Czechia is the most Jewish-friendly country in the EU, and will likely stay so. Our Jewish community used to be very vibrant and it is sorely missed.

We should indeed defend Taiwan, but we (as "the entire EU") seem to be lukewarm even about defending Ukraine which is much closer to us and in a hot war. Some people just prefer sticking their head in the sand.

Maybe the Jewish people are better at discerning building-up danger, because of their long history of persecution.

I hope it remains so. I felt an affinity from even before I stepped off the train from Munich. It's a funny story - my passport was examined by German police in the bar car of the train. My passport was not in order and they were radio calling to see whether to haul me back to Munich and detain me. I played for time as the border approached. The bartender was Czech, and he watched all this quietly. As soon as we stopped at the last town on the border, the police decided to tell me to have a nice trip, and he took me into the store room on the train, opened the window and poured shots and lit a cigarette for me as we crossed the border and said "fucking Germans. Welcome to Czechia... anything is possible!" And immediately I fell in love with the country. I would say, God bless that bartender on the train but almost everyone I met in the next year in Prague was equally kind and wonderful.

I can't speak for all Jewish people, but yes we are raised reading history to understand the way that threats can build up over time, and the multiple masks that threats can wear. For me, personally, I see this as an affinity to all small, powerless but free people... Kurds, Taiwanese, Ukrainians, Tibetans, Yazidis... particularly those who don't evangelize but simply want to be left alone to prosper and live in peace with their own people. Czechs are similar to that as the most "western-facing Slavic people" and I grew up in America enthralled by Vaclav Havel as a beacon for individuals and every small nation wanting freedom.

You are of course right that this history of persecution raises one's antennae and evokes horror at anything that seems to favor totalitarian modes of thinking. But the Czechs level of paranoia made me laugh sometimes, maybe because it was so similar.