Fever, Zionism, Secularism

[tcpip]

Spent two days off sick from work this week. On Sunday afternoon fellow gamers noted that I looked decidedly off-colour, but I managed to participate in good humour just the same - having decided that the language of Middle-Earth's Dalish needs to be expressed in the accent of the Swedish chef from the Muppets (if Rohirric is similar to old Anglo-Saxon, then Dalish is Swedish). OK, maybe that was the first signs of impending delirium, because all through Sunday night and throughout Monday and Tuesday I was hot, felt cold and clammy, constantly dehydrated.

I have finally finished an essay on Apartheid and Zionism, which nobody of a partisan persuasion will agree with, and follows on somewhat from a previous essay The Country of Palestine : A Zero State Solution. Appropriately today I went to a small lunch in honor of Nigel Sinnott's 70th birthday at Halina Strnad's home; there's a four hour interview with Halina available on Youtube including her experiences in Auschwitz and Stutthof.

Nigel been a secular activist for his entire life, and is a former editor of The Freethinker. A truly intelligent atheist and committed liberal in the British Oxfordshire tradition, his opinions are deeply considered and balanced. Other attendees included a number of people involved in the Humanist Society. Halina too is a member and delighted attendees with a story of a local Jewish function where a younger member at her table (who obviously didn't know) called her self-description as a secular Jew as an oxymoron. "What right do you have to call yourself a Jew?", he asked the holocaust survivor. It's where gallows humour meets irony.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Jewishness as a 'race' or a religion is one of those things that keeps coming up in one form or another. Some genii out there tend to pull out their trump card with 'but the Nazi's said it was a race!'. Do we want to let the Nazis define our identities or form our arguments?

My view is that Jewishness is, clearly, a religion. You can read all about it in the Old Testament. There are many who are lapsed or entirely secular Jews and that is fine in the same way that most people who class themselves as Christians have no formal involvement whatsoever with any branch of the Church. Anyone can lay claim to membership of any religion with complete authenticity as no human authority can say otherwise with any certainty.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

One of brilliant entries in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia is for anti-semitism, and points out that in order for there to be anti-semitism there has to be a notion of the Semitic. Persecution of the Jews in Europe, at least in modern times where "race" was being established as an idea, derived from the assumption that because their religion of Semitic that they were too, and hence polluting European Christendom.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1603&letter=A#4621

It is all madness of course, and I constantly find myself returning to the point of how human beings desire to be part of a collectivity for the mental security, yet then use that membership to differentiate and persecute members of other constructed collectives - overlooking the visceral reality of their membership to the same species.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I think that denies shared cultural heritage and experiences, which is the defining aspect of an ethnicity, if not a "race". The holocaust has nothing to do with the old testament, yet there are plenty of atheists around to whom it is a central event to their personal and family histories. The same could be said for food, language and music. There's more to being a Jew than the religion. If you can't use the term "secular Jew" (which pretty clearly says that you identify with the cultural, if not religious aspects of Jewish people) then how do you class all those people who are clearly of the same ethnic group, but do not have a religion that binds them together?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It is true there is more to it than religion, but the religion, the religious heritage, and in particular, the persecution for a religious heritage, is the foundation of the historical shared identity.

Of course one can be a secular Jew, just as there are secular Christians (or for that matter, Christian atheists).