Preface to the First Edition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Writing this book has been a true labour of love.I wrote it over more than four years, but its gestation period has been much longer, dating back at least to the late 1970s, when I began teaching a course on the sociology of North American Jewry at McGill.I am deeply involved, personally and professionally, in the subject.The book grapples with all the major themes of modern Jewish life in Canada.Jews have always been interested in their own saga, and, as I shall argue, with very good reason.Canadian Jews are no different.Regardless of how involved or well-versed they are in Canadian Jewish life, they should find much in this book that is informative, engaging, and provocative.But this book is also written for those who are not Jewish.I have found a sincere fascination among Canadian non-Jews concerning this strange people.This has been my happy experience for many years with my eclectic band of (mainly non-Jewish) lunchtime regulars at the McGill Faculty Club.In subtle ways they, too, have contributed to this book.No subject has been off limits.Often a Jewish topic would arise, not from my own prompting.Whatever the issue -the latest turn in Israeli politics, a movie with a Jewish theme, free speech and Holocaust denial, the mysterious behaviours of Hasidic Jews, the latest Jewish joke -I would find collegial interest and fresh perspectives.This general curiosity is growing with increasing contact between Jews and non-Jews, not least through the rising rates of intermarriage.I hope this book helps.I base my assertions, at least most of them, on evidence.But I have also cut down on the jargon of social science, provided basic information, and explained Jewish and technical terms.The book is for
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.702 | 0.574 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".