>
>I can't understand why anyone can fail to see that "the Jews" is offensive.
I don't find it so, any more than "the Americans"; "the Left," etc. My grandmother usedto get upset when she say Heifitz referredto in the paper as "the great Jewisj violinist." She thought that was antisemitic. I though she was being silly. We Jews will be happy to take Heifitz and Einstein and Freud and Marx.
>Using this phrase for any but the most trivial purposes is either an
>empirical error, a failure to be informed about the multiplicity of views,
>experiences, thoughts, characteristics, etc. among those called Jews,
All groups are like this. This is pomo run amok.
or
>else it is an imputation of some mystical significance to Jewishness.
Why not? There is a people called the Jews, it exists as a social fact, nothing mystical about it.
>Christianity had a view of their mystical significance. So, apparently,
>does
>Islame, though it seems less integral than in Christianity's case. (I'm
>fairly poorly informed about the details of this). Various fascist and nazi
>groups had notions of "the Jews'" mystical significance, and used them as
>the prelude to attacks on specific persons and populations.
Yes, but the problem was not that they had a conception that the Jews exist as a group, which is true, but that their conceptiionof the group was wrong and wicked.
>Is it not obvious that "the Jews" is always suspect from the standpoint of
>democratic values? Not necessarily socialist values, but those rooted in
>the
>most elementary bourgeois democracy?
>
No more than any other group.
jks
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