After having thought about it for far too long, for many reasons, including mere rhetorical ones, I've decided to just go ahead and call myself a Jew. The practical consequences of this are negligible, basically what it amounts to is that when I talk about some or other Jewish Idea or issue, I can use the pronouns "we/us" if it suits me at the time.
If people choose not to accept my self-declaration, well, that's fine, I won't be too insistent. I feel I'm on the right side of this but they may see it differently, I can understand that, most people are in awe of various exclusionary authorities, and I lack respect for such things. If people simply question, I could say "on my mother's side," or, for that matter, "on my father's side," and deny any further knowledge. As we shall see later in this essay, both are true in some sense.
When I think it would get me into an interrogation or other trouble, I don't have to bring it up at all, it's only when and where I choose to call myself Jewish I will, and otherwise not. I don't believe I'd be violating any Jewish principles in this, Jews have historically denied Jewishness when they had to, or wanted to. It's not against a Commandment, there is no Commandment against dissembling, only bearing false witness.
If Jews were being persecuted, in principle, if I were the most moral person I could be, I'd stand right in front of them and beg to receive the first stone, even if I knew myself not to be Jewish in the least. In reality, I'd be more likely to run away as fast as possible, but that's not entirely un-Jewish either. Sometimes people think of "taking the first stone" as a Christian idea, but it isn't. In their principles Christian ethics are not much different from Jewish ethics, and if Jesus lived at all, which I now believe he did*, he was a Jewish rabbi, and therefore everything he said is Jewish too, even if Jews having other rabbis and their successors don't accept his teachings. Judaism is like that, different rabbis can say completely different things as there is no human central rabbinic authority. Rabbis are schooled to the satisfaction of another Rabbi, but that and being Jewish--as defined by their teachers--is the only requirement.
(*Not that I believe every word of the Gospels, except perhaps metaphorically. In my understanding of the actual history, Jesus was a Jewish rabbi prince, the true heir to the Jewish throne as Matthew makes clear, and also a charismatic teacher who was ultimately crucified for defying human authorities, but he failed to die on the cross and escaped into anonymous exile, in large part because he had a lot of Jewish friends and followers. Nobody used the word Christian until Paul came along, and he was Jewish too. Paul determined that one didn't have to be Jewish to be Christian, and I'm just taking that one step further, by saying nobody has to be authorized by a Jewish agency to be Jewish either, as by widespread agreement now one doesn't have to be religious to be Jewish anyway.)
If you argue that I "haven't experienced Jewish persecution," as it turns out, someone once shouted an anti-Jewish (aka antisemitic) remark at me when I was in junior high school. I first thanked him for calling me Jewish, which I did not know and had always wanted to hear. He argued back, "Don't try to fool me. Look at that nose! Look at your friends!"
My other identities have suffered persecution also. Communists were among the first sent to the death camps--if not merely shot on sight. Even before that, Socialists and organizers were murdered in Krystallnacht. Not to mention Communists and organizers facing decades of legal persecution even in the "free" USA. Pretty much everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, persecution, or identity harassment, and it's all the same kind of evil as far as I am concerned, except as directed to those people who really have misused excess power, such as the ruling class.
All this being said, of course I am a Athiest Jew. I am certainly not claiming to have converted to Judaism or any other religion. But if other Jews can be Athiest Jews, then so can I. I'm also an anti-Zionist, but there are also many anti-Zionist Jews, and they were the majority before WWII, and anti-Zionism has a 2000 year theological grounding in Judaism, so it cannot be determinative for not being Jewish.
The Zionist State is not likely to accept my self-declaration, but I do not care, I have no desire to visit the Zionist State anyway, and even if I were undeniably a Jew, by whatever other standards they construct, they wouldn't let me in for my anti-Zionist and pro-BD stances anyway, as some of my fellow Jews have discovered. Meanwhile, why should I let the Zionist State determine what the threshold or characteristics of Jewishness is, when I don't respect their authority one iota? I can just hold that whatever my quotient of Jewish blood is, it is good enough for me, and likewise for other Jewish principles--I satisfy the ones that truly need satisfying and the others aren't determinative.
