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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (219796)	2/20/2007 3:33:40 PM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

But I suspect that wrt people who really CARE about religion (communities other than Reform Jews, for example) she is probably right. You can't have it both ways - one can either convert to Judaeism, or not. And if you can have converts, Jews are not an ethnic group. Someone's subjective view of the appropriate behaviour of the converted person is really not an issue. And someone who is 22 generations descended from a convert who was not well looked upon by her peer group is a Jew, or not? As I understand it, modern day Judeaism says you can convert, so Nadine's racist opinions are just Nadine's racist opinions.

To: epicure who wrote (219796)	2/21/2007 12:51:18 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 281500

I disagree with Nadine on many things we talk about here, but she is presenting the view of "many communities" and she is probably right. Converts have always been looked at with a certain amount of suspicion in any faith- just think about the the conversos in Spain- who were going the other way (from Jewish to Christian) and who were known as "Maranos" or "pigs". Lets look at the greatest "conversion" process in the world - becoming American. Anyone can do it, and once they do, voila, they are American. Just because the American racist that has been in the USA for 10 generations looks at the new US citizen from Vietnam who just got nationalized 2 minutes ago with suspicion doesn't make the new (formerly Vietnamese) American less American. In other words, the racist's view that the new American citizen is "less American, and should be viewed with suspicion" is wrong. Furthermore, when you then go 3-4 generations downstream from the convert, all that suspicion falls away as the grandkids raised in Oklahoma are clearly American. Aint it the same with Judaeism? If some person converted in the year 1400, and at that time was viewed with suspicion by the racist Jews in the community who doubted the conversion, aren't the converted person's great grandkids going to be full time Jews just like the suspicious people's grandkids? And if so, what is ethnic about those grandkids when the original convert might have been a Catholic from Iceland?