Hiero
19th June 2010, 10:49
I was hoping to have a conversation about racial/ethnic/national identity.
People constantly dismiss race and ethnicity, saying they can't be this or that because they don't exist within a predifined existence. So you can't be an athiest Jew because I declare being Jewish as being a adherent of Judaism. It basically means nothing, if we are to say face anti-semitism. It would be alot easy to declare to everyone that there are no Jews, no Blacks, no Latinos etc because race is merely imaginary. What result would that have in a world so heavily invested in racial and ethnic identity?
I draw on Sartr'e essay Anti-semite and Jew as it focus alot on the situation of being a Jew. That an individual is born and finds himself in a situation. He can be inauthentic, and deny this situation exists. So he can claim that he is a man like all other men and does not exist in any Jewish situation. Or he be authentic and realise he is in a situation like many other Jews and make his choices from this situation. A truely non racist society would facilitate the freedom to make thoose choices. A inauthentic position with the left is to be colour-blind, so we don't care about your race just that you are worker and as workers we all face the same obstacles.
Anyway this is what I posted in another thread that lead into a debate about the existance of atheist Jews and can lead the conversation.
For one there is no such thing as "races", but saying that "you are not a Jew, but a human who can choose to be religious or non-religous and thus Jewish or non Jewish" is socially inept. Would anyone say that as a way to aviod anti-semitism?
There is a considerable amount of structural forces that make people recgonise race, such as structural racism that creates "apartheid" of people by forcing different socio-economic groups and this is futher visible in ghettos and surburbs for instance.
There is is also just being or doing a race or ethnicity. This is where certian Jews may claim to be atheistic. They are born and raised in a "Jewish" house, followed "Jewish" traditions, ate "Jewish" food, speak a "Jewish" language (Hebrew), have Jewish parents and are recognised by a "Jewish" community. If they say they are not Jewish, Western societies is inherently anti-semetic as it is racist and pushes them back to Jewish identiy. The anti-semetism of Europe consolidated the Jew as foreign to the host nation-state and an obstatcle to national unity.
There is a Judaism, which is the religion of the Jews. There is Israel and Israelites, which is the racist settler nation-state and nationality respectively, with an ethnically pure mentality of a pure Jewish state. And then there is the Jew, a social being who can exist in multiple conditions and existances. So there can be a Chomsky and there can be a Ben-Gurion.
Ofcourse all these things are "imaginary" but the "imaginary" is very powerfull when it is back up in the materiality of the world (real existing structures like capitalism and imperialism). It is going to be a long time for the racial-ethnic-national imaginary to change or disolve and this is dependent on the material changing.
People constantly dismiss race and ethnicity, saying they can't be this or that because they don't exist within a predifined existence. So you can't be an athiest Jew because I declare being Jewish as being a adherent of Judaism. It basically means nothing, if we are to say face anti-semitism. It would be alot easy to declare to everyone that there are no Jews, no Blacks, no Latinos etc because race is merely imaginary. What result would that have in a world so heavily invested in racial and ethnic identity?
I draw on Sartr'e essay Anti-semite and Jew as it focus alot on the situation of being a Jew. That an individual is born and finds himself in a situation. He can be inauthentic, and deny this situation exists. So he can claim that he is a man like all other men and does not exist in any Jewish situation. Or he be authentic and realise he is in a situation like many other Jews and make his choices from this situation. A truely non racist society would facilitate the freedom to make thoose choices. A inauthentic position with the left is to be colour-blind, so we don't care about your race just that you are worker and as workers we all face the same obstacles.
Anyway this is what I posted in another thread that lead into a debate about the existance of atheist Jews and can lead the conversation.
For one there is no such thing as "races", but saying that "you are not a Jew, but a human who can choose to be religious or non-religous and thus Jewish or non Jewish" is socially inept. Would anyone say that as a way to aviod anti-semitism?
There is a considerable amount of structural forces that make people recgonise race, such as structural racism that creates "apartheid" of people by forcing different socio-economic groups and this is futher visible in ghettos and surburbs for instance.
There is is also just being or doing a race or ethnicity. This is where certian Jews may claim to be atheistic. They are born and raised in a "Jewish" house, followed "Jewish" traditions, ate "Jewish" food, speak a "Jewish" language (Hebrew), have Jewish parents and are recognised by a "Jewish" community. If they say they are not Jewish, Western societies is inherently anti-semetic as it is racist and pushes them back to Jewish identiy. The anti-semetism of Europe consolidated the Jew as foreign to the host nation-state and an obstatcle to national unity.
There is a Judaism, which is the religion of the Jews. There is Israel and Israelites, which is the racist settler nation-state and nationality respectively, with an ethnically pure mentality of a pure Jewish state. And then there is the Jew, a social being who can exist in multiple conditions and existances. So there can be a Chomsky and there can be a Ben-Gurion.
Ofcourse all these things are "imaginary" but the "imaginary" is very powerfull when it is back up in the materiality of the world (real existing structures like capitalism and imperialism). It is going to be a long time for the racial-ethnic-national imaginary to change or disolve and this is dependent on the material changing.