Racist or not?...you make the call.

[mostsmooth]

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I find that like the term "nigger-rig" You would never use it in front of a black guy, but if you did he would only be, at the most, minorly irriatated

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please use it in a sentence and find me a black person who would only be minorly irritated.

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Most blacks I know, and I know a lot - my city's population is over 1/4 black and I live on the poorer side of town.

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youre not implying black people are poor, are you?

Wow. I posted my reply without reading any responses. Apologies if I offended anyone. I thought someone could become jewish if they did some tests and proved their faith to the appropriate person. I have never had a jewish friend, so not too clued up on it.
I was thinking along technical lines when I considered 'jewish' not a race. I wasn't raised in a lilly white wasp community - there just wasn't a particularly noticeable jewish community.

[LittleOldLady]

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Okay, whats a race then genius?

I'll give you a hint, its a social construct. Thus jews can be a "race" just as well as niggers can.

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1: "A race is a distinct population of humans distinguished in some way from other humans. The most widely observed races are those based on skin color, facial features, ancestry, and genetics. Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, are often controversial due to their impact on social identity hence identity politics. "

2: "The biological definition of race is an categorization of organisms with differing characteristics while maintaining enough similiarities to be a part of a common genus and species. The word race in this context can be considered synomynious with sub-species."

3: "Biology. an interbreeding subgroup of a species whose individuals are geographically, physiologically, or chromosomally distinct from other members of the species. Anthropology. 1. a geographical variation in the human population, identified by a range of genetic characteristics such as hair and skin color, eye color and shape, facial features, body build, and blood group"

Biology question: If someone with the Jewish gene mates with someone with the Catholic gene, is the offspring Catholic or Jewish? If the offspring ends up being Catholic, will his or her mating with a Muslim lead to a Catholic offspring or a Muslim offspring... or perhaps the dormant Jewish gene will spring forth...? You should be able to answer this question, knowing so much about race.

Oh yeah... that's right... religion is not genetic, while things like skin color are (or "nigger-ness" as you so eloquently put it.)

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I get very weary of explaining this, but here goes again. There are two ways to become a Jew. One way is to be born of a Jewish mother. An individual born of a Jewish mother is a Jew without regard to what religion he or she does or does not practice. He or she can be baptized Catholic and go to Mass and even become a saint in the Catholic church, and he or she is still a Jew, something the Nazis knew and acted on when they killed Edith Stein to punish the Dutch bishops for their lack of support for the Final Solution. So, yes, Jews form a separate gene pool, or perhaps two separate gene pools (if you consider the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews far enough apart genetically). That is why Tay-Sachs disease occurs almost exclusively among Ashkenazic Jews, although it does occur very rarely in other population groups (in particular French-Canadians and their cousins, the Louisiana Cajuns). The other way to become a Jew is to convert. The children of a woman who has converted to Judaism will be born Jews. Conversions to Judaism are relatively rare because Judaism is not a triumphalist religion and does not proselytize, but they do occur, bringing new genetic material into the Jewish gene pool. Through the millennia of anti-Jewish oppression, Jewish women were frequently subject to rape, and again any children conceived of the rape of Jewish women would be born Jews, bringing with them into the breeding population the genes of their non-Jewish fathers.

So, yes, there are Jewish genes--but there are no Christian or Muslim genes. Both Christianity and Islam are triumphalist religions which successfully seek converts worldwide, and thus adherents of those religions can be from any human population and can have any genetic profile.

To answer your facetious question, if a Jewish woman mates with a Catholic man, the child will be born a Jew no matter which religion he or she is taught to practice. From the Catholic perspective, that child should be baptized and brought up Catholic, but the child is not born a Catholic. If a Jewish man mates with a Catholic woman, the child is not Jewish unless he or she goes through a conversion process. Now, in very recent years some Reformed rabbis will circumcise and bar mitzvah boys with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother without conversion, but these are the same rabbis who will eat cheeseburgers and drive on the sabbath.

[InchoateHand]

Warik, see LOL's post.

JWNED.

