{"id":95281,"date":"2016-05-08T09:07:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T17:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=95281"},"modified":"2016-05-08T09:07:16","modified_gmt":"2016-05-08T17:07:16","slug":"what-is-a-jew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=95281","title":{"rendered":"What is a Jew?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/gentilesoul.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/08\/what-is-a-jew\/\">A goy writes<\/a>: That question only sound provocative when a gentile asks it, I suppose.  But being a curious person, who has read big chunks of the Koran and Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching and Confucius and Plato and so on&#8230; I sometimes read about Judaism.  I was thinking about ethnic-intermarriage, and I knew about the Jewish proscription against it, which I assumed was a rule mostly ignored by American Jews.  But I googled something about it, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chabad.org\/library\/article_cdo\/aid\/148995\/jewish\/On-Intermarriage.htm\">this entry on Chabad.org<\/a> was the first one to show up.<\/p>\n<p>Frankly, it seems unbelievably racist to me.  Here&#8217;s my favorite section:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>What, then, is a Jew?<\/p>\n<p>After studying the matter for many years and having countless conversations with Jews of every degree of observance and belief, I think that the most convincing and coherent answer is that the distinguishing element of the Jew is the <span class=\"glossary_item\">Neshamah<\/span> (soul) that every Jew possesses. The soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew. They have different characteristics, potentials and needs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>My goodness. Imagine a white person proclaiming&#8211;on a well-known mainstream public website, by the way&#8211;that the soul of a white person is different than the soul of non-whites. What do my fellow gentiles think of this? Do we give Judaism a pass on being flat-out racist? I mean, of course, I&#8217;m trolling a bit&#8230; and I get it: if Jews accepted intermarriage without hesitation, they would vanish as a people. But that&#8217;s true of any ethnic group, and it seems to me that if any of the rest of them avoided intermarriage&#8211;in 2016!&#8211;specifically out of an effort to maintain their ethnic in-group population, we would not hesitate to call that &#8220;racist.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A goy writes: That question only sound provocative when a gentile asks it, I suppose. But being a curious person, who has read big chunks of the Koran and Bhagavad Gita and Tao Te Ching and Confucius and Plato and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=95281\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95282,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95281\/revisions\/95282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}