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

[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).