“Any good-faith attempt to protect any minority, including the Jewish minority, from anti-Semitism or violence is a good thing. But these things do not truly define Jews as an ethnicity. And President Trump has thrown that eternal question into sharp relief by signing an executive order meant to strengthen protections against anti-Semitism on college campuses, where the debate over Israel and Palestinian rights has grown increasingly toxic in recent years.Jewish Americans, who are presumably the beneficiaries, are deeply torn about what it all means.Barry, director of innovation and teen engagement at the Pozez Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia, said that before last week, the only time anyone asked her whether Judaism is a nationality was when she taught seventh-graders about the Holocaust. This week, adults walked into the JCC in Fairfax to share their thoughts and seek hers.“It’s definitely brought the conversation of Judaism as nationality to the forefront,” Barry said.When hate crimes are on the rise, dark corners of the Internet are flooded with vitriol about Jews and both the president and members of Congress have been accused of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, the Trump administration’s attempt at protection is viewed with both suspicion and, in some corners, relief.“Throughout Jewish history, categorizing Jews into a separate group has led to othering and sometimes violence. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here:Rabbi Jack Abramowitz, Jew in the City's Educational Correspondent, is the editor of OU Torah … It is heartbreaking.”In the 1970s, according to General Social Survey data, 99 percent of U.S. Jews were categorized as white.

“That story is really important to who we are.”The increasing number of ethnicities represented in many Jewish communities doesn’t mean Judaism’s ethnic component is irrelevant, just changing, Mates-Muchin said. Come to Israel and you will find black Jews, oriental Jews, Indian Jews, etc. This prohibition continues uninterrupted up one’s paternal line so that even the wife of our forefather Yaakov would be prohibited to one of us (Hilchos Ishus 1:6).This halacha only makes sense because we are literally one big family, not just a family in the metaphorical sense of the world.That Judaism is a familial relationship makes perfect sense. Black vs. white is a matter of race; Spanish vs. Portuguese (for example) is a matter of ethnicity.Race, insofar as it exists at all, is a function of DNA. How about Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris? “We are developing a very distinctive Jewish American ethnicity and identity.”Rabbi Aaron Alexander, co-senior rabbi at Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation, said he taught Hanukkah study sessions on two nights last week and both times participants spent the first 20 or 30 minutes asking questions about the executive order.Like many good Jewish questions, the answer was both no and yes.No, Alexander said, Jews are not a nation-state: “To start to suggest that Jews could be considered a separate nation — that has been and will continue to be dangerous for Jews, to be seen as having some other nation that they are more loyal to than the one in which they live and pay taxes.”And, yes, he added, Jews’ sacred texts tell them that they are connected to fellow Jews, as one people, wherever they live. (There is also the legend of Pope Andreas, but that tale is unconfirmed.) Many of us share similar family customs but other branches of the family may develop their own practices. Most of them were Ashkenazi, a European ethnic lineage specific to Jews.

What about ethnicity? In fact, these examples are more indicative of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, or even of American Jewish culture. Consider Exodus 19:6: “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This remained so even after the Jews were exiled from their land, as seen in Esther 3:8: “There is a certain nation scattered and dispersed among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom….” (An exhaustive list of Biblical references to the Jews as a nation would take up wayyyy too much space. There is only one race, and that is the human race, so to speak of the “Jewish race” can be problematic. So it’s not looking good to define Judaism as a race. They maintain that there’s only one race – the human race – and that any distinctions are only significant because we’ve decided that they are. “Often people tell them that’s not an ethnicity — that’s only a religion.”Mates-Muchin, whose father is Ashkenazi and whose mother is a Chinese American Jewish convert, said she believes she is the first Chinese American rabbi.

So one can practice widely different forms of the religion, no religion or an altogether different religion and still be Jewish.So, if Judaism is not a race, nor an ethnicity, nor is it limited to religion, then what is it?

I know some of them myself.

First of all, there are many flavors of Judaism – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, et al. “When they’re asked what their race is or ‘what they are,’ they say that they’re Jewish,” said Mates-Muchin, 45.

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