Nominations for SDMB Understatement of the Year Award 2012 are closed.
I do like to ever so slightly understate things, just a little tiny bit.
My grandfather and his brother (both Jewish, although non-Orthodox) were drafted for World War II. My grandfather served in the Pacific. My great-uncle was sent to Europe where he was killed in battle.
Zev Steinhardt
To return to this distant point, “turned away” is not the same as “given the pass”. “Given the pass*”* is intended to convey the idea that they are allowed to abstain, as opposed to being kicked out or not accepted, which is what “turned away” conveys.
But arguably not as bad as often claimed.
Besides, Hoover held the record for nearly ten years for largest bonefish caught in the state of Florida. Betcha didn’t know that! Or that he had two asteroids named for him, Hooveria and Herberta. These are little-known Hoover facts.
Folks,.
First, I want to apologize for derailing this thread. It wasn’t my intent.
Second, the idea that some of you have that I am anti-anything is laughable. Don’t get me wrong, I am not floating around on ecstasy loving everyone. But I can honestly say that liking or disliking anyone has never had anything to do with religion, color, or any of the standard “bigot” reasons. If you happen to be an asshole that cut me off in traffic, I will dislike and probably throw some profanity your way even if you were my twin brother.
If my questions seem inflammatory, that isn’t and wasn’t my intent. Asking a question of whether or not you are Jewish first and then American or Canadian second was not trying to stir the flames of hatred. I honestly thought that was the way Jews identified themselves. Because of the uniqueness of the Jewish culture, I have read both on this message board and other places that being Jewish is not the same as being Irish. An Irish-American comes from Ireland. A Jewish American comes from all over the world. So what is “being Jewish” mean? Are you tied by religion, common customs, language, etc, or what? Jews certainly are not identified by boarders, like polish, italians, etc.
Anyway, The question of “loyalty” was not meant as a “let’s round up the Jews, they aren’t Americans!” call. It was actually just a question. Whether or not the Nazis did this or not I do not know, but based on some of your reactions, I can make a guess. For those of you that thought that was where I was going, my sincere apologies.
as to those of you that think I’m “ducking” a point, please,… That’s not my style. I don’t happen to live on these boards like some of you, and I definitely don’t hang out in one forum or in one thread waiting for your posts. If I haven’t answered a question, usually it is because I have either missed it, or didn’t have the time to rewind at that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.
Finally, I want to again thank those people that took the time and effort to try and answer my questions based on the question, not on some assumed motive. You do know that some of us DO have genuine questions. There is no political motivation behind it. It’s simply a question. My original questions of wondering what the number and percentages were happened to come up in a question about WWII and the draft and Jews. I dont know why anyone might be surprised that I wasn’t wondering the same thing about Italians, Polsih, or Germans.
My time in this thread is over, simply because I don’t check the board daily and I don’t want to be accused of not answering something because it makes me uncomfortable.
One final note. Fighting ignorance is something that is done much more effectively if the anger and vitriol is left out of an answer. I have learned a lot about people in this thread that I didn’t know before. And quite frankly, I wish I never knew. And it had nothing to do with specific questions or answers in this thread.
Uh-huh.
If you’re going to make passive aggressive insults, I’d recommend being more creative.
It’s a bit difficult to take this comment seriously and believe it’s intellectually honest.
To be fair, there are some Jews who do describe their self-identification in such terms.* What seemed to many posters ridiculous, to the point of suggesting thinly veiled antisemitism, was the assumption that Jews as a group self-identify in such a way.
In fact, pretty much any sweeping statement about the beliefs, practices, principles or philosophy of Jews as a group should be examined with caution. I don’t think it should be forbidden to inquire about the validity of such statements, but it’s a good idea to bear in mind that many of them are so bound up with traditional antisemitic slurs and smears (and the “Jew first, [nationality] second” comment is definitely one of those) that they automatically seem offensive.
- random googling examples: a blog commentator:
a 1972 Village Voice headline (quoting a Jewish Nixon supporter): “I’m a Jew first and an American second”
another blog commentator:
If you are coming back I’d like to find out where you heard this. I’ve never heard this before, although I may have heard things that could be misinterpreted to mean what you state above. I could also think there are Jews who say things like that and believe it, but I doubt they represent the majority of Jews in the world if they do exist.
