You may be assuming an offense where none is intended, John. I was simply trying to clarify that Jews are not a race. Some people seem to think they are one.

I keep bringing it up, because it seems to be a very fuzzy area in people's minds as to what they think a Jew is. Usually you find they haven't really given it much thought at all.

It's easy to know what a Canadian is. He's someone born in Canada. A German is someone born in Germany...or possibly a descendant of someone born in Germany if you want to look at it that way. A Lakota Indian is someone descended from other Lakota Indians. A Swede is someone from Sweden. A Catholic is a member of the Catholic religious community. A Buddhist is a member of the Buddhist community. Etc....etc...

But a Jew is not necessarily someone born in any particular location (including Israel) nor is he necessarily someone born to Jewish parents (since he could be a convert) NOR is he some necessarily who practices Judaism (the religion), since he could be an atheist. Some people born in Israel (like Arabs) are definitely not Jews, but they are Israelis. So what the heck is the final definition of a person called a "Jew"? Most people never even gave that 10 seconds thought in their life, I bet.

And yet we have a special red flag word "anti-semitic" coined specially to designate people who are against Jews, and it seems to be the ultimate negative stigma possible (along with "racist" or "child molester"). So what's that about if most people can't even agree among themselves on what a Jew is and have never really thought about it? Doesn't it seem a little strange?

It's because of the extremities of emotion and attitude around these anti-semitism issues that I bring it up, and that's why it interests me. If people are going to raise very emotional issues around an identity like "Jewish" then they should at least give some thought to what it actually MEANS, right? At least I would hope they would.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a unique situation in the world, and it has been so since WWII, if not long, long before that, since there were many previous pogroms against the Jews. I think most people are incredibly mentally lazy about it, because most of them never even stopped to think what a "Jew" is, did they? They just acted on some facile assumptions about what a Jew is, picked up some cardboard stereotype from their parents and filed it in their mind, and those assumptions were probably several cards short of the whole deck.

Hitler could not have fooled so many Germans, for example, and gotten them to support his crazy anti-Jewish crusade if a few more of them had been inclined to actually THINK a bit about what a Jew is, and what varieties of possibility that entails...instead of just accepting the cardboard stereotype of a Jew that he waved in front of them.

But again, I'm clearly expecting too much of humanity, right? I expect humanity to be smart enough to get over this divisive nonsense of labelling people in groups and prejudging them on that basis, but it clearly is not going to happen in my lifetime.