[Gamblor]

Hi andy

I'm not sure. There are certainly posts in there (specifically, Blargs) that make me want to beat the [censored] out of the poster, but offended? I dunno.

I don't really have a Jew-dar. These kinds of questions never come up for me - I don't look at people and try to guess if they're jewish or not (really!). The kind of people that do that are the most self-conscious about their Judaism. They know they're minority and they're so scared of being turned on that I think they sub-consciously seek out similar people to grab on to.

Being Jewish for me, as I'm sure you've gathered, isn't a religious thing. There is a Jewish religion, sure, but you can be Jewish and not have ever set foot inside a synagogue. I have 20-something friends in Israel who haven't been in a synagogue in their lives.

That's why I have no problem with terms like Jewish-American or Jewish-Russian. If I tell a Polish girl my ancestors were Polish, and she asks me if they're pure Polish or Jewish (this has happened), I don't take much offence. If you can tell a Russian with any significant degree of accuracy at first glance, or a German, or an Irishman or any other nationality, it wouldn't surprise me if you could tell a Jew.

Ultimately, I've said a million times, Jews are welcome in most places in the world. But still, in my opinion, we're guests there, forced to live in another's world.

If a Jew can't work Fridays or on a holiday, he is forced to miss work. In Israel, Fridays and Saturdays are the Weekend, Sunday is a regular day of work. And that works because the majority is Jewish. Jewish holidays are vacation days, we don't have to take vacation on like Thanksgiving or Easter, because we have our own holidays. It's things like that that make Israel so important and really make it "our" land.

I've rambled long enough. I'm sure you have plenty to disagree with [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

I would like to knock some sense into Blarg though. The stereotype of helpless whiny Jews should be limited to the Jews of Europe, who lived under every sort of discrimination (including genocide) known to man and never did anything about it.