I'm Jewish. Ask me anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One other comment: the reason why you are heading so many different positions is that Judaism encourages people to question things. Including what it means to be jewish.

There is a joke: once you get 10 people in a town, you have a Shul...once you have 20, there are two shuls. Because everyone has there own idea as to what it means to be jewish.

I do not believe in a personal god, but I do believe in physics.

?

[Anonymous]

Little Italy is just about gone in NYC btw. Italians in general are more integrated than jews despite many of them attending private parochial schools in the past. How many Italians do you know that have primarily Italian friends?

[Anonymous]

19:20 again. I'm not Italian btw, nor catholic, but there are many Italians in and around NYC. It could be that there are areas where they are insular, but just not where I lived or went to school and I feel I know more Italians than I do jewish people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One other comment: the reason why you are heading so many different positions is that Judaism encourages people to question things. Including what it means to be jewish.

There is a joke: once you get 10 people in a town, you have a Shul...once you have 20, there are two shuls. Because everyone has there own idea as to what it means to be jewish.

I do not believe in a personal god, but I do believe in physics.

Haha. And there's another joke (similar idea): If you have two Jews in a room, you have three opinions!

[Anonymous]

Do some Jews dislike Catholics? Why?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do some Jews dislike Catholics? Why?

There are about 15 million Jews in the world. I am sure a few dislike Catholics. Basically any question of the form "do some X dislike Y" the answer the answer is yes.

Because individuals sometimes have bad experiences with members of group Y, and they are not enlightened enough to see that a general dislike of a religious racial or ethnic group is a form of bigotry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Little Italy is just about gone in NYC btw. Italians in general are more integrated than jews despite many of them attending private parochial schools in the past. How many Italians do you know that have primarily Italian friends?

And for the most part eastern European Jewish neighborhoods where most people are secular and that are held together only by immigrant experiences are gone too. Even affiliated Reform and Conservative Jews are fairly spread out geographically for the most part. Reform more so than Conservative, generally.

[Anonymous]

I was responding to the OP who said she wasn't religious but still thought she was chosen. You even agreed this was an irrational statement by the OP.

I went back and OP said that she was undecided about G-d. That is NOT the same as being an atheist. In my eyes it is someone wrestling with faith, lacking certainty, perhaps considering different views of what G-d is as well as if G-d exists.

You seem to want to tie up everything into a neat package of "belief in G-d" That just is not the way Judaism as a living religious tradition works. It is not a set of propositions you check off yes or no to. It is a set of practices, engaged in by communities - even within a given community people will differ about the meaning of what they are doing. The only real way to understand this is to live it - short of that, you could read more about it in books. Going online and getting frustrated because Jews do not fit the categories you have around "religion" "race" etc is not going to help you understand. And again, it does not seem to me you are here to understand. You are here to argue. Belligerently.

[Anonymous]

I was asking people this the other day - how did Reubens come about? I mean they have corned beef and cheese on them, which is not Kosher... so why are they always associated with Jewish delis? They are delicious BTW.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To this blog owner. I'm very sorry you had to go through this. It sounds terrible. Obviously the people you encountered were extremely racist. Not just towards jews but toward anyone who was not like them including blacks. Do you really think that a person like myself who attended school with half jews and then went on to college that had 1/3 jews and joined a sorority of half jews is going to be as racist as the people you described? How would I even live my life? I've mentioned several times that I still have many friends who are jewish and so far have not called you a name despite being hurled accusations. Also, at the end you seem to suggest that because the school isn't diverse, it's probably this school is still racist. So you are judging whether a school is racist or not by how diverse the school is and saying that since there are so many whites, it's probable that they will be discriminatory. Can you not imagine the reverse where there is a school of mostly jew, black, Asian, or Spanish where the majority picks on the minority? Are these groups not able to be discriminatory? Of course they can be. That is all I'm saying happened to me and because I didn't see a strong tie between these people I was wondering why they were so hung up on being together all the time.

http://davidsalzberg.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-life-in-1975.html

I bolded the above because therein, in my opinion, lies the flaw in the way you are looking at this. I do think Jews have a shared cultural identity, akin to Asians having a shared cultural identity, and that it is based on a lot more than just combating anti-semitism or banding together to avoid being eliminated or whatever. Almost all of my parents' friends (aside from those they met through their jobs) are Jewish. Neither my parents nor their friends are atheists, but they are not particularly religious and it is not the practice of judiasm that brings them together. They just get each other and speak each others language. They have similar definitions of success and similar ideas about family. They have similar ideas about what is rude or polite. They have similar ideas about dealing with their emotions. Heck, they have similar ideas about how much food to serve at a party. And all sorts of other things that add up to make them similar culturally. Just because you didn't "see the tie" doesn't mean it is not there. I think non-religious WASPs are similar culturally too.

That being said, of course my parents and their friends don't "pick on" non-Jews. That type of behavior is something more than simply choosing to befriend and spend time with people with a similar culture, and that is of course repugnant.