By that same token, as far as other ethnicities go, I'm all of them too. All living humans are related by not too many generations. That's good enough, isn't it? For rhetorical purposes, it's better to use "we/us" anyway. It sounds better, it feels better, it's more inclusive. It's people who are being exclusive who should have to justify their exclusivity. So as well as Jewish, I'm also Palestinian Arab, and everything else, as it suits me to say or not. It might be more of a stretch to say I'm Chinese when it's possible (though unlikely) that my nearest Chinese ancestor might have been as remote as 3500 years ago, before a united "China" as such existed, but why bother with such details? Scientific investigation has shown the necessity of all people being related that far back, but in most cases, less than half that far in most cases, and who would know or care anyway?
I can call myself anything and everything I want to, as long as its not subject to some kind of exclusionary authority, or even then if I just use lower case letters and define things as I choose to.
So the same thing applies to religions as well. I can certainly find a few good things in most any religion. And as long as I don't have to submit to some human authority, I can rhetorically claim to be contiguous with any of them, if and when it suits me. If someone wants to get technical with me, whatever, and I often can get technical right back. Like most Athiests, I often know as much about major religions as their church attending congregants do, because we Athiests have to know these things to have decent debates, while actual congregants can often just sheep along. Often things which are commonly supposed to be this or that way, are not really as ironclad as people usually think (there was no Nicene creed in the time of Paul, for example, so I could claim to be a "creedless" Christian as some still are) and all things religious are greatly and unavoidably subject to interpretation.
If Jesus were in Nazi Germany, he would most certainly take the first shot, not only by courage and by being Jewish, but by being an ethically uncompromising communist organizer of the masses and even an instigator--he turned over the money changer tables and demanded a Debt Jubilee! (Funny how most people don't "get" the real story here.) We get a glimpse of that same kind of selflessness today--mostly in anti-Zionist Jews. Some are right up front with their other semitic cousins in dangerous protest actions, begging to take the first shot, and also in building anti-Zionist organizations and media facing off against a hostile establishment, friends, and family, all opposing an illegal, immoral, and distinctly un-Jewish Occupation and apartheid state. (As many remark now, the Zionist State bears a striking resemblance to the Nazi State, though in slower motion and less murderous and destructive so far. And terrorizing rather than conquering its neighbors.)
The Jewish anti-Zionists inspire me and show what Jewish character should look like, following the Jewish principles in the Torah. (And the truest Christian principles too, which are basically the same.) My own anti-Zionist and Communist organizer work barely deserves mention in these regards, and I can only hope it comes from the same place.
As far as Israel is concerned, in my version of Jewishness/Judaism, Israel is still a metaphysical concept meaning the ultimate goal of social progress, peace on earth and abundance and love and meaning for all. That is contiguous with how religious Jews had defined it for almost two millenia before Zionism took hold after the Holocaust, and some Jews still see it that way. For me, as an Athiest Communist Jew, this end goal is identical to the Communist World Utopia. Not something that's going to be fully implemented right away, but a goal we should always aim to achieve and emulate now in every way we can. Much as the Kingdom of Heaven--a Christian concept--also has the same sense and meaning. The Apostle Paul (a Jew as well as a Christian on his own terms) defined the Kingdom of Heaven as existing in the here and now and in our hearts and minds within Christian communes, where each contributes as they are able, and receives as they need.
Israel should NOT be a place on war-torn earth as it is now, or a Zionist apartheid state of perpetual warfare. I am angered by the way Zionists have stolen our sublime Jewish metaphysical and ethical (nee religious) concepts to glorify an apartheid state created and maintained by continual violence and threats of more. That is the very antithesis of Israel!
