Pompey. Within Jewish history, Richard is actually remembered quite positively for having put down that pogrom, which started only because the Jewish community of London had attempted to pay tribute at his coronation. Richard's regent William de Longchamp did extort the Jewish community in the King's absence, but otherwise England's Jews had more social equality than in France or the Holy Roman Empire, where they were officially servants of the government from birth, possibly owing the the fact that Medieval English Jews were Francophone rather than Anglophone. The real monster is Edward Longshanks, which is great because absolutely everyone has a reason to hate him.
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  20. Fourth!
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  21. 0:39 this looks familiar
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  22. Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to the tribe.
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  23. Happy Passover, and apparently Happy Jews Talking About Jesus Week!
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  24. Hi.
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  25. I'll be honest; I avoided this video for a long time because I assumed it was a meme video.
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  26. See you next time ;)
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  27. Okily-dokily.
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