My grandfather was a card carrying communist in the 1930s because he was involved in union organizing amongst the mechanics and electricians. He gave it up with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which he viewed as transparently discrediting to communism.
1) The issue of Jewish leftism mostly seems to be a phenomena of elite Jews. While average Jews are slightly to the left of average whites, elite Jews are dramatically to the left, with the UMC falling in-between.
You see this pattern with other non-whites. Your middle class light skinned Cuban pretty to the right, but your professional Indian woman in NOVA being hyper woke.
2) I think there is a "somewhere vs anywhere" divide partly related to class (the upper classes move more) but also quite related to the Jewish experience of not really belonging to an area/society and having to move around.
3) I don't really see any elite Jewish conservatives. I see libertarians and I see neocons. But present author excluded I feel like I see few conservatives.
4) Jewish attitudes in Israel are so different than in America I can't help but think that there is a specifically anti-majoritarian stance that is solely related to their being in the minority. All minorities in all cultures seem to have this attitude, though not all have either the capability or inclination to make it political (East Asians for instance are temperamentally unpolitical, even if they can be counted on for some votes).
3) Yuval Levin comes to mind. Yoram Hazony. But you're correct that Jews tend to be "anywheres," so their idea of utopia is one in which Jews have freedom everywhere. This tends toward either libertarian utopianism on the one hand or America as world human rights policeman on the other.
> Jews tend to be "anywheres," so their idea of utopia is one in which Jews have freedom everywhere.
I wrote several times that this "anywhere" is rather confusing and misleading, and this sentence exemplifies this. A truly "anywhere" person would not need special freedoms beyond what local "somewheres" had. This "anywhere" is not truly anywhere: it is restricted to a distributed, largely urban milieu and habitat consisting of cultural enclaves that are partially geographically (but more strongly socially) segregated in the urban/metropolitan zones they occur in, where the peculiar culture of so-called "anywheres" exists and where they can thrive. Plop them down in a farming town in the middle of Iowa or in a factory mono-town in ex-USSR and they suddenly may not feel so "anywhere" after all.
You've described exactly why people call them Anywheres but you're getting it backwards. It is not that Anywheres would thrive literally anywhere but that Somewheres thrive, or at least desire to reside, in the specific places where they are located. Anywheres are not 'restricted' to the enclaves that you describe. The point is that they would (and do) thrive in a similar environment *anywhere*, and there is no shortage of those environments. That gives them the ability to escape from the bad consequences of the policy choices they want to impose on the 'somewheres' who are have no desire or possibly ability to relocate.
Conservatives and libertarians tend to be Somewheres in the sense that they consider whether than can live with the consequences of their policy choices because they aren't looking to move if things turn to $#!t. Zionists (used non-pejoratively as a label for Jews who support a Jewish homeland) would also tend to be Somewheres as opposed to culturally Jewish Anywheres would would be the supports of the US guaranteeing religious freedom in other countries.
You are contradicting yourself. If, as you say, Anywheres are not restricted to enclaves, then they would thrive literally anywhere. My point is that Anywheres are just as rooted in their network of enclaves as Somewheres are in their more compact localities, and therefore the distinction is not as categorical as its author suggests. This parallels the well known problem with results on supposed liberal open-mindedness, where questions on which open-mindedness is scored are those that appeal to liberals, whereas on some other questions which are not typically asked in surveys on this issue liberals are as stubbornly closed-minded and bigoted as any hick fundamentalist; exempla sunt odiosa. Somewheres used to move a lot more than they do now, by the way, e.g. the mass migration out of the Dust Bowl constituted about 3% of the total population of USA at that time, so moving away from self-inflicted trouble is not a peculiar habit of Anywheres either.
This is what I'm referring to, and I admit that its probably shifted since 1989.
There is a big difference between ordinary Jews and non-Jews (+22 vs -14), so maybe the word "slight" is off, but its in contrast to elite opinion and an acknowledgement of -14 being somewhat balanced and in line with other aspects of Jewish demographics (urban, coastal, etc).
This contrasts with elite opinion, which is a whopping -62 leftwards and basically a landslide. Most UMC non-elite Jews are probably in between, which means the voting patterns make sense.
What those graphs from forty years ago show does not support your assertions.
I would also like to know how they defined "Jew". Are atheists included? Children of those who claim to be Jewish? Do you have to be practicing? Or is it only an ethnic identification?
Pew research had a horrible time trying to figure out who, exactly, qualified as being Jewish.
But even if we grant that the people doing the survey had a good scheme for identifying who is Jewish and who isn't (which isn't possible, but let's pretend), the graphs STILL show the entire population of Jews is more liberal than the entire population of non-Jews.
"Religion is not central to the lives of most U.S. Jews. Even Jews by religion are much less likely than Christian adults to consider religion to be very important in their lives (28% vs. 57%). ... U.S. Jews do not have a single, uniform answer to what being Jewish means. When asked whether being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, ancestry, culture or some combination of those things, Jews respond in a wide variety of ways, with just one-in-ten saying it is only a matter of religion."
These days I feel far more connected to majority of Israeli Jews, who are far more conservative, whether religious or mizrahi, than Western Jews are. They can detect danger a mile away. Why we Western Jews are unable to detect danger as well as they can, is shocking to me.
3) Not elite, I guess - in a way I think the idea of an "elite conservative" is now improbable - and I don't know in what direction he's veered lately, but Theodore Dalrymple comes to mind, at least on the subject of social decay.
See Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century for an extrapolation on this theme across continental Europe and into the Pale and Russia. He details in great length the exceptional performance of Jews in urban settings over successive generations (industry, education, then eventually as influential political actors) starting in the mid 1800s. Sets Jews within the larger merchant class outsider group common throughout world history (Indians in Africa & Caribbean, overseas Chinese in SE Asia, Greeks in Europe and the NE), Germans throughout Europe and Russia, Arabs in Latin America, etc.)
Importantly echoes the idea Arnold expresses here that by the early to mid 20th Jews were vastly over-represented in communist movements, capitalism (banking, industry, prestige professions, academy) and media.
1. Jewish support for Russian vs non-Russian communist movements. Russia may be special because of the particularly vicious history of Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism, against which the Communists' claim to rise above all ethnic prejudice would have particularly stood out.
2. Contemporary support for Communism among Jewish vs African-American intellectuals. Both keenly conscious of long and terrible histories of prejudice, both easily tempted by confirmation bias to see a better alternative in the nominally anti-racist Communist movement. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes etc may well have had similar motives to the Communist-sympathizing Jews you describe.
Yes. There is a very good book about this: Verbeeten, David R. The Politics of Nonassimilation, The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century (2017)
Not mentioned in this brief essay was the important role played by the Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is covered in Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Solzhenitsyn's 200 Years Together.
