The Three Faces of Judaism: Ethnic, Religious and Ideological

I believe we need to separate Judaism into 3 distinct categories: ethnic, religious and ideological.

You can be a religious or ideological Jew without being ethnically Jewish. While I’m not denying there’s any biological link between being ethnically Jewish and ideologically Jewish, I believe that ideological Judaism is mostly a social construct. And like all social constructs, it can and should be critiqued, ostracized and deconstructed when appropriate.

While ideological Judaism is not equivalent to modernism, the two ideologies do share a significant intersection, with many modernist and authoritarian models of government being created by individuals who hold Jewish ideological beliefs.

What Adolf Hitler did wrong is that he targeted primarily the Jewish ethnicity. Most modernists would agree that ethnicity is not something that you can choose. I believe it is usually inappropriate to target any specific ethnicity or religion, or at least it’s just extremely bad optics.

Please note that not all ideological Jews are ethnic Jews and not all ethnic Jews are ideological Jews. I believe a strong distinction must be made between the two sets to begin addressing the actual problem at hand.

Comments |1,919|

Legend *) Required fields are marked
**) You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>