(And for the record, Prime Minister Bennett is the first Israeli PM to wear a yarmulke and define himself as religious, if that means anything.)
No. Asking if there are/have been practicing Jews as Heads of State or Heads Of Government is not at all offensive if one does not even imply that one is better than the other.
No, but implying that a Jew who happens to be an atheist isn’t Jewish, is.
Has this happened here?
There’s a lack of clarity here about phrases like “Jewish in a religious sense”. On the one hand it can mean, “Jews who are observant of Jewish religious laws”; but on the other hand, it can also mean “Jews who are Jewish in accordance with Jewish law.” Discussing the first can be legitimate discussion, although in my experience, outsiders don’t appreciate how closely heritage, culture and religion are intertwined in Jewish thought. Discussing the second is a major political minefield, because it can be used to imply that people, who are Jewish by any definition accepted by Jews, are somehow not Jewish.
Zelenskyy, for instance, is Jewish, End of story. He’s Jewish by descent, and he self-identifies as Jewish. What he may or may not believe in is irrelevant to the discussion.
And if the question were “Is Zelenskyy Jewish”, then that would be the answer. But that’s not the question the OP is asking. The question the OP is asking is whether he practices his religion, and the answer to that question might be different.
I don’t think it is irrelevant to this discussion, because if it is then the entire discussion is irrelevant.
The hawks/paid Russian trolls in a Toronto Jewish Facebook group were discounting support for Zelinskyy by pointing out his wife and kids are baptized Eastern Orthodox. Don’t get me started on this group of yutzes.
While this discussion is really fascinating, it was never my intention to turn this thread into a debate about Jewish identity. All I’m asking about are heads of state and heads of government that are avowedly religious Jews. This excludes secularists and atheists from this particular question without taking any stance whatsoever on whether they are actually Jews. If that’s something you want to debate, please take it to some other forum (Great Debates or IMHO, I suppose).
And, with the blessing of some FQ mods, I’ve moved that side discussion to its own thread:
Please stick to the narrow topic described in the OP for this thread.