Good Lord! He was a mess, wasn’t he?
Eh, if he was wearing a hat, he’d look like any number of orthodox.
Between this and the “Jewed him down is a compliment, really,” it’s starting to feel like the Augusta National around here.
Sure it’s a culture, religion and ethnicity. But the argument:
P1) The children of a jewish mother are Jewish
P2) Bobby Fisher’s mother was Jewish
C1) Therefore Bobby Fisher is Jewish.
is either using only the religious definition of Jewish or incorrect. And I stand behind my argument that if you don’t consider yourself Jewish there’s no reason to accept P1.
The children of a german mother are german.
The children of an american mother are american.
The children of a black mother are black.
It does break down with ‘the children of a white mother are white’, but we all know that trick.
Bobby’s ethnically jewish. By, not just jewish standards, but german standards, and pretty much every other standard that exists.
You’re just treating it as if it were merely a religious option. It’s not just a religious option. It’s a tribe.
The OP’s argument was:
The Lurker Above’s point is that this “officially” a Jew stuff if your mother is a Jew but not your father is meaningless since this doesn’t apply to someone that doesn’t accept this part of Jewish dogma.
“Officially” in the sense of, “the official policy of the Jewish religion.” Since there’s no other body which determines whether someone is a Jew or not, I would say that the most authoritative source of who is or isn’t “officially” Jewish is the Jewish law itself. “Officially”, in this case, means, “in theory,” not in practice.
But you aren’t “officially” Jewish “in theory” unless you adhere to the policy and believe that policy carries any weight. That was The Lurker Above’s point. You stated:
Fischer being an official Jew doesn’t make anything weirder unless Fischer bought into the “policy”.
You’re still jewish enough for Hitler to kill you if it’s only your dad. I think that’s a good enough definition for the rest of the world. So the Jewish religion is more restrictive than the rest of the world is. And that’s a big deal how?
Ethically, he’s Jewish. And practically, he was a self-loathing Jew. Well, that and a complete and utter asshole.
The children of a german mother and a non-german father are half german by most accounts. I don’t know what Fischer’s mothers ethnicity was, but his father was not Jewish. That makes him half Jewish, at most.
You sound like my mother. Who was not a genealogy expert. 
Being Jewish is a lot like being black. One drop is enough for the whole thing, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. They wouldn’t have let him in the country clubs in the 70s, you know.
The only issue I have here is that if Fischer himself didn’t want to be considered Jewish then we should respect that.
That, and his chess, should be about the only thing we should respect about this unpleasant man. I always saw it as profound, mostly undiagnosed, mental illness. A sad waste to an otherwise brilliant chess player.
Eh? Perhaps but let’s give the nut his due, if he didn’t consider himself Jewish (and I have no idea if he did or not) then he isn’t Jewish from his point of view. Not imposing others impressions onto him, if he didn’t consider himself a Jew then I don’t think he’s a Jew.
I assume you mean ethnically, not ethically.
OK, but he also didn’t consider himself to be crazy. He was very sane, from his point of view. But that doesn’t mean it was true.
See, if it was just an issue of him converting to a different religion, or declaring himself atheist, I would respect that. Robert Novak, for instance, was born Jewish, but he converted to Catholicism. And even though Robert Novak was an asshole, I can still respect that conversion, because it’s not like he started bashing the Jews after he did it. But Fischer went far beyond that, into very different territory. He didn’t just declare himself no longer Jewish religiously, he insisted that he was no longer ethnically Jewish, and THAT is insanity, since his mother was Jewish, his biological father is suspected to be Jewish, he grew up in Brooklyn around Jewish intellectuals and bohemians. For him to go from that, to becoming an absolute Nazi and virulent bigot, is something that I CAN’T respect, and so I will continue to consider Bobby Fischer a Jew because to do so is a way of highlighting the hypocrisy and craziness of his position. He was a Jew, who was afflicted with a terrible form of mental illness.
I’m not arguing that his notion that his claiming that he wasn’t ethnically Jewish wasn’t bat shit crazy. He clearly was ethnically Jewish. However, if he didn’t consider himself Jewish then he wasn’t a Jew. A historical Jew sure, but not a Jew.
And respect Fischer? Other than his chess playing abilities why would anyone respect him? He was either a mental patient or a complete and utter tosser. Perhaps both.
By “respect” I meant, recognize his rejection of Judaism as legitimate. I do not recognize it as legitimate, the way I would if someone converted formally from Judaism to some other religion. What Bobby Fischer did was an act of insanity, not one of any genuine introspection or religious conviction. I mean, he said that “the Jews are driving the African elephant to extinction because its trunk reminds them of an uncircumcised penis.” This is not the rhetoric of even a mentally-sound anti-Semite; it’s the rantings of someone who is deranged. I feel sorry for Fischer more than hate him.
What is this “Jew blood” of which you speak, and where can I get some?