In fact religion is all that ties together the many different Jewish cultures in the world. Just as there are Americans who call themselves Irish Catholics, people can have different cultural, ethnic, religious, and national associations. You continue the basic theme that somehow people’s loyalties must be tied to a single aspect of their life. What American cannot be suspected of disloyalty on that basis?
Actually, discussions of what it means to “be Jewish” as opposed to “being Irish”, in so many words, have in fact happened here on these boards, as in this thread:
I don’t think Stink Fish Pot got his information from any really authoritative source, and I don’t think he’s claiming that he did, but I can certainly believe that he ended up getting that impression from observing actual discussions between Jews and others about how to define being Jewish.
Replace every instance of the word Jew and Jewish with the word Italian. Now can you see how offensive that would be to Italians who had immigrated to America and their descendants? It’s equally or rather more so for Jews who have had a dual loyalty stigma attached to them in all sort of anti-Semitic claptrap. Bear in mind that Italian-Americans were fighting a war against their native homeland in WWII. I’m half Italian and to my knowledge every able bodied male on that side of the family who could served in the military; even my grandfather repeatedly tried to enlist to be told repeatedly that he couldn’t enlist or be drafted due to his civilian work being vital to the war effort (he was a chemical engineer). Suggesting to any of them at the time that they had a dual loyalty would likely have resulted in fisticuffs.
Every meet an Orthodox Italian?
Mark Clark’s mom was Jewish
He was a lousy general, though.
Well I met second generation Mexican & Vietnamese-americans who had not learned English and never traveled out of their enclave - except to visit “back home”.
You will find a few dim bulbs in any ethnic group who feel that way. Generalizing that (or any offensive attitude/behavior) to an entire group is a classic bigot’s ploy.
A study of American isolationism leading up to WWII shows that it was common to smear Jews for raising alarms about Nazi Germany as being motivated entirely by self-preservation and attempting to drag America into war against its interests (Google Lindbergh and his notorious Des Moines speech). Suggesting in the face of easily obtainable evidence that Jews then avoided military service is an attempt to reopen and worsen old wounds.
And thanks for Just Asking them.
No, but I’ve met a few Roman Catholic ones.
So the whole point of this thread has been to reinforce your bigoted notions about Jews?
FinnAgain has made this point in other threads and I thought it was pretty accurate: Judaism predates modern notions about ethnicity and race, so the ethnicity/religion/race debate is tricky. Thus comparing being Jewish to being (say) Italian doesn’t quite work. But that’s not really the point here.
Yup. Judaism is really a “tribal” identity more than anything. Any analysis along the lines of ethnicity/religion/race can easily be disproved by counter-examples.
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Judaism isn’t exactly an “ethnicity” or “race” because you can convert to it. It certainly isn’t a “race” as we know it, because (say) a Black man cannot convert to being a White man (Michael Jackson aside :p). Moreover, there are both Black and White Jews.
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Judaism isn’t exactly a “religion” because you can be an atheist and still be a Jew.
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However, Judaism isn’t exactly not a religion, because if you convert to some other religion that is incompatible with Judaism, you cease being a Jew. In short, you can be an athiest Jew, but not a Christian Jew (attempts to claim otherwise tend to be Christian attempts to convert Jews).
Best way to look at it in anthropological terms is as a tribal identity. Jews are people who, under the Rules of the tribe, are considered Jews either by birth or by adoption into the tribe and who maintain that identity by not adopting another indentity that is incompatible with the rules. The basis of the rules is of course religious, but a religion formed at a time when religion was more about social organization than about professions of faith. Hence, if you follow the rules it isn’t all that important (within the rules) whether or not you literally believe in their supernatural origin. A believer may well hold that those who do not believe aren’t very good Jews, but only the most extreme would ever say they weren’t Jews at all - the rules quite clearly state that they are.
Which is all very interesting, but the significant point is this: there is no evidence whatsoever that members of a “tribal” identity are more likely to be more loyal to the “tribe” than to their country, as opposed to members of a religion or ethnic group.
No, the purpose was to ask if the US military or the US draft had ever given special consideration to Orthodox Jews. I consider the question answered long ago. As far as I am concerned, we can close the thread.