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I find that like the term "nigger-rig" You would never use it in front of a black guy, but if you did he would only be, at the most, minorly irriatated

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please use it in a sentence and find me a black person who would only be minorly irritated.

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Can we please use the politically correct term

"African American Engineer" something

Last time I checked Jewish wasn't a race.

It's sterotypical.

[Rushmore]

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Throughout history the Jewish people have considered their race and religion to be intertwined.

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Wow, thanks for clarifying. I guess since the Jewish people "considered" their race and religion to be intertwined that makes the whole "division of mankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type" definition out to be nonsense after all.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go "consider" my bank account to be $10,000,00 and buy myself a "considerably" large house.

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Wow, my first reaction to your other post (where you inexplicably fixed my post to say something that I had not actually intended) was that you were a bad person with whom I would never agree on anything.

But now I see that I was wrong, and that you are a smart and good person with whom I might well have a propensity toward agreement.

[Rushmore]

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Warik, see LOL's post.

JWNED.

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I am not here to defend anyone's position or champion anyone's cause, but let's be honest--any objective person who reads LOL's post can plainly see that she is positing that the rules as determined by the group in question (i.e. Jews) are definitive in this dialogue, and they are not.

The notion of race is not to be determined by the Talmud, the Torah, the Koran, or Mad Magazine. It is defined by science, which is not to be found in the texts mentioned.

What an odd exchange.

[private joker]

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Sorry for being confusing. He deserves an insta-ban because that point has been debated pretty thoroughly over the past few pages, yet he flies in and posts a one-line response that clearly indicates he hasn't read any of the thread.

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Point made. Anyway, I can't explain it any better than LittleOldLady did, and she is probably either distantly related to me, or very similar in countenance to the people with whom I had Thanksgiving dinner.

[LittleOldLady]

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Warik, see LOL's post.

JWNED.

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I am not here to defend anyone's position or champion anyone's cause, but let's be honest--any objective person who reads LOL's post can plainly see that she is positing that the rules as determined by the group in question (i.e. Jews) are definitive in this dialogue, and they are not.

The notion of race is not to be determined by the Talmud, the Torah, the Koran, or Mad Magazine. It is defined by science, which is not to be found in the texts mentioned.

What an odd exchange.

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Race in the sense we have been discussing is a cultural concept, not a biological ('scientific') one. (There are other senses of 'race' which are scientific and are not relevant here.) For example, in the state of Louisiana where I spent most of my adult life, race is determined by law. Anyone who has just 1 of his/her 32 closest ancestors with genetic material deriving from a population originating in sub-Saharan Africa is, by law, black. Period. End of story. People who did not want to be classified as black have challenged this in court and lost--and that in recent years. It is not a thing of the distant past. From a biological point of view this is ridiculous. What does it mean to be black when only one of your 32 forebears is of African descent? It means that in Louisiana there are blonde, blue-eyed 'blacks' and red-haired, green-eyed, freckled 'blacks.' This is clearly a cultural, not a biological, concept.

Now, I would not call Jews a race. You totally missed the point. I was speaking of genetics in response to Warik who was deriding the possibility of a genetic component to Judaism. In fact, because for many millennia Jews have defined themselves as Jews by birth (without regard to whatever religion is eventually espoused) and have been endogamous, Jews form a distinct gene pool (breeding population) as evidenced by the appearance of certain genetic diseases, blood type patterns, and other commonalities of DNA. This would be more analogous to ethnicity, such as being Irish or Italian (which groups have both cultural and genetic ties), than to race. I am quite sure that when it comes to ticking off 'race' boxes all Ashkenazic Jews tick 'white' or Caucasian. I personally have the fairest skin imaginable, almost as fair as an albino, and very light eyes. What else would I check? (pace David Duke)

Jews have genetic ties, cultural ties, and religious ties. Christians and Muslims have only religious ties. Adherents of Christianity and Islam can be of any genetic and cultural background. Religion is their only shared feature.

To go back to the OP, "to jew down" is offensive because it applies a negative stereotype to a (minority) group. The terms 'race' and 'racist' are really irrelevant.