Suppose a white American woman married a Japanese man from a traditional family. She learns Japanese, she learns the customs and rituals of the various seasons, she learns how to fit in, and her in-laws accept her. Is it racist of them to observe that she can never truly become Japanese?
The reason she can never become "truly Japanese" in the minds of most Japanese is because she is white. If an Asian from Brazil did the same thing, after 20 years of living in Japan she theoretically could be identical to the Japanese, and most people who met her would not know anything about her being born in Brazil. Her parents in law would probably always consider her the wife from Brazil, but that's because she's the wife from Brazil.
it is not so easy to change your basic ethnicity from whatever you were to Jewish.
Of course it is. If Jews accept converts, it has to be. What else happens in conversion? And since the Jews have been wandering around the planet for thousands of years, you can bet your life their have been plenty of conversions, adoptions, and fornicating with the non-Jewish locals, which all leads to the opposite of an "ethnic group".
If Rabbi Shalom in Moscow in 1,100AD adopted some street orphan, raised him as a Jew named Yev, and Jewish Yev then produces 500 Jewish descendants, are they all part of this "ethnic" group, whereas the descendants of Yev's brother, who didn't get adopted by Rabbi Shalom, are part of a different ethnic group?
Are these Chinese Jews in Shanghai, who presumably look Chinese, part of this Jewish ethnic group? And so are African Jews in Ethiopia? And so will be Sammy Davis Junior's grandkids?
If the Jewish ethnic group encompasses all possible races, what's ethnic about it? |