Jews were never majority Bolshevik, nor were Bolsheviks majority Jews, but Jews were greatly overrepresented among them and played a key role in the secret police and the gulag. As Slezkine noted, if you were interrogated and shot during the great purges of the 1930's, it was likely by a Jew. Lenin, himself of part Jewish descent (a grandfather lived in the Yishuv, now Israel) said he could not have made the revolution without them. After WWII, Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union and huge crowds of Jews turned out for her. The Russian Jew had rediscovered his particularist identity after the murderous Nazi invasion, and Stalin grew suspicious. Remember the "Jewish Doctors' Plot," as Stalin grew ill? A huge pogrom such as had been perpetrated on other ethnic identities was about to be launched on the Jews when Stalin died and it just fizzled out.
Today, American Jews of the left focus on the Nazi holocaust, but few are aware of that other holocaust, that of the mass murders and gulags of the Soviet Union, in which Jews unfortunately played a large role.
" ...in which Jews unfortunately played a large role."
And in which Jews were by no means excluded from that demented Soviet slaughter, wherever they were present where it was carried out.
What I see as the problem is this: the refusal to look with equal scrutiny on everything that took place during the interwar years, means that we cannot begin to grasp that a kind of madness (I mean if Hitler had had his way, we'd have not only the destruction of European Jews but *all Poles* dead as well, followed by various other ethnic groups) afflicts *large parts* of the world, Asia included, good Lord, what Japan gets up to - and while I certainly don't understand it at all - the fact that it is shrouded from view means no one ever will.
I mean, whatever scant teaching goes on about WW2 - I don't think Belarus is hardly even mentioned.
And even if no one ever will plumb this bizarre world convulsion - in which but one nation, the UK, and its child the USA, really come out smelling like a rose, and yet somehow is still trotted out as the great villain of the world stage - this half-truth presentation means at the least that no one is being warned against ideology - ideology reputationally somehow has basically skated through the whole mess untainted, as the world pretends that the one crime - yes, ultimately the worst crime - was the only crime.
Read Dwyer's "War Without Mercy". It's a tremendous work of scholarship on the race-based aspects of WW II. His argument is that WW II was a Darwinist race war, in which Nazis considered Slavs and Jews subhuman, Japanese considered Chinese subhuman, and Americans considered Japanese subhuman. I read it as part of my history MA back in the 1980s, and was deeply impressed by the quality of the argument.
I see no evidence that Americans considered Japanese subhuman. More alien than the Germans that were held in very small numbers, sure (and to intern the enormous German-derived population in America, such as Eisenhower, or Nimitz, was obviously impossible). But without getting into the right and wrong of the internment, even to adduce what life was like for the Japanese in those camps as a like thing to what went on in the bloodlands, seems to me obscene.
You haven't read Dwyer. Remember, the teens fighting the war in 1941 were born in 1921. In 1924, the Democrat National Convention had the infamous "Klanbake", where they nearly nominated a prominent KKK member for president. The soldiers whose parents were Democrats were frequently virulently racist.
Dwyer documents how Japanese soldiers were depicted as apes and monkeys. Japanese prisoners were almost never taken by American troops, unless the troops were offered soft-serve ice cream as a reward. Japanese were considered morally and physically backward with poor eyesight and poor balance. Their kamikaze attacks were shockingly suicidal to the Christians who had to fight those waves off - soldiers saw it as animal atavism.
America has a long history of discrimination against Asians. The largest lynching in US history was of Asians in California. The very first federal immigration laws ever passed in this country (1875 Page Act) were passed to restrict Asian women from entering - all Asian women were considered prostitutes.
In short, 1940's America, and the soldiers who fought in that decade, were raised in a dramatically different country than we have been.
Apparently we have been raised in a country that considers e.g. ordering hundreds of people to dig a pit and then shooting them and pushing them into it, or ordering everyone to gather inside a church and then setting fire to it - is the equivalent of sending people to the high desert to live in quonset huts, garden, and do crafts.
When Roosevelt set up the concentration camps, there was no way for the American people to know that he wasn't engaged in mass murder. Americans just assumed everything was fine.
In "War Without Mercy", American soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater never took Japanese prisoners. When asked, they claimed that the Japanese never surrendered. Instead, they fought to the death like cornered animals.
But, when the American high command said that any soldier who brought in a Japanese prisoner for questioning would receive free soft-serve ice cream, the capture of Japanese soldiers suddenly soared.
So, maybe American troops did not engage in formally organized genocide. But informally? Well, a strong argument could be made. And which is worse - requiring orders to do it, or doing it spontaneously because you consider your opposition to be animals?
“One hypothesis, offered by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini, is that rabbis in the Christian era mandated that young males be taught Torah. This imposed a hardship on a farmer, who needed to tend to crops and/or livestock. A farmer could not spare his own time or the time of his sons to pursue Torah study. Instead, farmers would have found Christianity easier to live with.” So farmers choose Christianity over Judaism because Judaism was too book intensive and time consuming?
Christianity was not an agrarian religion, it was an urban religion.
Judaism defines itself biologically (matrilineal descent by the rabbis, patrilineal descent by Ethiopian Jews) and genetically (cf. the Israeli rabbinate, which began genetic testing to demonstrate Judaism at least as recently as 2019), thus Jews have *NOT* "leaned against [the Nazi definition]", unless you want to claim that Israel's rabbis are crypto-Nazis or that Israel's rabbis are not Jews.
Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, was considered an adversary to the US *BOTH* prior to and following WW II. Even during the war, the alliance was an uneasy one, which is why the Rosenburgs could be tried for treason for giving nuclear secrets to a war-time ally.
The Jewish Virtual Library seems quite proud of the Jewish contribution to socialism. Are the creators of that site Nazis?
You say Jews do not "sacralize victimhood". Alan Dershowitz says you are wrong:
"This remarkable story is all too typical of how so many Jewish leaders throughout our history have reasoned about Jewish survival. Without tsuris--troubles--we will cease to be Jewish."
Basically, socialism attracts those who are religiously minded, but are in rebellion towards God. They want the blessings of the Torah, but not the obligations of the Torah in their personal life.
They want to live life on their own terms, but somehow avoid the consequences that God has created to guide us to the life that we should be living.
Your "theory of political beliefs":......My theory of political beliefs...as it relates to a self-identification with political "radicalism" amongst white/white(ish) Westerners is that it arises from a subliminal but rather shallow desire to feel more virtuous (and sophisticated) than your ordinary Joe/Jane. The vast majority of people of this kind formed their "radicalism" on a conveyor belt from school-to-university (for people who step off at 16, "radicalism" will rarely be part of their vocabulary).
And My Theory of Political Beliefs as it relates to a self-identification with political "conservatism"? At its worst it seems to be a kind of inchoate rage. For others it springs from deep family roots. And for university-educated apostates (like me) - ones given to intellectualising? I'm not sure (maybe it is harder to identify one's own subliminals) but perhaps we are kind of Edmund Burke intellectual clones.
"My theory of political beliefs is that people tend to align with what they think of as a friendly tribe and in opposition to what they think of as an enemy tribe."
Sometimes the description of the aligned tribe as friendly might be a stretch. An important anecdote about the 1930s and Jews is contained within Amity Shlaes forgettable book The Forgotten Man. She covers the NIRA and Roosevelt's prosecution of businesses. The key case the administration eventually lost at the supreme court being the Schechter Chicken case. From wikipedia, "After the decision was announced, newspapers reported that 500 cases of NIRA code violations were going to be dropped." Also, "The Schechter brothers were Jewish (the surname Schechter means "slaughter" in Yiddish, and specifically refers to a ritual slaughterer)." The brothers had already died, but Shlaes tracked down and talked to one of their descendants who said the brothers likely voted for Roosevelt all four times. Which would include 3 elections after their direct fervent prosecution by his administration.
American Jews in those times had much worse enemies than Roosevelt. Father Coughlin in the U.S. And Hitler overseas. Roosevelt was regarded by Jews as a friend, even though he was no help to Jews fleeing Hitler. He could do that. He was regarded as a friend both by black voters and by Southern segregationists.
It's kind of like Asians voting DEM despite being massively discriminated against. Individually they feel it is the price of doing business to rise the ranks at Harvard/Google, etc.
The New Deal Coalition was a contradiction in terms, but that's inherent to any super majority.
Even a single "group", communists, can have little in common (my grandfathers working mans trade unionism was probably a lot more immediate and practical then I imagine your grandparents intellectual communism).
In politics all the incentives point towards 51%/49% in the long run, so getting FDR style victories requires getting strange bedfellows together on either legitimate (we are both getting something out of this), deceptive (both think they are getting one over on the other), or both.
Eventually, the New Deal coalition contradictions broke it down, as various groups got sniped off and circumstances changed. A similar thing happened to Reaganism.
I once taught at an Asian test prep school. I doubt a single student there ended up going to Harvard, but nearly all had Harvard caps. Many had come over from Korea knowing little more about America than that they wanted to go to Harvard.
Yes, and when I read about it this point was made clear like never before. The best alternative to vote for was a guy who was trying to put them in prison for just doing business. It is easy to see Roosevelt as the clear choice from 80 and 90 years distant.
Since none of us was actually alive and old enough to have listened to Father Coughlin - it's one of those things where I can't help this little feeling of niggling doubt about the ever-increasing reports of his listenership and influence ... if only because I am not young, I have been an avid consumer of American pop culture of the 20th century my whole life, and had scarcely heard of Father Coughlin until just a few years ago ...
Admittedly this may be a North/South thing, in a "Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you" way.
No, no, I know who he is and what a nutter, in the tradition of American nutters - I just doubt this mass appeal. Like, is he really bigger than Mary Baker Eddy or one of those weird child evangelists?
I would also guard against imagining that much in the manner of early cable tv, early radio represented consumer demand as much as, who was willing to put their garbage on the new medium.
Some of the universalizing, cosmopolitan, socialist feeling may owe partly to German-ness alone (or entwined, Germans and Jews and Romantics).
Red State Texas' Hill Country among other areas was often German-settled, that's well-known, but less well-known is that there were three strands of Germans: Protestants, Catholics, and "freethinkers". The latter for instance founded towns called Comfort and Welfare, not generally Jewish immigrants that I'm aware but they named another of their towns Boerne after a Karl Ludwig Börne, evidently, whose wikipedia page gives you the flavor of their idealism.
To this day, if you drive through Comfort for instance, you may be struck by the absence of what are thick on the ground in other Texas towns: churches. Only a handful were built, eventually.
Interesting read, Arnold. this stuff always intrigued me for the simple reason that, to my knowledge, I have none of it in my history. My mother’s family came straight into the South around 1900, and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for Communism or Socialism in the South. My father’s people came in at Philadelphia, but (from sketchy info) they seem to have been business folks and farmers in Russia and went straight into business when they got here. One great-great grandfather reputedly went to the Dakotas in the 1880s—I’m guessing as part of Baron de Hirchs’s agricultural colonies. No Communists, though.
A more interesting question is why your mother was a communist and you become a neoliberal. I would say that both ideologies have something in common that attract Jews: abstraction.
Both promise transcendence beyond personal and historic attachment, free entry, meritocracy, etc.
"Nazi racial ideology saw Jews as an ethnic group. In my lifetime, Jews have leaned against this. They prefer to think of Jews as distinctive religiously or perhaps culturally, but not genetically."
Well, when Jews themselves defined Judaism by matrilineal descent, then why complain when Jews are taken at their word? Ask any rabbi - a person's mother must be Jewish in order for the person to claim Judaism. How is that NOT a biological test? It's bad when Nazis do it, but ok when rabbis do it? That appears to be the reality on the ground.
As for the idea that Jews do not think of themselves as genetically distinct, if that were true, Israel's rabbinate would not be doing genetic testing to establish a person's Jewishness. Yet they are.
"Israel's Rabbinical Courts Begin to Recognize DNA Tests, Potentially Opening Gateway to Proving Jewishness" ~Haaretz (Sep 1, 2019)
Horowitz has a fascinating life story. One of his books explains what caused him to shift from radical leftism to conservatism. I won't spoil it, but it has to do with a friend of his having been murdered by a radical leftist thug gang.
It isn't genetic - converts don't change genetically when they are called Jews. Yet Israel's right of return is sometimes based on genetic testing of the people applying.
It isn't cultural - there isn't a consistent Jewish culture. Some people who claim to be Jewish do so only on the strength of their mother being Jewish. They don't share any other cultural aspects of Judaism, yet matrilineal descent is sufficient to make them Jewish.
It isn't matrilineal descent - the Karaites and the Ethiopian Jews both recognize only patrilineal descent, yet they have right of return.
It isn't the rabbinical system - Ethiopian Jews don't recognize rabbinic or Talmudic authority.
It isn't national citizenship - Jews can be citizens of any nation.
It isn't belief - atheists can be Jews.
It isn't circumcision - the Reform often don't practice it any more.
No matter what you point to, it is easy to find a group of Jews who don't fit the definition you choose. Judaism is like the luminiferous ether. Everybody thinks it should exist, because if it did exist, it would answer a lot of questions, but when you test to find it, you can't. It doesn't actually exist.
Judaism is an illusion maintained because Christians and Muslims have historically required Jews to exist in order to maintain their end-time prophecies. For Christianity, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have converted. For Muslims, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have been murdered. If there are no Jews, then both end-times prophecies fail. Everyone pretends Judaism exists because so many groups NEED it to exist.
But it doesn't exist.
Judaism hasn't existed for millennia.
At this point, it's just a bunch of 21st century people LARPing ancient monotheism.
But they aren't bound by religion, text, language, morality, customs or homeland. None of those things are true.
Atheists can be Jews - that is not a religious boundary.
Reform Jews don't take the Torah as binding, and many Reform rabbis no longer require circumcision.
Different groups of Jews have different native languages, and Hebrew is frequently not numbered among them (think Yiddish for Ashkenazi, or Ge'ez for Ethiopian Jews).
Morality is not consistent across groups. Ethiopian Jews completely reject the authority of the rabbinate and the synagogue system along with rabbinical moral standards. Indeed, since the ancestors of Ethiopian Jews fled before the 2nd Temple was destroyed, many Ethiopian Jews today are not aware of the 70 AD event. When they fly to Israel and take advantage of the Right of Return (which they are recognized as having), they are often aghast to find the 2nd Temple is no longer standing.
As for homeland, arguably the majority of Ashkenazi Eastern European Jews were anti-Zionists. Indeed, there are many among the Haredi who - to this very day - see the existence of Israel as an abomination. These Jews agree with Hamas and Hezbollah that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. Haredi rabbis have frequently met with Muslim leaders to advocate for this.
So, if you have a definition for what makes someone Jewish, please provide it. No matter what definition you bring forward, if you do honest research, you will find a group of people who are recognized as Jews, yet do not fit your definition.
You’re being obstinate. As a people we are bound by these things in a far more comprehensive way than any other I can think of. Will all Jews subscribe to all of them? Obviously not. But that is my point about variation. There is enough commonality to substantiate my argument.
As should be clear by now, I am not interested in “all or nothing.” I don’t know if you are Jewish, but if you are, you probably know that, unlike all the others, Judaism is a religion of action, NOT of belief. Orthodox define it strictly as matrilineal. Most Jews are far more flexible in their definition. But the overlap is the essence.
Well, as Upton Sinclair might have said 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his personal identity depends on his not understanding it.'
You have just demonstrated that you can not provide a definition of what it means to be Jewish. The (undefined) "overlap" is both, according to your lights, essential and - by easy investigation - so overarching that literally ANYONE can be a Jew, if they choose to self-identify as one.
You claim Judaism is a religion of action, but the single most important Jewish action for a thousand years was sacrifice in the Temple, and no Jew has performed that action in 2000 years. If action is the basis of Judaism, why are rabbis doing genetic testing to determine who is Jewish? Yet right after claiming "action" as the basis, you then acknowledge that action is NOT a basis (it's matrilineal).
You not only cannot provide a definition, what statements you DO provide immediately contradict each other.
Your own responses show that Judaism is an illusion, a fantasy, a LARP. Judaism is whatever anyone chooses to say it is. The same person can define it in two completely contradictory sentences in the same paragraph, and still insist the whole explanation works.
It is the theological version of the luminiferous ether. It explains everything except itself, which it cannot explain, or even demonstrate. Judaism is a null set.
Myriad things. That's why Jews are not defined merely by their choice of belief, but by so many things. One of the reasons for that is that Jews don't proselytize others hoping to convert them. There is somewhat less "watering down" of the connections.
It is narrated in the hadith that the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until you fight the Jews, until a Jew will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will say: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him – except the gharqad (a kind of thorny tree).’
“Narrated Abu Huraira, Allah’s Apostle said, “By Him in whose hands my soul is, son of Mary, Jesus will shortly descend amongst you people (Muslims) as a just ruler and will break the cross and kill the pig and abolish the Jizya (a tax taken from the non-Muslims, who are in the protection of the Muslim government).” (Vol. 3:425)
“There is a hadith that says Islam will rule the world just before the world ends. At that time, there will be a war between Muslims and Jews, a lot of killing. Jesus Christ will guide the Muslim troops as a Muslim. We believe he will come again and break the cross. He will show he was a prophet, not the son of God. The world will benefit when it is Muslim. Everyone will feel at ease.”
Jews have more intense connections of the ones you mention above than other religions. Often not just one or two, but many: genetic, religious, Jewish mother, strong family bonds, cultural habits, surname, and more.
There is no such thing as a Jew. Judaism died out shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. The entire rabbi-synagogue system is an absurdist response to the loss of that central identity.
Second, the people who claim to be Jews today are not special, they do not feel more, they do not have more intense connections than any other group of people you care to name. Middle-eastern peoples, whether Muslim, Berber, Arab, whatever, are not genetically distinct from the people who claim to be Jews, there is no substantial or consistent differences between those who claim Judaism and those who claim any other heritage or lifestyle. In fact, the Judaism claim is made by so many different groups of people that the Berbers, Arabs, gypsies, etc. have a much better argument for uniqueness as a group than those who claim Judaism.
My grandfather was a card carrying communist in the 1930s because he was involved in union organizing amongst the mechanics and electricians. He gave it up with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which he viewed as transparently discrediting to communism.
1) The issue of Jewish leftism mostly seems to be a phenomena of elite Jews. While average Jews are slightly to the left of average whites, elite Jews are dramatically to the left, with the UMC falling in-between.
You see this pattern with other non-whites. Your middle class light skinned Cuban pretty to the right, but your professional Indian woman in NOVA being hyper woke.
2) I think there is a "somewhere vs anywhere" divide partly related to class (the upper classes move more) but also quite related to the Jewish experience of not really belonging to an area/society and having to move around.
3) I don't really see any elite Jewish conservatives. I see libertarians and I see neocons. But present author excluded I feel like I see few conservatives.
4) Jewish attitudes in Israel are so different than in America I can't help but think that there is a specifically anti-majoritarian stance that is solely related to their being in the minority. All minorities in all cultures seem to have this attitude, though not all have either the capability or inclination to make it political (East Asians for instance are temperamentally unpolitical, even if they can be counted on for some votes).
3) Yuval Levin comes to mind. Yoram Hazony. But you're correct that Jews tend to be "anywheres," so their idea of utopia is one in which Jews have freedom everywhere. This tends toward either libertarian utopianism on the one hand or America as world human rights policeman on the other.
> Jews tend to be "anywheres," so their idea of utopia is one in which Jews have freedom everywhere.
I wrote several times that this "anywhere" is rather confusing and misleading, and this sentence exemplifies this. A truly "anywhere" person would not need special freedoms beyond what local "somewheres" had. This "anywhere" is not truly anywhere: it is restricted to a distributed, largely urban milieu and habitat consisting of cultural enclaves that are partially geographically (but more strongly socially) segregated in the urban/metropolitan zones they occur in, where the peculiar culture of so-called "anywheres" exists and where they can thrive. Plop them down in a farming town in the middle of Iowa or in a factory mono-town in ex-USSR and they suddenly may not feel so "anywhere" after all.
You've described exactly why people call them Anywheres but you're getting it backwards. It is not that Anywheres would thrive literally anywhere but that Somewheres thrive, or at least desire to reside, in the specific places where they are located. Anywheres are not 'restricted' to the enclaves that you describe. The point is that they would (and do) thrive in a similar environment *anywhere*, and there is no shortage of those environments. That gives them the ability to escape from the bad consequences of the policy choices they want to impose on the 'somewheres' who are have no desire or possibly ability to relocate.
Conservatives and libertarians tend to be Somewheres in the sense that they consider whether than can live with the consequences of their policy choices because they aren't looking to move if things turn to $#!t. Zionists (used non-pejoratively as a label for Jews who support a Jewish homeland) would also tend to be Somewheres as opposed to culturally Jewish Anywheres would would be the supports of the US guaranteeing religious freedom in other countries.
You are contradicting yourself. If, as you say, Anywheres are not restricted to enclaves, then they would thrive literally anywhere. My point is that Anywheres are just as rooted in their network of enclaves as Somewheres are in their more compact localities, and therefore the distinction is not as categorical as its author suggests. This parallels the well known problem with results on supposed liberal open-mindedness, where questions on which open-mindedness is scored are those that appeal to liberals, whereas on some other questions which are not typically asked in surveys on this issue liberals are as stubbornly closed-minded and bigoted as any hick fundamentalist; exempla sunt odiosa. Somewheres used to move a lot more than they do now, by the way, e.g. the mass migration out of the Dust Bowl constituted about 3% of the total population of USA at that time, so moving away from self-inflicted trouble is not a peculiar habit of Anywheres either.
Incorrect.
The data has already been collected.
America's Jews have voted hard left for as long as America has kept records.
It isn't an elite thing, it's a majority thing.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-voting-record-in-u-s-presidential-elections
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62864e35-a215-46c5-9e74-069ef52faa0d_1280x720.png
This is what I'm referring to, and I admit that its probably shifted since 1989.
There is a big difference between ordinary Jews and non-Jews (+22 vs -14), so maybe the word "slight" is off, but its in contrast to elite opinion and an acknowledgement of -14 being somewhat balanced and in line with other aspects of Jewish demographics (urban, coastal, etc).
This contrasts with elite opinion, which is a whopping -62 leftwards and basically a landslide. Most UMC non-elite Jews are probably in between, which means the voting patterns make sense.
What those graphs from forty years ago show does not support your assertions.
I would also like to know how they defined "Jew". Are atheists included? Children of those who claim to be Jewish? Do you have to be practicing? Or is it only an ethnic identification?
Pew research had a horrible time trying to figure out who, exactly, qualified as being Jewish.
But even if we grant that the people doing the survey had a good scheme for identifying who is Jewish and who isn't (which isn't possible, but let's pretend), the graphs STILL show the entire population of Jews is more liberal than the entire population of non-Jews.
"Religion is not central to the lives of most U.S. Jews. Even Jews by religion are much less likely than Christian adults to consider religion to be very important in their lives (28% vs. 57%). ... U.S. Jews do not have a single, uniform answer to what being Jewish means. When asked whether being Jewish is mainly a matter of religion, ancestry, culture or some combination of those things, Jews respond in a wide variety of ways, with just one-in-ten saying it is only a matter of religion."
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-identity-and-belief/
These days I feel far more connected to majority of Israeli Jews, who are far more conservative, whether religious or mizrahi, than Western Jews are. They can detect danger a mile away. Why we Western Jews are unable to detect danger as well as they can, is shocking to me.
Would you count Bernie Marcus? Conrad Black?
3) Not elite, I guess - in a way I think the idea of an "elite conservative" is now improbable - and I don't know in what direction he's veered lately, but Theodore Dalrymple comes to mind, at least on the subject of social decay.
See Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century for an extrapolation on this theme across continental Europe and into the Pale and Russia. He details in great length the exceptional performance of Jews in urban settings over successive generations (industry, education, then eventually as influential political actors) starting in the mid 1800s. Sets Jews within the larger merchant class outsider group common throughout world history (Indians in Africa & Caribbean, overseas Chinese in SE Asia, Greeks in Europe and the NE), Germans throughout Europe and Russia, Arabs in Latin America, etc.)
Importantly echoes the idea Arnold expresses here that by the early to mid 20th Jews were vastly over-represented in communist movements, capitalism (banking, industry, prestige professions, academy) and media.
Good interview with Slezkine here with Harry Kreisler: https://youtu.be/K_nhahTUFWo?feature=shared
Two useful comparisons here would be:
1. Jewish support for Russian vs non-Russian communist movements. Russia may be special because of the particularly vicious history of Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism, against which the Communists' claim to rise above all ethnic prejudice would have particularly stood out.
2. Contemporary support for Communism among Jewish vs African-American intellectuals. Both keenly conscious of long and terrible histories of prejudice, both easily tempted by confirmation bias to see a better alternative in the nominally anti-racist Communist movement. Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes etc may well have had similar motives to the Communist-sympathizing Jews you describe.
I recall that ex-communist David Horowitz described the Jewish communist enclaves in New York as a kind of shtetl.
Yes. There is a very good book about this: Verbeeten, David R. The Politics of Nonassimilation, The American Jewish Left in the Twentieth Century (2017)
Not mentioned in this brief essay was the important role played by the Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution, which is covered in Slezkine's The Jewish Century and Solzhenitsyn's 200 Years Together.
Jews were never majority Bolshevik, nor were Bolsheviks majority Jews, but Jews were greatly overrepresented among them and played a key role in the secret police and the gulag. As Slezkine noted, if you were interrogated and shot during the great purges of the 1930's, it was likely by a Jew. Lenin, himself of part Jewish descent (a grandfather lived in the Yishuv, now Israel) said he could not have made the revolution without them. After WWII, Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union and huge crowds of Jews turned out for her. The Russian Jew had rediscovered his particularist identity after the murderous Nazi invasion, and Stalin grew suspicious. Remember the "Jewish Doctors' Plot," as Stalin grew ill? A huge pogrom such as had been perpetrated on other ethnic identities was about to be launched on the Jews when Stalin died and it just fizzled out.
Today, American Jews of the left focus on the Nazi holocaust, but few are aware of that other holocaust, that of the mass murders and gulags of the Soviet Union, in which Jews unfortunately played a large role.
" ...in which Jews unfortunately played a large role."
And in which Jews were by no means excluded from that demented Soviet slaughter, wherever they were present where it was carried out.
What I see as the problem is this: the refusal to look with equal scrutiny on everything that took place during the interwar years, means that we cannot begin to grasp that a kind of madness (I mean if Hitler had had his way, we'd have not only the destruction of European Jews but *all Poles* dead as well, followed by various other ethnic groups) afflicts *large parts* of the world, Asia included, good Lord, what Japan gets up to - and while I certainly don't understand it at all - the fact that it is shrouded from view means no one ever will.
I mean, whatever scant teaching goes on about WW2 - I don't think Belarus is hardly even mentioned.
And even if no one ever will plumb this bizarre world convulsion - in which but one nation, the UK, and its child the USA, really come out smelling like a rose, and yet somehow is still trotted out as the great villain of the world stage - this half-truth presentation means at the least that no one is being warned against ideology - ideology reputationally somehow has basically skated through the whole mess untainted, as the world pretends that the one crime - yes, ultimately the worst crime - was the only crime.
Read Dwyer's "War Without Mercy". It's a tremendous work of scholarship on the race-based aspects of WW II. His argument is that WW II was a Darwinist race war, in which Nazis considered Slavs and Jews subhuman, Japanese considered Chinese subhuman, and Americans considered Japanese subhuman. I read it as part of my history MA back in the 1980s, and was deeply impressed by the quality of the argument.
I see no evidence that Americans considered Japanese subhuman. More alien than the Germans that were held in very small numbers, sure (and to intern the enormous German-derived population in America, such as Eisenhower, or Nimitz, was obviously impossible). But without getting into the right and wrong of the internment, even to adduce what life was like for the Japanese in those camps as a like thing to what went on in the bloodlands, seems to me obscene.
You haven't read Dwyer. Remember, the teens fighting the war in 1941 were born in 1921. In 1924, the Democrat National Convention had the infamous "Klanbake", where they nearly nominated a prominent KKK member for president. The soldiers whose parents were Democrats were frequently virulently racist.
Dwyer documents how Japanese soldiers were depicted as apes and monkeys. Japanese prisoners were almost never taken by American troops, unless the troops were offered soft-serve ice cream as a reward. Japanese were considered morally and physically backward with poor eyesight and poor balance. Their kamikaze attacks were shockingly suicidal to the Christians who had to fight those waves off - soldiers saw it as animal atavism.
America has a long history of discrimination against Asians. The largest lynching in US history was of Asians in California. The very first federal immigration laws ever passed in this country (1875 Page Act) were passed to restrict Asian women from entering - all Asian women were considered prostitutes.
In short, 1940's America, and the soldiers who fought in that decade, were raised in a dramatically different country than we have been.
Apparently we have been raised in a country that considers e.g. ordering hundreds of people to dig a pit and then shooting them and pushing them into it, or ordering everyone to gather inside a church and then setting fire to it - is the equivalent of sending people to the high desert to live in quonset huts, garden, and do crafts.
I appreciate your serenity of mind, though.
When Roosevelt set up the concentration camps, there was no way for the American people to know that he wasn't engaged in mass murder. Americans just assumed everything was fine.
In "War Without Mercy", American soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater never took Japanese prisoners. When asked, they claimed that the Japanese never surrendered. Instead, they fought to the death like cornered animals.
But, when the American high command said that any soldier who brought in a Japanese prisoner for questioning would receive free soft-serve ice cream, the capture of Japanese soldiers suddenly soared.
So, maybe American troops did not engage in formally organized genocide. But informally? Well, a strong argument could be made. And which is worse - requiring orders to do it, or doing it spontaneously because you consider your opposition to be animals?
“One hypothesis, offered by Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini, is that rabbis in the Christian era mandated that young males be taught Torah. This imposed a hardship on a farmer, who needed to tend to crops and/or livestock. A farmer could not spare his own time or the time of his sons to pursue Torah study. Instead, farmers would have found Christianity easier to live with.” So farmers choose Christianity over Judaism because Judaism was too book intensive and time consuming?
This is counter-historical. Historically speaking, Christianity was an urban religion. Indeed, the word "pagan" just means "farmer."
This entire essay is rife with historical errors. It's a "just-so" story.
In what ways is it erroneous?
Christianity was not an agrarian religion, it was an urban religion.
Judaism defines itself biologically (matrilineal descent by the rabbis, patrilineal descent by Ethiopian Jews) and genetically (cf. the Israeli rabbinate, which began genetic testing to demonstrate Judaism at least as recently as 2019), thus Jews have *NOT* "leaned against [the Nazi definition]", unless you want to claim that Israel's rabbis are crypto-Nazis or that Israel's rabbis are not Jews.
Communism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, was considered an adversary to the US *BOTH* prior to and following WW II. Even during the war, the alliance was an uneasy one, which is why the Rosenburgs could be tried for treason for giving nuclear secrets to a war-time ally.
The Jewish Virtual Library seems quite proud of the Jewish contribution to socialism. Are the creators of that site Nazis?
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/socialism
You say Jews do not "sacralize victimhood". Alan Dershowitz says you are wrong:
"This remarkable story is all too typical of how so many Jewish leaders throughout our history have reasoned about Jewish survival. Without tsuris--troubles--we will cease to be Jewish."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dershowitz-jew.html
I could go on, but the combox is not the place for an essay.
Basically, socialism attracts those who are religiously minded, but are in rebellion towards God. They want the blessings of the Torah, but not the obligations of the Torah in their personal life.
They want to live life on their own terms, but somehow avoid the consequences that God has created to guide us to the life that we should be living.
Excellent food for thought.
Your "theory of political beliefs":......My theory of political beliefs...as it relates to a self-identification with political "radicalism" amongst white/white(ish) Westerners is that it arises from a subliminal but rather shallow desire to feel more virtuous (and sophisticated) than your ordinary Joe/Jane. The vast majority of people of this kind formed their "radicalism" on a conveyor belt from school-to-university (for people who step off at 16, "radicalism" will rarely be part of their vocabulary).
And My Theory of Political Beliefs as it relates to a self-identification with political "conservatism"? At its worst it seems to be a kind of inchoate rage. For others it springs from deep family roots. And for university-educated apostates (like me) - ones given to intellectualising? I'm not sure (maybe it is harder to identify one's own subliminals) but perhaps we are kind of Edmund Burke intellectual clones.
"My theory of political beliefs is that people tend to align with what they think of as a friendly tribe and in opposition to what they think of as an enemy tribe."
Sometimes the description of the aligned tribe as friendly might be a stretch. An important anecdote about the 1930s and Jews is contained within Amity Shlaes forgettable book The Forgotten Man. She covers the NIRA and Roosevelt's prosecution of businesses. The key case the administration eventually lost at the supreme court being the Schechter Chicken case. From wikipedia, "After the decision was announced, newspapers reported that 500 cases of NIRA code violations were going to be dropped." Also, "The Schechter brothers were Jewish (the surname Schechter means "slaughter" in Yiddish, and specifically refers to a ritual slaughterer)." The brothers had already died, but Shlaes tracked down and talked to one of their descendants who said the brothers likely voted for Roosevelt all four times. Which would include 3 elections after their direct fervent prosecution by his administration.
American Jews in those times had much worse enemies than Roosevelt. Father Coughlin in the U.S. And Hitler overseas. Roosevelt was regarded by Jews as a friend, even though he was no help to Jews fleeing Hitler. He could do that. He was regarded as a friend both by black voters and by Southern segregationists.
It's kind of like Asians voting DEM despite being massively discriminated against. Individually they feel it is the price of doing business to rise the ranks at Harvard/Google, etc.
The New Deal Coalition was a contradiction in terms, but that's inherent to any super majority.
Even a single "group", communists, can have little in common (my grandfathers working mans trade unionism was probably a lot more immediate and practical then I imagine your grandparents intellectual communism).
In politics all the incentives point towards 51%/49% in the long run, so getting FDR style victories requires getting strange bedfellows together on either legitimate (we are both getting something out of this), deceptive (both think they are getting one over on the other), or both.
Eventually, the New Deal coalition contradictions broke it down, as various groups got sniped off and circumstances changed. A similar thing happened to Reaganism.
The percentage of Asians anywhere close to Harvard or Google is tiny.
I once taught at an Asian test prep school. I doubt a single student there ended up going to Harvard, but nearly all had Harvard caps. Many had come over from Korea knowing little more about America than that they wanted to go to Harvard.
It is close to their hearts.
Yes, and when I read about it this point was made clear like never before. The best alternative to vote for was a guy who was trying to put them in prison for just doing business. It is easy to see Roosevelt as the clear choice from 80 and 90 years distant.
It seems easy to see in the 30s and 40s why some might choose communism considering the other tribes on offer.
Since none of us was actually alive and old enough to have listened to Father Coughlin - it's one of those things where I can't help this little feeling of niggling doubt about the ever-increasing reports of his listenership and influence ... if only because I am not young, I have been an avid consumer of American pop culture of the 20th century my whole life, and had scarcely heard of Father Coughlin until just a few years ago ...
Admittedly this may be a North/South thing, in a "Watergate does not bother me/Does your conscience bother you" way.
See https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/radioactive
No, no, I know who he is and what a nutter, in the tradition of American nutters - I just doubt this mass appeal. Like, is he really bigger than Mary Baker Eddy or one of those weird child evangelists?
I would also guard against imagining that much in the manner of early cable tv, early radio represented consumer demand as much as, who was willing to put their garbage on the new medium.
The majority of American houses did not own a radio at his supposed peak.
Much of America was not even electrified.
Wikipedia says " It is estimated that at his peak, one-third of the nation listened to his broadcasts"
No, not forgettable. An extraordinary book.
Some of the universalizing, cosmopolitan, socialist feeling may owe partly to German-ness alone (or entwined, Germans and Jews and Romantics).
Red State Texas' Hill Country among other areas was often German-settled, that's well-known, but less well-known is that there were three strands of Germans: Protestants, Catholics, and "freethinkers". The latter for instance founded towns called Comfort and Welfare, not generally Jewish immigrants that I'm aware but they named another of their towns Boerne after a Karl Ludwig Börne, evidently, whose wikipedia page gives you the flavor of their idealism.
To this day, if you drive through Comfort for instance, you may be struck by the absence of what are thick on the ground in other Texas towns: churches. Only a handful were built, eventually.
Interesting read, Arnold. this stuff always intrigued me for the simple reason that, to my knowledge, I have none of it in my history. My mother’s family came straight into the South around 1900, and there wasn’t much enthusiasm for Communism or Socialism in the South. My father’s people came in at Philadelphia, but (from sketchy info) they seem to have been business folks and farmers in Russia and went straight into business when they got here. One great-great grandfather reputedly went to the Dakotas in the 1880s—I’m guessing as part of Baron de Hirchs’s agricultural colonies. No Communists, though.
A more interesting question is why your mother was a communist and you become a neoliberal. I would say that both ideologies have something in common that attract Jews: abstraction.
Both promise transcendence beyond personal and historic attachment, free entry, meritocracy, etc.
"Nazi racial ideology saw Jews as an ethnic group. In my lifetime, Jews have leaned against this. They prefer to think of Jews as distinctive religiously or perhaps culturally, but not genetically."
Well, when Jews themselves defined Judaism by matrilineal descent, then why complain when Jews are taken at their word? Ask any rabbi - a person's mother must be Jewish in order for the person to claim Judaism. How is that NOT a biological test? It's bad when Nazis do it, but ok when rabbis do it? That appears to be the reality on the ground.
As for the idea that Jews do not think of themselves as genetically distinct, if that were true, Israel's rabbinate would not be doing genetic testing to establish a person's Jewishness. Yet they are.
"Israel's Rabbinical Courts Begin to Recognize DNA Tests, Potentially Opening Gateway to Proving Jewishness" ~Haaretz (Sep 1, 2019)
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-09-01/ty-article/.premium/will-dna-testing-become-the-gateway-to-proving-jewishness/0000017f-dc8a-df9c-a17f-fe9a2f270000
Apr 29, 2019
No elite Jewish conservatives? What about David Horowitz, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, David Goldman?
Horowitz has a fascinating life story. One of his books explains what caused him to shift from radical leftism to conservatism. I won't spoil it, but it has to do with a friend of his having been murdered by a radical leftist thug gang.
Actual Judaism is incompatible with communism, the Torah assumes private ownership, even in the future messianic era, see Micah 4:4
They know nothing about actual Judaism and care even less.
👏🏻 Absolutely.
Define what Judaism is.
It isn't genetic - converts don't change genetically when they are called Jews. Yet Israel's right of return is sometimes based on genetic testing of the people applying.
It isn't cultural - there isn't a consistent Jewish culture. Some people who claim to be Jewish do so only on the strength of their mother being Jewish. They don't share any other cultural aspects of Judaism, yet matrilineal descent is sufficient to make them Jewish.
It isn't matrilineal descent - the Karaites and the Ethiopian Jews both recognize only patrilineal descent, yet they have right of return.
It isn't the rabbinical system - Ethiopian Jews don't recognize rabbinic or Talmudic authority.
It isn't national citizenship - Jews can be citizens of any nation.