But seriously, besmirching our Jewish words and concepts is trivial compared to endless war and suffering. That is the real problem. We Jews and all others must do what we can to stop it. What binds us together as Jews is a relentless pursuit of peace, truth, justice, love, and meaning, within a deep tradition of books and reflection, and that is what we are all about, and not a blue shielded perpetual war zone of nationalist paranoia.
All this being said, I have to account for the sad fact that a majority of my fellow Jews have jumped on the Zionist ship since the creation of the Zionist State. They seem to be ok with an apartheid state that even looks a little like slow motion genocide. Is this a fault in the Jewish "race"? Why am and (and other anti-Zionist Jews) different?
No, it is an established fact that among people who are partisan, partisanship can all too easily trump (and Trump) everything, even long established intellectual, ethical, and religious ideals. This is not at all unique to Jews. The same thing happened in "the most advanced culture" on earth, among some of the smartest people on earth, the Germans. This is what has happened among Evangelicals in the USA whose support for Trump is the most unyielding, despite the obvious fact that he is not one of them.
Once the Holocaust happened, and the Zionist State was created, the fix was in. The problem is not a problem of Jewishness or Judaism, the problem is a problem of Nationalism, which has a strong almost irresistable appeal to most every human being. The Zionist State is the only State defined in purely ethnic terms in the world today.
It just so happened, and partly by chance, that I managed to avoid the siren call of ethnic nationalism. For one thing, as the sea change following the 1967 Jewish victories and beginning of the Occupation occurred, I did not identify as a Jew. Therefore, the nationalism did not appeal to me, and I could evaluate what was happening in the Zionist State in more objective terms. By 1969 or so, and the occupied territories were still occupied, it was becoming more and more clear that a big mistake was being made. This was not going to end well, it looked to me. It had to go one way or the other, either scrupulous attention to maintaining and enhancing the integrity and independence of the Palestinian state (with strongly pro-active Israeli support to get it started on a strong footing) or a single binational state with equal rights for all (which Zionists say is "not Israel") to have some chance of remaining something like a permanent and sustainable solution that wouldn't end in catastrophe.
From that point onward, it seemed to me that rather than deploying the great(er) intellectual and ethical talents of the lefter Jews toward one or other of these sustainable ends, my comrades were marginalized and left behind to become mere critics and opposition advocates, and the military right wing took actual operations over more and more, it became total ethical collapse, which sadly had started at the very beginning with ethical faults but which were now becoming bigger and bigger and inescapable.
My Jewish friends tended to follow the nationalistic partisanship, and reject my critiques. I don't recall that anyone ever said this to me, but somehow I could imagine some feeling "You're not a Jew, so you don't understand." That is, by the way, a pure expression of nationalistic partisanship.
But I'm ok with it in this sense: I am not expecting everyone to accept my Jewishness. That's the thing I care the least about. It has mattered to me, some parts of me, for a long time and now that I've made up my mind I'm going to stick with it. But all the same, I feel more comfortable intellectually identifying as a universalist, a believer in universal and non-partisan values, and I also strongly feel that partisanship is a negative force, and I worry that even "identifying" as anything other than a universalist might weaken my resolve. Many I respect have denounced their Jewishness just as I am embracing it, and I respect that too, as a form of intellectual honesty and disciplinary love.
And then there might be non-Jews who could say, "How can you side with these people! See what they are doing!" But THAT is ignorance or anti-semitism. As I have argued, the faults of the Zionist State have little to do with Judaism and Jewishness in the abstract, and those are the things I identify with (and not the nationalism). My Jewish community is the international community of Jewish Atheists, Leftists, and anti-Zionists, who I believe have remained the closest to the true spirit of Jewish traditions, ethics and books in the modern world. I strongly admire them and always have, and will try to extend all the solidarity I can, as well as to all who support universal human rights. One not entirely unimportant task is to rescue at least two ancient traditions (Judaism and Christianity) of love, scholarship, and reflection from a 20th century mental and geopolitical trap, terrifying, murderous, and potentially a catastrophe for all.
