Absolutely on belonging to the Jewish nation or the Jewish people. Also, it’s misleading to compare the use of the word “nationality” in this context to the Soviet nationality policy, as some have done out there in the twitterverse.
In the USSR, Jewishness was indeed viewed as a “nationality.” But the Soviets fought tooth & nail against acknowledging that Jews were a people or a nation. Doing so would have meant that US & Israeli Jews who were fighting for Soviet Jewry to rejoin the Jewish people had a case.
Moscow claimed that Soviet Jews were a separate category & had nothing to do with any other Jews on the planet. If they acknowledged that Soviet Jews were part of a Jewish people, they’d have to “let my people go,” & they were not going to do that voluntarily.
Soviet Jews understand better than most that being a Jew is not only about religion but also about ethnicity (which is what the Soviet term “nationality” really meant). Millions of us were not religious. But our Jewishness was hardwired into us via our ethnic features.
Friend & foe could identify us as Jews from 1 look at our faces. Ethnic features, in fact, topped everything else. For example, Jews from mixed families had the option of writing the nationality of their non-Jewish parent in their papers. But that only made everyone laugh. Why?
Because: as the famous Soviet saying goes, “they punch you in your face, not on your passport.” In many ways it didn’t matter what your papers said: your ethnic features told your story. (In Nazi times, too, of course, some Jews survived because they didn’t “look Jewish.”)
I learned from @DanielGordis ‘s “Divided We Stand” that defining Jewishness exclusively in religious terms is a purely American Jewish thing. There were reasons for US Jews to insist on that. But I think most of us know that Jewishness also includes ethnicity.
And most of us get that there is such a thing as Jewish nationhood or peoplehood. It’s rich & complex, & it doesn’t negate our belonging to whatever country we happen to live in. Denying its existence in the name of partisan politics just seems silly & wrong.
