Date: Friday, 22 January 1993 09:40:55 MST
X-Mailer: TMail version 1.15R
From: "D. C. Sessions" <dcs@witsend.tnet.com>
Organization: Nobody but me -- really
Subject: Re: jews as a race
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Distribution: world

In <1993Jan15.1777.22691@channel1>, wayne.mcguire@channel1.com (wayne mcguire)  wrote:
# 
# To: Karen Lee Givon
# 
#   WM> David Ben-Gurion, although an atheist, was still a Jew.
#   WM> Friedrich Nietzsche, although born of Christian parents,
#   WM> was not a Christian. Do you appreciate the distinction?
# 
#  KG> Do you think Ben-Gurion did not think of himself as a Jew??
#  KG> Being a Jew is more than following the religious code. The
#  KG> vast majority of secular Jews will flip over if you tell
#  KG> them that they "are not Jews".
# 
# Karen,
# 
# How can I put this politely? I can't. So far mostly what I've
# seen posted on this subject, with a few notable and blessed
# exceptions (including some email), is a pile of crap, and
# strangely neurotic, squirmy, evasive crap at that.

  Well, that's true.  But nobody made you post it.

# Let's take the Arab/Israeli conflict. Are Arabs an ethnic group
# in the racial sense? It would appear so. Are Israeli Jews an
# ethnic group in the racial sense? I don't know for sure, but it
# appears so. Both groups are Semites, are they not? Semites are
# people who share racial or ethnic traits in the biological sense,
# no?

  This stands as an excellent comment on your qualifications for this
  exchange (I can't really bring myself to call it a debate.)  Look
  up 'Semitic' in the dictionary and you'll find that the term is
  LINGUISTIC.  Semitic peoples are those speaking Semitic languages,
  which was in bygone times a surer classification than antigen
  matching.  Still a whole lot easier to apply.  Oops.

# So what, really, is all the noise about on this subject?

  Good question.  Since you're the noise source, perhaps you
  could enlighten us.  Or have we already figured it out and
  the above question is rhetorical?

#                                                          Do some
# Jews find it insulting to be regarded as an ethnic group in the
# same way that Italian-Americans or Chinese-Americans are?

  Insulting, no.  Threatening, yes.  For more than 2000 years other
  groups have tried to redefine Jews; the efforts have NOT been
  beneficent.  Like the elephant, Judaism has SOME properties
  in common with ethnic groups, some in common with religions, some
  in common with nationalities, etc.  Claiming that Jews ARE any of
  these is at best a misleading oversimplification and at worst the
  opening move in an attack on Jewish freedom or survival.

# I know of no other ethnic group which shows the least bit of
# anxiety or resentment about being classified as such. Who cares?

  Perhaps because they ARE ethnic groups?  Perhaps in those cases
  the generalization to a category still fits reasonably well?
  Perhaps because the categorical abstraction 'ethnic group' was
  CREATED for these groups?

  I rather doubt that Roman Catholics would be so sanguine about
  an official categorization as an ethnic group.  Especially if
  there were reason to believe that this would be followed by
  moves to take away protections not shared by other 'ethnic groups.'

# All us of have biological roots and are members of ethnic groups,
# or mixes of ethnic groups. I myself am a mix of English, Dutch,
# French and Irish "blood," to use a term favored by Martin Buber
# and Ze'ev Jabotinsky. I guess that makes me a person of North
# Western European extraction. Call me an Anglo-Celt, if you will.
# So freaking what?
# 
# So what is all the uproar about?

  When 'ethnic group' is used as a euphemism for 'race' by racists,
  there's cause for uproar.  Not because the racist dimwits are too
  dense to realize that they're confusing themselves with their own
  semantic fallacies, but because they ARE racists and the semantics
  are just a front for a racist agenda.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast