Thanks. Logical, and the same than in french in fact. Actually, I had already vaguely wondered if Jewish could be used when refering to a human.
I’ve never been good at grammar, nor liked it. For instance in this case, when reading the post, I actually thought it could have something to do with the words being nouns or adjectives, but erroneously came to the conclusion that “american” in “he’s an american” and he’s american" where both nouns, since the structure of the sentence was exactly the same, apart from the article. Fortunately, this is only an issue when writing in a foreign language. In your own, you don’t have to wonder whether a word is a noun, an adjective to know how to use it correctly.
You never know why people hold onto things (and no, I’m not going to open that link – eeeeew!). I once spent a fascinating afternoon in the Cleveland police forensics lab, being shown around by one of the forensic chemists. When I commented that some of the paraphernalia around the office was not what one might find in normal offices (mostly evidence in cases – bongs and various drug paraphernalia, weapons, rape kits, that sort of thing), he chuckled and said he’d spare me a look into the refrigerator.
Silly me, I asked what was in the refrigerator. Seems it was more case evidence – a prostitute had offered to trade oral sex for coke with her pimp, and took more coke that he thought was part of the deal, so he decided he should have more services rendered unto him than she had already agreed to. She thought otherwise, and well, without going into too many gory details, the result of their commercial dispute was in a jar in the fridge.
Just to muddy the waters further, the above belief is indeed held by most Jews, particulary Orthodox Jews such as Zev, but there is a small but growing minority of Jews who question or reject ritual circumcision. (Various news articles, mostly about uncircumcised/anti-circumcision Jews in the US and Israel, go into more detail about this “movement”.)
So there is another side to the issue of the religious necessity of Jewish circumcision. The majority view agrees with Zev and Doc that there is absolutely no getting around the commandment of neonatal circumcision for Jewish males, but there are certainly Jewish opposing viewpoints:
Personally, I disagree that circumcision will ever actually vanish from Judaism, but the evidence seems pretty strong that the small minority of Jewish males who don’t undergo infant circumcision, and of Jewish parents and religious leaders who don’t see a religious necessity for male circumcision, is increasing. So the scenario hypothesized by (I think) clair, in which “no-circumcision Judaism” becomes a recognized subset of Jewish thought and practice, is IMHO actually quite plausible. Naturally, there would be lots of fierce arguments about its legitimacy, but there always are with religious schisms.
