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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm Jewish and have several friends who are at least part German.

Interesting and strange tidbit-I remember my parents saying the German Jews consider themselves classier and smarter than the Jews from other parts and they sometimes snub other Jews or something like that. There was this ranking of sorts-German Jews considered themselves at the top then Russian Jews, etc then Sephardic from various places. I know, it's inane and senseless. My parents werr of Russian Jewish decent.[/quote]

I learned this in US history class, that the more established German Jews in the United States were not all necessarily thrilled by the influx of Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early 20th century.

I was once part of a bizarre conversation or rather the observer to a conversation, while living in Spain: I had just met several people who all considered themselves German. They switched to English so that I could be included in the conversation, which was nice of them. One girl had grown up in South America, but her family relocated Germany when she was around 10 or so. They had lived in South America since after World War II, so you kind of have to wonder if they were ex Nazis. She was pretty brown, so clearly at some point someone who was Latino had married into the family. Another had been born in North Africa, and had some sort of darker coloring from somewhere, but her mother was German, and when her parents got divorced, her mother remarried a German and a moved her back to Germany. These two women were very insistent they were German and nothing else. No hyphenation of ethnicity. The third person came from a family of Russian Jews who moved to Germany in the 1970s. Apparently West Germany had some sort of "we're sorry about the Holocaust" Repatriation program for Russian Jews.

Anyway, the girl who have been born in South America started going off on this rant about how she hated Frankfurt Jews. I was shocked. I  would think that if you were German, you might want to be extra careful about saying antisemitic things, esp if front of someone who was Jewish. The Jewish guy did not react really, just continued the conversation. I could not tell if he agreed with her, and did not consider her offensive because he did not consider himself a Frankfurt Jew since he is of Russian descent, or just did not want to get into it with her, or what. I was not sure what to do. Part of me felt like I needed to speak up and call her out, but I just met them and needed to be on good terms with them for professional reasons. And also felt like she probably would just call me out and say you've  never been to Frankfurt so how do you know? So I change the topic to ask her why her Spanish was so good, as that point I did not know she had grown up in South America. She told me she had grown up in Bolivia, and I said tryingt o make conversation oh, you're Bolivian, and she snapped back, "no, I am German! I am not Bolivian!" At which point the Russian Jew non German said snidely, "yes, she is proper German. Do not ask her why she is brown" and she glared at him. At which point I started talking about the weather.

It was bizarre. I felt like there were all sorts of nuances and twist interns that I was not quite clued into.[/quote]

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