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>>he wasn't raised Jewish, and wasn't bar mitzvahed. But he >>self-identifies as Jewish, and I feel like I have about as >>much right to say that he's not really Jewish as I would >have >>telling a mixed race person with light skin that they can't >>self-identify as black. > >Well, black people tend to take whoever wants to claim >it (if anything, we try to claim too many people), which is >why we're generally happy taking mixed-raced people (also, >unlike white people, black people tend to feel improved by >whiteness, while white people tend to feel tainted by >blackness, >no social science mumbo jumbo-o) >
Yeah, but there are white people who feel authorized to say ignant shit like "Tiger Woods isn't really black." There are probably some black people who say it too, but the general idea is that I don't think that anyone can really tell anyone else how to self-identify. If Ryan Braun considers himself Jewish even though he doesn't observe the holidays and didn't have a bar mitzvah, who am I to tell him he can't?
>Neither here nor there, though: Jewish is a >cultural/religions >group more than it is an ethnic group at this stage, and so >cultural identification and being "raised" a certain way is >a perfectly fair criteria if that's what you want to use >
There are definitely some people (I'm kinda on the fence) who see Jewish as a race/ethnicity. For thousands of years, we were prohibited from intermarriage. We were chased out of pretty much every place we've tried to call home. Due to these things, we share more in common with each other genetically than we do with any particular country we may have been living in at the time. A Jew living in Russia may likely share more genetically in common with a Jew living in France than he will with his next-door neighbor who is non-Jewish.
> >>It would be hypocritical of me to criticize him for >>identifying as Jewish when he doesn't practice the religion, >>since I haven't been to a regular friday night service in >like >>15 years. But being bar mitzvahed is such a fundamental part >>of Jewish religious and cultural identity that it's hard to >>take him seriously as a Jew without it. And it makes me >think >>of what's going to happen when my non-Jewish wife and I have >>kids. I refuse to budge on the issue of my hypothetical son >>being bar mitzvahed. She refuses to budge on having the >child >>baptized. Somewhere in between those two events is up for >>grabs. > >Well, damn, how the fuck y'all gonna settle this? >
Today is definitely not the day for me to answer this question. *Jews you*
"this is okp tho, reading is completely optional" (c) desus
Proceed with caution. I am overtly racist.
<-- In Pigpen we trust
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