245 Comments

"Never mind that Jews are not indigenous to Europe any more than blacks are indigenous to the United States."

How long do your ancestors have to have lived someplace to be considered "indigenous" to that location? According to Genesis, Abraham came from Mesopotamia to current day Israel. Does that mean his descendants are NOT indigenous to Israel?

Aside from some possibly some populations in Africa, NOBODY is indigenous to their current location.

It's not a meaningful way of characterizing people.

I've known people who were black Americans and I've known people who were immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. The black Americans were much more "American" than they were "African."

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As a Jew, I will admit to being entirely Caucasian. This is not the same as being white. My Caucasian-ness won't get me into the local KKK chapter or, if they're still organizing, the local Nazi Party.

Let us observe a distinction that both KKK/Nazis and Progressives make, some unwittingly.

Black and White is not the same as black and white. David Duke is White, and Louis Farrakhan is Black. Note the capitalization - it is an expression of identitarianism. I am pretty sure Thomas Sowell is black and Ron Paul is white, according to their own worldviews and senses of self. I'd call that racial incidentalism and distinguish it from identitarianism. This matters greatly, and I note the vast majority of mainstream media are now casting all African American historical figures as "Black" such as Martin Luther King jr. who certainly saw himself as "negro", or possibly "Negro". The do not have the right to project this on historical figures and while exhausting, they need to be challenged on it. It's a falsity that advances a Marxist and divisive agenda that harms society, but as they repeat it over and over, it becomes axiomatic nevertheless because it goes unchallenged. And it gets back to this discussion, which is the degree to which others are allowed to define the affinities and identities of those with different ancestries and/or phenotypes. I argue that human beings, being mostly able to speak for themselves, get to define their group affinities individually and should never be assigned those affinities without being asked. If that's too inconvenient for others to do, then the decent thing to do is to not assign an affinity at all.

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Thanks for sparking some real-life dialogue. It's refreshing, to say the least.

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A lot of mud indeed. This is a bottomless pit. David makes the mistake himself in imagining that Catholics had a much easier time of it.

As a Montrealer, he should be well aware of the treatment of the Irish by the Scottish, and he may be too young to remember, but in the US Catholicism was by no means a “ticket to whiteness” until Kennedy, the idea of a Catholic president was as ludicrous as a Jewish one.

The entire exercise is doomed. Pointing out exceptions to the last person’s grievance leads nowhere fast. What we need is the moral courage to say a) we should not use people’s skin color, or any other immutable characteristic, as a basis for disliking that person, and that b) there will forever be people that do it anyway.

By the way, I am not directing this at David. I suspect he agrees with what I have to say.

AZW

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Are we only WHAT we are, just that, no more, no less?

Our human sum simply the algorithmic yield of our DNA as stirred (not shaken!) by our random placement in our Parent's Home?

Without volition, captives of genetic fate, the accident of birth, our lives indelibly writ from the moment of conception on: is there nothing we can do? Or rather, is everything we do merely the ineluctable end result of our particular collection of category memberships as processed by a world filled only by categorical sorting imperatives...you're a this, go there, do that? Yes, sir, may I have another?

That seems insane, doesn't it?

Are Jews White? Who cares?

And if someone somewhere cares, so what? Why do we care?

Mom always asked us, "If everyone jumps off a cliff, would you?" "No!", my brothers and I always answered in enthusiastic unison, "Of course not -- that would be really, really stupid!"

As stupid, perhaps, as playing the "Are Jews White Game"? Or... Are Whites Privileged? Are Blacks Victims? Are Women Glass Ceiling'd? Are fat people jolly...short people Napoleons....gay people fashionable? And on and endlessly on.

Just because someone somewhere may or may not see us as a particular category stereotype... or maybe a collection of multiple category stereotypes (?!)....does that mean we must see ourselves that way? Just because some Sneetches have Stars Upon Thars....that does not make them the best kind of Sneetches on Beaches....no matter what Sylvester McMonkey McBean might say.

So let's stop it. Even if every other lemming leaps off the identity politics cliff....even if every other 'breaking news' story is about another sub-sub-sub demographic/sociographic category group whose feelings got ruffled because their sub-sub-sub demographic is 'you know'....just stop it.

