Thread by @SlavaMalamud

One last word on whether we, Jews, are a race.
Yes.
This is the word. Yes, we are. Unequivocally. Not open to discussion, but I can explain.
First of all: race is fake. It's a social construct, it has nothing to do with objective reality, it exists only insofar as we define it...

Colin Kapernick and Whoopi Goldberg look nothing alike and share almost no facial characteristics to put them in the same racial group, even the most loosely defined one.
Yet the are both classified as "black", because our society defines blackness as a comparison to white people

In America, you are black if you are not white. By the same token, a Greek person and a Dutch person look nothing alike at all, but both would be defined as "white" under the umbrella of some ambiguously understood "European culture", which, by definition, is a social construct.

People were originally grouped into races with only one goal in mind: to discriminate and subjugate. Therefore, the only opinion on the subject of race that matters comes from the only people who have defined it and care about it the most: racists.

In other words, if your societal group is hated by racists on the basis of some arbitrary characteristics you were born with and cannot change, you are a race.
It's that simple.
I am a Jew. There are zero traditions of Judaism I have ever followed. Not even one. Ever...

I love pork, I have worked on Saturdays, when I was married, I didn't send my wife to bleed in a shed, I consider all innumerable prohibitions of Judaism to be unbelievably silly and the entire practice a definition of OCD.
But I am a Jew. Just ask any anti-semite.

In the USSR, I was defined as a Jew on official documentation, was singled out and hated as a Jew, and it was all on the basis of my looks and my last name. Nobody cared about whether I kept kosher, mutilated my penis or wore an idiotic box with a leather strap on my forehead.

Once, my geometry teacher told the entire class that I represent all the worst characteristics "of his tribe."
No amount of atheism would change this. I could've converted into Orthodox Christianity and would still remain a Jew.
It's a race. According to the only people who know.

And yes, this also means that Ivanka Trump is not a Jew. She is a cosplayer. She's taken advantage of our comparatively privileged status in America to pretend being Jewish. It's not at all different from a white person's liking soul food and R&B and claiming kinship with slaves.

Ivanka can recite the Torah from here to Haifa, but her Aryan looks are all that matters as far as anti-semites are concerned. They may hate her as a race traitor, but they will never hate her as a Jew.
She is not the same as I am.
In a normal society, this shouldn't matter...

In a normal society, race should be irrelevant and, at most, a curiosity, a piece of family lore, akin to a white person's saying, "Hey, my grandpa was Swedish", and your replying, "Really? That's nice" and never thinking about this again.
But we don't live in a normal society.

We live in a society defined and informed by racial differences and racial strife.
Both of which are products of social conventions. Which do not presuppose one's ability to change their racial characteristics.
This is my situation, as a Jew.
Religion is utterly irrelevant here.

With all that, I accept Goldberg's apology and wish she were unsuspended so she could go on air and spread the word.
Stop defining us as a religion! Religion is an opinion.
Nobody in living memory has murdered a Jew because of what type of meat he ate.
Full stop.