If people choose not to accept my self-declaration, well, that's fine, I won't be too insistent. I feel I'm on the right side of this but they may see it differently, I can understand that, most people are in awe of various exclusionary authorities, and I lack respect for such things. If people simply question, I could say "on my mother's side," or, for that matter, "on my father's side," and deny any further knowledge. As we shall see later in this essay, both are true in some sense.
When I think it would get me into an interrogation or other trouble, I don't have to bring it up at all, it's only when and where I choose to call myself Jewish I will, and otherwise not. I don't believe I'd be violating any Jewish principles in this, Jews have historically denied Jewishness when they had to, or wanted to. It's not against a Commandment, there is no Commandment against dissembling, only bearing false witness.
If Jews were being persecuted, in principle, if I were the most moral person I could be, I'd stand right in front of them and beg to receive the first stone, even if I knew myself not to be Jewish in the least. In reality, I'd be more likely to run away as fast as possible, but that's not entirely un-Jewish either. Sometimes people think of "taking the first stone" as a Christian idea, but it isn't. In their principles Christian ethics are not much different from Jewish ethics, and if Jesus lived at all, which I now believe he did*, he was a Jewish rabbi, and therefore everything he said is Jewish too, even if Jews having other rabbis and their successors don't accept his teachings. Judaism is like that, different rabbis can say completely different things as there is no human central rabbinic authority. Rabbis are schooled to the satisfaction of another Rabbi, but that and being Jewish--as defined by their teachers--is the only requirement.
(*Not that I believe every word of the Gospels, except perhaps metaphorically. In my understanding of the actual history, Jesus was a Jewish rabbi prince, the true heir to the Jewish throne as Matthew makes clear, and also a charismatic teacher who was ultimately crucified for defying human authorities, but he failed to die on the cross and escaped into anonymous exile, in large part because he had a lot of Jewish friends and followers. Nobody used the word Christian until Paul came along, and he was Jewish too. Paul determined that one didn't have to be Jewish to be Christian, and I'm just taking that one step further, by saying nobody has to be authorized by a Jewish agency to be Jewish either, as by widespread agreement now one doesn't have to be religious to be Jewish anyway.)
If you argue that I "haven't experienced Jewish persecution," as it turns out, someone once shouted an anti-Jewish (aka antisemitic) remark at me when I was in junior high school. I first thanked him for calling me Jewish, which I did not know and had always wanted to hear. He argued back, "Don't try to fool me. Look at that nose! Look at your friends!"
My other identities have suffered persecution also. Communists were among the first sent to the death camps--if not merely shot on sight. Even before that, Socialists and organizers were murdered in Krystallnacht. Not to mention Communists and organizers facing decades of legal persecution even in the "free" USA. Pretty much everyone has experienced some form of discrimination, persecution, or identity harassment, and it's all the same kind of evil as far as I am concerned, except as directed to those people who really have misused excess power, such as the ruling class.
All this being said, of course I am a Athiest Jew. I am certainly not claiming to have converted to Judaism or any other religion. But if other Jews can be Athiest Jews, then so can I. I'm also an anti-Zionist, but there are also many anti-Zionist Jews, and they were the majority before WWII, and anti-Zionism has a 2000 year theological grounding in Judaism, so it cannot be determinative for not being Jewish.
The Zionist State is not likely to accept my self-declaration, but I do not care, I have no desire to visit the Zionist State anyway, and even if I were undeniably a Jew, by whatever other standards they construct, they wouldn't let me in for my anti-Zionist and pro-BD stances anyway, as some of my fellow Jews have discovered. Meanwhile, why should I let the Zionist State determine what the threshold or characteristics of Jewishness is, when I don't respect their authority one iota? I can just hold that whatever my quotient of Jewish blood is, it is good enough for me, and likewise for other Jewish principles--I satisfy the ones that truly need satisfying and the others aren't determinative.
