Reply to Is the refernece "he/she looks very Jewish" benign or an insult?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
See the post above yours. That person absolutely disputes it. 
 [/quote]

I am the PP above.

I did not dispute it - I problematized it.

Because it is, you know, problematic.  The very term "Ethnic" as used today, tends to conflate culture with origin with "Race".

Is there an Ashkenazic culture? Sure there is.

Is there a group of people whose immediate ancestors come from Jewish communities that followed Ashkenazi religious rites, regardless of whether those immediate ancestors were religious or not?  Sure there are.

Is there evidence of some genetic distinctiveness such that you could take 100 people with such descent and tell them apart from 100  gentiles, or 100 Mizrahi Jews - sure   (but its not clear to me you could tell them apart from 100 jews descended from Ladino speaking Sephardic rite communities in Italy or the Balkans)

Ashkenazi as "ethnic" group is problematic BECAUSE it conflates this last with the two earlier (and also with ashkenazi religious practice) . And also because, like racial thinking in general, it identifies a genetic correlation across a population with membership in a "group".   But that gets into the whole issue of how narratives about such statistical correlations hide the genetic diversity within said "groups" and create not particularly useful narratives about them.  [/quote]

You realize I'm far from the only one recognizing that Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group, right? It's a generally accepted fact within the anthropology, geneticist, and sociology communities.

This study further speaks to the genetic distinctiveness of our community: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1336798/[/quote]

I searched that for "ethnic" and found zero uses of the word.

again, you fail to note that "Genetic distinctiveness" is not what is problematic, but the notion of "ethnic group" and how that is used to conflate unlike things.[/quote]

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