Lonely Chinese girls/boys. 
Does that mean I can call you Ol’ Hebrew Bastard?
Thanks, now I’m imagining some guy rapping in old NY Yiddish. Of course he has a big bling torah scroll hanging from a rope chain around his neck.
Don’t eat pork
Not even with a fork
Can’t touch that
;j
Hey, I’m not fond of identity politics either. But recognizing ethnicities != identity politics.
The Nazis and Hitler certainly considered Jews to be members of a “race.” The “semite” race I suppose is how they phrased it.
We can argue the semantics as to whether or not there is a Jewish race or not (there is certainly a certain degree of ethnic homogeneity that many many people who practice the religion have) considered the “Jewish problem” to be a racial issue, not a religious or cultural one (well they did consider it a cultural one, but more so a racial one than anything.)
So I don’t see that the teacher in question was “wrong” to consider Judaism a race in that context. She is wrong to say Hitler was “half-Jewish” because what she is implying with that has never been proven from any of the reading I’ve looked at. Anyways, neither his father or mother were “Jewish.”
True, but it’s one of the roots of identity politics.
As I see it, and as I’ve been arguing in my classes for years now, fallacious fungibility is the root of both racism and identity politics. You can’t have identity politics without the attempt to make groups cohesive beyond their reality. As such, without concepts of ‘Jewishness’ ‘blackness’ ‘whiteness’ or what have you, identity politics become impossible.
That is my objection to some things in this thread. I’m sorry if I’m explaining myself poorly, I’ll try to do better in a few hours. Now, I need to run to my Theory of Mind class.
Check y’all lata.
You better stay away from Mel Brooks movies. Those are REALLY gonna cheese you off.
And let me add that, although I usually come out on the “PC” side of things here (and frequently get flamed for that), even I am taken aback that someone finds offense at such an innocuous remark as “Jewish girls are hot”.
I subscribe to the weak Sapir/Whorf/Korzybski hypothesis. I believe it is imperative that, as a society, as a nation, and more importantly, as a community of humanity, we use language properly.
It’s not about being PC, it’s about using language that reflects rather than obfuscates reality.
And, no, I don’t have a problem with any Mel Brooks movie I’ve ever seen.
(And now my professor is wondering why I’m typing so much. I’ll post later.)
Askenazi Jews lived in reproductive isolation (for the most part) for a long time. We have customs and practices and foods that no one else shares. So what in the world is the problem with being labelled an ethnicity? Now, I’m all for not being killed in pogroms or Holocausts, and I understand why you think recognizing ‘Jewish’ as an ethnicity is a part of that. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize its truth.
I don’t see how “I like Jewish girls” is any different than:
“I like Catholic girls”
“I like black girls”
“I like vegan girls”
“I like asian girls”
“I like rich girls”
“I like white girls”
I wouldn’t write that way in a formal paper on ethnicity, but I don’t see the harm in everyday language. Sorry, but I don’t think it obfuscates reality at all.
At the very least the language arts teacher needs to amend her statement to the class…
“Last week I told you Hitler was half Jewish. That is not true. What is true is that his mother (who was Austrian, not German. His father was also Austrian, not German) was born out of wedlock. His acknowledged grandfather was Austrian, however, his mother was working in a Jewish household when he was concieved, leaving some people to unsubstantiated speculation that he would have had a Jewish grandparent.”
Rewrite to address kids that appear to be younger than eighth grade. Personally, with kids younger than eighth grade, she has opened up a can of worms on the whole “Hilter’s grandmother got pregnant when she wasn’t married and we don’t really know who she had sex with” but, hey, she opened.
At most, Hitler would have been 1/4th Jewish, not half. And that is complete speculation.
Look, this whole GD as to whether “Jewishness” exists as an ethnicity or not. The point, relevant to a liturature class is context!
Context, people. and in the context of the historical period of the Third Reich, Jewishness was considered an ethnicity as legally defined by the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. And is it relavent to demonstrating that the Nazi’s were indeed often struck with contradictory and idiotic decisions, which we can now go back and review and make informed decisions about, and, well, learn from history.
If identifying ethnicities is the start of identity politics, then let’s use History like this to recognize that, and I don’t see anything wrong with even “stupid lil’ 7th graders” being exposed to these ideas and having to study it through a number of means, both in the OP’s history class and in their language arts classes. In conclusion, a correction is in order, but this is a weak rant.
Hitler’s paternal grandfather is who we should be talking about, not his maternal grandfather:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler#Who_was_Alois.27_real_father.3F
Carry on.
It’s generally believed that the Jewish grandfather is a whole cloth fabrication. His grandmother was living in Graz when she became pregnant, and though there are reports that she was impregnated by her Jewish employer (or his son- sometimes the family name is given as Frankenberger), there is no evidence of any Jewish family (named Frankenberger or otherwise) living in Graz before 1856 (source: Simon Wiesenthal center). Hitler was definitely embarassed by his ancestry and sought to obscure certain aspects in light of his pseudoscientific genetic policies, but the most likely embarassing aspect was that his father’s family had an inordinately high percentage of mental cases and his mother’s family had an inordinately high number of physical deformities and abnormalities. Also, it is very possible that Hitler’s father and mother were an incestuous marriage (half-uncle/half-niece to be precise), which if true probably contributed to the early deaths of most of their children. Neither Hitler nor his only full-sibling reproduced (well, there are rumors Hitler fathered a son during WW1, but it seems unlikely).
But nobody made you the Lorax for the English language. Just because you have an opinion on a subject doesn’t make it reality, especially when many people have a differing opinion on the subject.
I’ve been studying the construction of the English language in micro and meta detail for half a decade now in the ivory tower. I’ve studied cognitive psychology and linguistics. I’ve studied how children learn and how the structure of learning informs thought. I’ve studied general semantics and the interaction and interplay and interpenetration between language and mind.
And I will put my research up against anybody’s opinions any day of the week.
Now, I promise I will respond to everybody, but I’m starved and I’m going to get dinner. Hopefully in the next 24 hours I’ll get to everybody.
That explains the haughtiness.