It isn't belief - atheists can be Jews.
It isn't circumcision - the Reform often don't practice it any more.
No matter what you point to, it is easy to find a group of Jews who don't fit the definition you choose. Judaism is like the luminiferous ether. Everybody thinks it should exist, because if it did exist, it would answer a lot of questions, but when you test to find it, you can't. It doesn't actually exist.
Judaism is an illusion maintained because Christians and Muslims have historically required Jews to exist in order to maintain their end-time prophecies. For Christianity, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have converted. For Muslims, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have been murdered. If there are no Jews, then both end-times prophecies fail. Everyone pretends Judaism exists because so many groups NEED it to exist.
But it doesn't exist.
Judaism hasn't existed for millennia.
At this point, it's just a bunch of 21st century people LARPing ancient monotheism.
Bollocks! Find another people equally bound by religion, text, language, morality, customs and homeland. You’re arguing that there is variation. So?
But they aren't bound by religion, text, language, morality, customs or homeland. None of those things are true.
Atheists can be Jews - that is not a religious boundary.
Reform Jews don't take the Torah as binding, and many Reform rabbis no longer require circumcision.
Different groups of Jews have different native languages, and Hebrew is frequently not numbered among them (think Yiddish for Ashkenazi, or Ge'ez for Ethiopian Jews).
Morality is not consistent across groups. Ethiopian Jews completely reject the authority of the rabbinate and the synagogue system along with rabbinical moral standards. Indeed, since the ancestors of Ethiopian Jews fled before the 2nd Temple was destroyed, many Ethiopian Jews today are not aware of the 70 AD event. When they fly to Israel and take advantage of the Right of Return (which they are recognized as having), they are often aghast to find the 2nd Temple is no longer standing.
As for homeland, arguably the majority of Ashkenazi Eastern European Jews were anti-Zionists. Indeed, there are many among the Haredi who - to this very day - see the existence of Israel as an abomination. These Jews agree with Hamas and Hezbollah that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. Haredi rabbis have frequently met with Muslim leaders to advocate for this.
So, if you have a definition for what makes someone Jewish, please provide it. No matter what definition you bring forward, if you do honest research, you will find a group of people who are recognized as Jews, yet do not fit your definition.
You’re being obstinate. As a people we are bound by these things in a far more comprehensive way than any other I can think of. Will all Jews subscribe to all of them? Obviously not. But that is my point about variation. There is enough commonality to substantiate my argument.
Christians can be defined in one sentence - anyone who believes Jesus is God is a Christian.
Muslims can be defined in one sentence - anyone who believes that Mohammed was the last and best prophet of God is a Muslim.
Buddhists can be defined in one sentence - anyone who follows the teachings of Buddha.
Hindus can be defined as anyone who believes in the divinity of the Vedas, in karma and in reincarnation.
Now, you claim Jews can be distinguished from other groups.
Ok.
Do it.
Provide a sentence or paragraph description that simultaneously encompasses all Jews, and yet does not include anyone who is not a Jew.
As should be clear by now, I am not interested in “all or nothing.” I don’t know if you are Jewish, but if you are, you probably know that, unlike all the others, Judaism is a religion of action, NOT of belief. Orthodox define it strictly as matrilineal. Most Jews are far more flexible in their definition. But the overlap is the essence.
Well, as Upton Sinclair might have said 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his personal identity depends on his not understanding it.'
You have just demonstrated that you can not provide a definition of what it means to be Jewish. The (undefined) "overlap" is both, according to your lights, essential and - by easy investigation - so overarching that literally ANYONE can be a Jew, if they choose to self-identify as one.
You claim Judaism is a religion of action, but the single most important Jewish action for a thousand years was sacrifice in the Temple, and no Jew has performed that action in 2000 years. If action is the basis of Judaism, why are rabbis doing genetic testing to determine who is Jewish? Yet right after claiming "action" as the basis, you then acknowledge that action is NOT a basis (it's matrilineal).
You not only cannot provide a definition, what statements you DO provide immediately contradict each other.
Your own responses show that Judaism is an illusion, a fantasy, a LARP. Judaism is whatever anyone chooses to say it is. The same person can define it in two completely contradictory sentences in the same paragraph, and still insist the whole explanation works.
It is the theological version of the luminiferous ether. It explains everything except itself, which it cannot explain, or even demonstrate. Judaism is a null set.
Myriad things. That's why Jews are not defined merely by their choice of belief, but by so many things. One of the reasons for that is that Jews don't proselytize others hoping to convert them. There is somewhat less "watering down" of the connections.
“ For Muslims, Jesus doesn't return until all the Jews have been murdered.”
Can you provide some details on this? This is the first I’ve heard of it.
It is narrated in the hadith that the Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until you fight the Jews, until a Jew will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will say: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah, here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him – except the gharqad (a kind of thorny tree).’
https://islamqa.info/en/answers/223275/in-the-battle-between-the-jews-and-the-muslims-at-the-end-of-time-the-aggressors-will-be-the-jews
“Narrated Abu Huraira, Allah’s Apostle said, “By Him in whose hands my soul is, son of Mary, Jesus will shortly descend amongst you people (Muslims) as a just ruler and will break the cross and kill the pig and abolish the Jizya (a tax taken from the non-Muslims, who are in the protection of the Muslim government).” (Vol. 3:425)
“There is a hadith that says Islam will rule the world just before the world ends. At that time, there will be a war between Muslims and Jews, a lot of killing. Jesus Christ will guide the Muslim troops as a Muslim. We believe he will come again and break the cross. He will show he was a prophet, not the son of God. The world will benefit when it is Muslim. Everyone will feel at ease.”
https://www.zwemercenter.com/jesus-jerusalem-the-islamic-end-times/
Muslims do NOT consider Jesus to be God, but DO portray him as the judge of everyone on the Last Day.
Jews have more intense connections of the ones you mention above than other religions. Often not just one or two, but many: genetic, religious, Jewish mother, strong family bonds, cultural habits, surname, and more.
There is no such thing as a Jew. Judaism died out shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. The entire rabbi-synagogue system is an absurdist response to the loss of that central identity.
Second, the people who claim to be Jews today are not special, they do not feel more, they do not have more intense connections than any other group of people you care to name. Middle-eastern peoples, whether Muslim, Berber, Arab, whatever, are not genetically distinct from the people who claim to be Jews, there is no substantial or consistent differences between those who claim Judaism and those who claim any other heritage or lifestyle. In fact, the Judaism claim is made by so many different groups of people that the Berbers, Arabs, gypsies, etc. have a much better argument for uniqueness as a group than those who claim Judaism.
Judaism is a catch-all term.
It doesn't mean anything.
It hasn't had any meaning for centuries.