I have a question…

One of my cousins on my father’s side is Jewish. She converted 45 years ago when she married a Jewish man, and they’ve raised their son and daughter as Jewish, including Bar and Bat Mitzvah. She keeps a kosher home still, even after her husband passed away, and was going to the synagogue regularly (before Covid). She keeps a mezuzah on her door. She recently told me that a kid (twenty-something) told her "well, you’re not really Jewish, and your kids aren’t really Jewish either. Their mother has to be Jewish, not just their father." My cousin told him, "My children were born to a Jewish mother." She was very offended. Once you convert, don’t you become part of the community ? 🤔

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Babylon

Remember that being an ethnic Jew differs to a religious Jew. You can convert religiously and follow Judaism and be a religious Jew but as an ethnoreligious identity, the ethnic part comes in, which undoubtedly incorporates Jewish culture which entails the progeny of the Jewish people. Meaning, you can assimilate but you would never be considered a full Jew if you were not born amongst them because your genetic features and blood are foreign to the ethnicity and you inherit different genetic features by default, typically

bijouxbroussard · F

@Babylon But havent there always been Jews of different ethnicities ? Sephardic, even Falashas, who go back thousands of years. A friend once told me "they’re the kids of Sol & Sheba". It’s one of the things I was sorry to hear about Israel. When writer Alice Walker visited, she reported that it reminded her of the segregated American South of her childhood. She said that they only seemed to consider Caucasian Jewish people "real Jews", even if others came from traditionally Jewish communities.

Babylon

@bijouxbroussard yes. There have always been multiple clans and different heritage trees but you gotta descend from it right? I can move to China with my black kiester but I wouldn't have inherited the features the Chinese are known for just by moving there. That's a factor at play within culture. The people may have features

And Israel is a terrible, apartheid state that gets by with everything because it leeches off the U.S. taxpayers (by choice of the government). I wouldn't use it as a yardstick for Jewish heritage and culture because its decisions are politically motivated, hence why you probably heard those bad things. Real Jews don't support the evils od Israel. The Zionists are deporting black Jews there from the "Jewish Homeland."

If your heritage is Jewish, then you're a Jew. You may not have been born with the blood and genetic features in the gene pool shared by the Jewish bloodline but any of the Jewish progeny do have that. Judaism is arguably an ethnoreligion so there is the culture/ethnicity and then the religious aspect. That's all there is to it