If it’s right, it’s not bigotry. Bigotry is an unfair public display of contempt for people who display certiain traits.
We’re talking about a very large and influential group of people who’s displayed trait is a form of bad judgement which can affect public policy.
We’re giving them a hard time because of the stubbornness with which they’re refusing to change their minds.
I’m missing something. How is that ad racist?
-FrL-
Jews are not a race. Even in the craziest social construct of “race”, Jews are not a race. It makes no sense to have a race that a person can join after birth. Besides, you can find Jews in most of the major ethnic groups in the world-- European, African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and even East Asian.
Possibly, but when I get to know someone I tend to engage them in conversations that will inevitably lead to some religious discussion, and I’ve never met a full-blown mouth-frother fundamentalist Christian that I am aware of.
This made me laugh becasue I instantly was transported to my youth and that old Calgon commercial with the Chinese laundromat (no, that wasn’t racist at all, was it?)…
“So how do you get the clothes so clean?”
“Ancient Chinese secret”
“Need more Calgon!”
“Ancient Chinese secret, huh?”
I can’t look at youtube at work, because it’s blocked, but if it’s the ad I’m thinking of, it was designed to exploit anti-miscegenation emotions in the more atavistic subset of the electorate.
If it’s not the one I’m thinking of, then I got nothin’.
nitpick: a laundromat is where the customer does his own laundry. This was a Chinese laundry (yes, still a throwback).
Then what are they?
I hear tell they’re a religion.
They are adherents of a religious faith; they can also be members of an ethnic group. Lot of overlap there, I think.
That’s odd, because all of the Jews I know don’t believe in God, don’t participate in any form of worship, and don’t share any sort of common ethos derived from their self-identification as Jews. That doesn’t sound like any sort of a religion to me. Either they’re deluding themselves when they call themselves Jewish, or there’s more to the term “Jew” than just the religious connotation.
Oh, and may I just say, in response to this:
“Tiger Woods.”
It’s more than a religion, but less than an ethnic group. OK? In fact, the term “Jew” encompasses many different ethnic groups. That’s the point. Call it club, if you want.
One person with mixed ancestry isn’t the same as a group of people with non-shared ancestries. I’m really not getting that…
You’re being kind of disingenuous. The identity that bonds Jewish people is religious identity… even if it’s the religion of their parents, grandparents, etc. Kind of the way lapsed Catholics can identify with each other even if neither of them go to church anymore.
It’s that shared experience of having been whacked on the back of the hand with a 2" dowel by Sister Mary Joseph for not doing your homework. I still have the scars…
Sister Mary Patrick and yard stick, for me!
And woe be it to any girl who didn’t have her beanie on church day-- she got a kleenex tissue bobby-pinned to their hair so as to cover her inferior, female head during Mass.
Most ethnic groups encompass many different ethnic groups. Jews happen to be an ethnic group that is both very widespread while at the same time retaining a high degree of uniformity despite a wide variety of disparate cultural influences. But to say that Judaism is not, itself, an ethnicity is ridiculous.
My point is that membership in one ethnic group does not preclude membership in any and all other ethnic groups. The fact that one can be black and Jewish is not evidence that either category it not an ethnicity.
Incidentally, what Jewish groups are there that do not trace their ancestry back to Abraham?
At what point does one become distant enough from a religiously observant ancestor that they no longer can legitimatly consider themselves Jewish? Your comparison to lapsed Catholics is a bit of disingenuity itself, because I’m talking about people who have never been observant, and whose parents were never observant. My mom is a practicing Catholic, but I’ve never been inside of a church except when someone’s been gettting married or buried. I’m not a Catholic in any sense of the word. My friend Jon, who would have to go back at least two generations to find a religiously observant relative, would be highly offended at the suggestion that he’s not a Jew. But his identity is a religious one, and mine is not? How does that work, exactly?
Jewishness is still a cultural characteristic, not a racial one.
Would one of you gentlemen like to open up a separate thread to discuss (for the umpteenth time) how to categorize the group(s) of people known as Jews and cease the hijacking of this thread?
[ /Modding ]
Really? So, if a white Christian fundamentalist observes that “most of the men in prison are darkies and wetbacks”, he’s not a bigot?