By that same token, as far as other ethnicities go, I'm all of them too. All living humans are related by not too many generations. That's good enough, isn't it? For rhetorical purposes, it's better to use "we/us" anyway. It sounds better, it feels better, it's more inclusive. It's people who are being exclusive who should have to justify their exclusivity. So as well as Jewish, I'm also Palestinian Arab, and everything else, as it suits me to say or not. It might be more of a stretch to say I'm Chinese when it's possible (though unlikely) that my nearest Chinese ancestor might have been as remote as 3500 years ago, before a united "China" as such existed, but why bother with such details? Scientific investigation has shown the necessity of all people being related that far back, but in most cases, less than half that far in most cases, and who would know or care anyway?
I can call myself anything and everything I want to, as long as its not subject to some kind of exclusionary authority, or even then if I just use lower case letters and define things as I choose to.
So the same thing applies to religions as well. I can certainly find a few good things in most any religion. And as long as I don't have to submit to some human authority, I can rhetorically claim to be contiguous with any of them, if and when it suits me. If someone wants to get technical with me, whatever, and I often can get technical right back. Like most Athiests, I often know as much about major religions as their church attending congregants do, because we Athiests have to know these things to have decent debates, while actual congregants can often just sheep along. Often things which are commonly supposed to be this or that way, are not really as ironclad as people usually think (there was no Nicene creed in the time of Paul, for example, so I could claim to be a "creedless" Christian as some still are) and all things religious are greatly and unavoidably subject to interpretation.
If Jesus were in Nazi Germany, he would most certainly take the first shot, not only by courage and by being Jewish, but by being an ethically uncompromising communist organizer of the masses and even an instigator--he turned over the money changer tables and demanded a Debt Jubilee! (Funny how most people don't "get" the real story here.) We get a glimpse of that same kind of selflessness today--mostly in anti-Zionist Jews. Some are right up front with their other semitic cousins in dangerous protest actions, begging to take the first shot, and also in building anti-Zionist organizations and media facing off against a hostile establishment, friends, and family, all opposing an illegal, immoral, and distinctly un-Jewish Occupation and apartheid state. (As many remark now, the Zionist State bears a striking resemblance to the Nazi State, though in slower motion and less murderous and destructive so far. And terrorizing rather than conquering its neighbors.)
The Jewish anti-Zionists inspire me and show what Jewish character should look like, following the Jewish principles in the Torah. (And the truest Christian principles too, which are basically the same.) My own anti-Zionist and Communist organizer work barely deserves mention in these regards, and I can only hope it comes from the same place.
As far as Israel is concerned, in my version of Jewishness/Judaism, Israel is still a metaphysical concept meaning the ultimate goal of social progress, peace on earth and abundance and love and meaning for all. That is contiguous with how religious Jews had defined it for almost two millenia before Zionism took hold after the Holocaust, and some Jews still see it that way. For me, as an Athiest Communist Jew, this end goal is identical to the Communist World Utopia. Not something that's going to be fully implemented right away, but a goal we should always aim to achieve and emulate now in every way we can. Much as the Kingdom of Heaven--a Christian concept--also has the same sense and meaning. The Apostle Paul (a Jew as well as a Christian on his own terms) defined the Kingdom of Heaven as existing in the here and now and in our hearts and minds within Christian communes, where each contributes as they are able, and receives as they need.
Israel should NOT be a place on war-torn earth as it is now, or a Zionist apartheid state of perpetual warfare. I am angered by the way Zionists have stolen our sublime Jewish metaphysical and ethical (nee religious) concepts to glorify an apartheid state created and maintained by continual violence and threats of more. That is the very antithesis of Israel!
