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Notes -
…Jewish libertarians, Jewish Objectivists, Jewish capitalists, Jewish socialists, Jewish eugenicists, Jewish Muslims, Jewish Christians, Jewish atheists, Jewish Ukrainian Nazis, Jewish CEOs, Jewish actors, Jewish news editors, Jewish bloggers, Jewish poor people on welfare, Jewish homeless drug addicts.
Jews are so fully integrated into mainstream culture in every respect that they’re in every profession, creed, and political group. To assign any collectiveness to Jews as a whole at this point is as fallacious as making the same list with Irish-descended or German-descended people. That’s my answer to “the Jewish Question.”
Surely you know that this is a lazy approach to the question. In fact, it seems tailor-made to be lazy and to require the least amount of thought possible. “I find this question yucky, so I will throw my hands up and refuse to contemplate it with any depth whatsoever.” You can’t seriously believe that percentages and probabilities mean nothing at all. You don’t actually think that the existence of a teeny-tiny handful of Jewish converts to Islam, or an infinitesimally small number of Jewish bums and street criminals, means that we cannot draw any useful conclusions about likelihoods and general tendencies. I trust that you’re smart enough to see why this is an absurd approach, in the same way that the existence of a tiny and statistically-insignificant number of female muggers and MMA fighters does not in any sense render us unable to draw reliable conclusions about the differences between men and women.
I am not disputing that; I am disputing that the existence of Jewish bums and “Jewish Muslims” disallows us from forming any useful generalizations about patterns involving Jews as an ethnic group, which is the claim that Duplex made. Certainly there were prominent Jews in most major post-Enlightenment European/Anglosphere philosophical movements, and I agree that this should give the hardcore “all leftism is the Jews’ fault” antisemites serious pause. This does not mean that Jews are exactly as undifferentiated and lacking in specific/prefictable qualities as German-Americans.
I think the worry is about creating generalizations out of red-herrings and a pattern of circumstantial evidence. I think many Jews are becoming increasingly differentiated. The percentages you brought up are certainly meaningful, but I think they're meaningful in the same sense that they're meaningful for most other populations you can find out there; namely of a very mundane and uninteresting kind. It's even inherent in the Reform tradition.
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