[lbo-talk] Re: who is Jewish

[andie nachgeborenen]

There is no easy answer about what counts as proof of Jewish identity to different groups -- including Jews.  There is certainly no univocal answer. I don't think anyone here disagrees with you about Israeli policy. Nathan is, however, right than an initial important impulse behind Zionism ()and the RoR) was to give Jews a refuge from discrimination. Your comment goes to the means adopted to that end, which, one can say with a certain degree of understatement, have been troubling. jks

joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at sun.com> wrote:At 02:54 PM 05/01/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>But Justin's point is that there is no "proof". It all depends because
>there is a complicated anthropology of the odd intersection of Jewishness as
>race, Jewishness as religion, and Jewishness as culture.

I wasn't speaking of metaphysical or logical proof. I was just referring to 
what would constitute proof to various different groups. My father was 
Jewish (it said so on his birth certificate) my mother was Greek Orthodox. 
If I had lived in Germany in WWII, I would have been a lampshade. If my 
father had emigrated to Israel when we left Romania, I might have gotten 
spat on and, certainly, the parents of potential Jewish boyfriends would 
have nixed me from the get go. In my 98% jewish high school in LA, this is 
indeed what happened. To some christians in Romania, I was a "dirty jew."


> The Right of Return is as much about saving people from
>discrimination based on an external definition of Jewishness that is
>separate from internal Jewish definitions of Jewishness.

If you want to save people from discrimination, you fight against 
discrimination. Period. You don't drive 3/4 of the population of an entire 
country out, steal their land and their property and then continue to 
terrorize the ones who remain.

Joanna

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