But seriously, besmirching our Jewish words and concepts is trivial compared to endless war and suffering. That is the real problem. We Jews and all others must do what we can to stop it. What binds us together as Jews is a relentless pursuit of peace, truth, justice, love, and meaning, within a deep tradition of books and reflection, and that is what we are all about, and not a blue shielded perpetual war zone of nationalist paranoia.
All this being said, I have to account for the sad fact that a majority of my fellow Jews have jumped on the Zionist ship since the creation of the Zionist State. They seem to be ok with an apartheid state that even looks a little like slow motion genocide. Is this a fault in the Jewish "race"? Why am and (and other anti-Zionist Jews) different?
No, it is an established fact that among people who are partisan, partisanship can all too easily trump (and Trump) everything, even long established intellectual, ethical, and religious ideals. This is not at all unique to Jews. The same thing happened in "the most advanced culture" on earth, among some of the smartest people on earth, the Germans. This is what has happened among Evangelicals in the USA whose support for Trump is the most unyielding, despite the obvious fact that he is not one of them.
Once the Holocaust happened, and the Zionist State was created, the fix was in. The problem is not a problem of Jewishness or Judaism, the problem is a problem of Nationalism, which has a strong almost irresistable appeal to most every human being. The Zionist State is the only State defined in purely ethnic terms in the world today.
It just so happened, and partly by chance, that I managed to avoid the siren call of ethnic nationalism. For one thing, as the sea change following the 1967 Jewish victories and beginning of the Occupation occurred, I did not identify as a Jew. Therefore, the nationalism did not appeal to me, and I could evaluate what was happening in the Zionist State in more objective terms. By 1969 or so, and the occupied territories were still occupied, it was becoming more and more clear that a big mistake was being made. This was not going to end well, it looked to me. It had to go one way or the other, either scrupulous attention to maintaining and enhancing the integrity and independence of the Palestinian state (with strongly pro-active Israeli support to get it started on a strong footing) or a single binational state with equal rights for all (which Zionists say is "not Israel") to have some chance of remaining something like a permanent and sustainable solution that wouldn't end in catastrophe.
From that point onward, it seemed to me that rather than deploying the great(er) intellectual and ethical talents of the lefter Jews toward one or other of these sustainable ends, my comrades were marginalized and left behind to become mere critics and opposition advocates, and the military right wing took actual operations over more and more, it became total ethical collapse, which sadly had started at the very beginning with ethical faults but which were now becoming bigger and bigger and inescapable.
My Jewish friends tended to follow the nationalistic partisanship, and reject my critiques. I don't recall that anyone ever said this to me, but somehow I could imagine some feeling "You're not a Jew, so you don't understand." That is, by the way, a pure expression of nationalistic partisanship.
But I'm ok with it in this sense: I am not expecting everyone to accept my Jewishness. That's the thing I care the least about. It has mattered to me, some parts of me, for a long time and now that I've made up my mind I'm going to stick with it. But all the same, I feel more comfortable intellectually identifying as a universalist, a believer in universal and non-partisan values, and I also strongly feel that partisanship is a negative force, and I worry that even "identifying" as anything other than a universalist might weaken my resolve. Many I respect have denounced their Jewishness just as I am embracing it, and I respect that too, as a form of intellectual honesty and disciplinary love.
And then there might be non-Jews who could say, "How can you side with these people! See what they are doing!" But THAT is ignorance or anti-semitism. As I have argued, the faults of the Zionist State have little to do with Judaism and Jewishness in the abstract, and those are the things I identify with (and not the nationalism). My Jewish community is the international community of Jewish Atheists, Leftists, and anti-Zionists, who I believe have remained the closest to the true spirit of Jewish traditions, ethics and books in the modern world. I strongly admire them and always have, and will try to extend all the solidarity I can, as well as to all who support universal human rights. One not entirely unimportant task is to rescue at least two ancient traditions (Judaism and Christianity) of love, scholarship, and reflection from a 20th century mental and geopolitical trap, terrifying, murderous, and potentially a catastrophe for all.
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