On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Max Sawicky wrote:
> A people are not a race. If all peoples were races, the meaning of
> race, such as it is, would be emptied.
If you insist, Max. Outside the US, ethnic group, tribe, nation and race are often used interchangeably depending on the context. The reason there seems to be such a wall between them in the US is a product of national political history: one is now associated with immigration and the other with slavery. (This separation wasn't always so clear even here, of course; the Irish used to be a race, as did almost group presently called ethnic). But if you define them the way Max Weber did, as "a political effective belief in a common descent," then the difference between ethnic group, nationality and race disappears. And that is generally the approach taken in the nation-state literature and the citizenship literature.
If you don't want to talk like that, that's fine. You are certainly right that it has a rhetorical charge that can be misused; Israel is not in fact South Africa. And it is certainly possible to conduct this conversation using less charged terms like nationality and descent. As long as it doesn't lead us to lose sight of basic realities, such as that an American style separation of church and state is inconceivable in Israel precisely because Judaism is defined there in ethnic terms as much as, or even more than, it is defined in cultural terms or as a belief system. (Although this doesn't mean they can't in theory have a normal immigration policy, which many have called for.)
I can't finally agree with you though that it's an off the wall way to speak. Even in America, it is common for Jews to speak of anti-semitism as a form of racism. It can't be racism if it doesn't refer to a race.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com