For those desperate to find division and in that division the reason WHY their life does not match their heart's desire....it will not matter in the least just how completely "identity differences fade with intermarriage and assimilation"; it will never fade enough. The more things actually do begin to look alike, sound alike, feel alike....the more microscopically granular the intersectionality of victimhood will become. Witness Mr. Josephson still clinging to his two-decade-old turn down at the Narragansett Dunes Country Club because, or so he presumes, he was "too Jewish".

Just as, we might equally presume with Aesop's Fox, that the grapes on that too-high branch were 'too sour'.

So sure....yeah, absolutely... we're all Victims of Something. And if we insist on seeing the world only through an Identity Politics Lens, then... yeah, sure... there are any number of categorical identities we all inhabit that carry any number of categorical crosses. So yeah, given that pathetic mindset, every bad thing which has every happened to us....every poor grade...every promotion missed....every bad home repair experienced....every date we never got....every girl that turned us down....every team for which we were not picked....every foul beneath every basket...every pass we did not receive...every package that Amazon lost....every time the barista called on THAT guy and not me even though I'd been standing there longer....all of that is because We're a Star-Bellied Sneetch (or not).

But why on earth would we want to live that way? Why would we want to see ourselves that way?

And the truth is, the more we rabidly embrace our category memberships and carry and wave our category flags...and stomp our category feet...and gnash our category teeth ... and insist on having loud and louder Wild Rumpuses in that Category's name (Did I tell you that Short People who are Lions Fans Lives Matter!??) ....the more the Other will increasingly find reason to dislike our Category Face and want us to shut our Category Mouths...and just go away.

So stop it! Stop counting. Stop 'wallowing' in the mud that we ourselves are still helping to create.

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JG concluded his comment by acknowledging an essential truth: "Jews do not recognize the racial categories under which other nations classify peoples." Indeed, we do not. The question is therefore primarily one for non-Jews, some of whom will respect our indifference to those racial categories (and reject the premise of the question), while others will not. A portion of the latter will apply their preferred racial classification of Jews to advance a particular agenda, which imparts information only about themselves, not about Jews.

A more contemporary problem is that large swathes of American Jews view the question as if they were non-Jews, and claim to be white or non-white, or most bafflingly, "Jews of Color". That they do so proves Glenn's point—notwithstanding David Josephson's valid arguments concerning Jewish particularism—which is the inescapable fact that the vast majority of Jews in America have assimilated. I aver that they have “fully assimilated”, which is to say that they have assimilated and acculturated themselves to the point at which their presence in America is rapidly fading. When Jews invoke such terminology to describe ("identify") themselves, demographic irrelevance is an inevitable outcome.

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The article entitled 'Stop Being Shocked' by the great journalist Bari Weiss is one I would really urge people to read, especially non-Jews. It provides a lot of food for thought in this particular discussion.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/stop-being-shocked

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( Cultural especially ) Christian Privilege is a very real thing in the West. Ask any Hindu, Jew, or Muslim.

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Jews are of any race through the bloodline of a Jewish woman to her daughters and their daughter s, etc. If an original mid-eastern, Jewish woman marries a Chinese man their children are Chinese Jews, or Jewish Chinese. This can be seen all over the world. Their are Native American Jews. There are Ethiopian Jews, etc. Customs of one or both ethnic groups can be followed. Those who follow mainly Jewish customs are usually found living in close proximaty of one another. Unlike Christians, people are "born" Jews. If not religious, a person who is born a Jew is still a Jew. If a Jewish person becomes a Baptist, the person is a Jew and a Christian. I am speaking of the traditional definition of a Jew. I am not talking about conversion. There is that, as well. People don't see it when Jews are discriminated against. I am married to a Jewish man. I was not given a job because he is a Jew. I know that is why through others. I'm mostly a white European. His family is from Poland, France, and Russia. He is white. What does it mean to be a White Jew? There are plusses and minuses. It doesn't help you when you are walking home from school. and frequently have to fight the White kids who calling you a Christ Killer.

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Is this guy a troll? We can look to the esteemed career of Judah P. Benjamin, Senator from Louisiana and later the powerful cabinet official in the Confederate Government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_P._Benjamin

Looks pretty white to me, as well as a certain family located out of Memphis but owning newspapers in New York who provided full throated support for White Supremacy-before they went woke. Maybe they're not white now, but they sure used to be.

https://spectator.org/the-new-york-times-gaslights-its-support-for-white-supremacy/

Now, white, of course, counts for nothing in the real world. Croats and Bosnians were white as well. Ukrainians and Russians are white. Armenians are white. Its never about race, its about ethnic competition for control over the governing elite, which can spiral out of control under duress. The Tutsi weren't white, but they were in the way of consolidation of power by the rival ethnic group.

The problem is not "hate", its the old story that there can only be one lord of the ring.

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Just to say, if anyone has a chance to see Alex Edelman's show One of Us, which is coming to DC shortly, he parses this (lightly) in the course of his monologue, which centers on attending a white nationalist meet-up after being the target of antisemitic online hate.

JG mentions South Africa - yes, I have to say that as a Jew born in Johannesburg during apartheid, it never occurred to us to think of ourselves as non-white, despite my grandparents' extended families (who had not immigrated) being decimated during the Holocaust.

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Just be lucky you aren't Palestinian. I hear it really sucks!

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This is great news- that colleague A communicates honestly with colleague B at the same institution. This means not everyone is scared silent. Glenn’s colleague has reason to express frustration at over-generalized identity discussions. Both Glenn and John rank highly in my mind with regard to cultural awareness and literacy. But an hour discussion is not enough time for either Glenn or John to state all relevant caveats and qualifiers.

Since January 2019, Equity has never typed the word “Jew”, nor “antisemitism”, “antisemetic” in a sentence at SF Gov. I retired in Nov 2021. Except - when Israel activated “Iron Dome” to repel Hamas rockets. Even though my Palestinian neighbors have blond hair and one with blue eyes, Equity says White vs. Brown for Israeli and Muslim, respectively.

When I reported the 2019 upstate New York machete/knife attack at rabbi’s house, plus criticism at Equity Director for “All Jews are White” mis-information, my manager threatened my job security. Two years later an Equity film at work (SF DPH) with wording “White Zionist globalized media”, and every director including HR ignored my complaint of antisemitism.

State Of California ethnic studies guidelines (CA is an Equity state), places the word “Jew” among a list of European immigrant ethnicities and nowhere else. “Holocaust” is mentioned-“The USA had a delayed response due to antisemitism”, only as weapon against the “evil White power structure of USA”.

Ordinarily, the Glenn-John discussion would not be the only place to hear talk about Jewish people. But, given what looks to me like a societal near-erasure of the word “Jew” in academic documents and discussions in recent years, your discussion captures more notice.

Glenn’s colleague complaining about “Jews” presented in race terms (Not White according to far-right, White according to far left) reminds me of “Latinos” who are defined by geography and not race. “Hispanic/Latino” no longer exists at US Census Bureau.

I live in California, where ethic communities are Northern China, Southern China, Vietnamese, Filipino, and other Asian. I am unfamiliar with Jewish history and culture on east coast. I read that Trump’s golf course on (Long Island or near?) was the first one in the county to not exclude Jews.

I don’t care who is or isn’t president or governor or mayor in 2024; the society-wide race propaganda needs to stop by the end of 2023. We 350 million can do this. Salvation Army petition leads by example.

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I don't agree with a LOT of what Jewish Currents says but you can judge me for having remained on their mailing list after I signed up for one virtual event on the Soviet Jewry movement 50 years later.

I know that Ruth Wisse has said that it is understudied why Jews turned to Communism which then proceeded to turn on everything Jewish. But the kind of socialism that the founding Israeli politicians had and the New Deal liberalism that most American Jews have has a lot of room for a Jewish religious sense of there being a floor of decency that people cannot fall under. We just had a shmita year to memorialize this concept.

Kanye is not talking socialism. Kanye is talking perverted Black conservatism from what I was told that he said--"why can't Black people have our own media outlets that we control" and from how he has clearly come under the influence of Candace Owens.

(I know the OU has made a lot of progress in their Nach Yomi program but I still have to catch up with all the learning I was supposed to do last year.)

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Anyone who has even a glimmering of cultural history knows full well that the great masses of American immigrants got no benefit whatsoever from theories of racial superiority. The notion of Jews, Slavs, Italians, Irish (me) as any kind of master race would have been laughable at that time. In terms of fashionable White supremacy nonsense, none of these groups is White, pigment notwithstanding.

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This is the most inane comment section I’ve seen. No one hear Listens.

You all talk over the person who was given this opportunity to make a point.

Pretty typical, especially if it’s about a Jewish person or people.

Jewish people get discriminated against all the time but everyone has a million excuses. Yalla.

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