"As a Jew, no place but Israel is home "

Sam knows. I personally have explained it to her at least once. This is her trademark intellectual dishonesty, which qualifies as trolling on a science website. Fortunately for her, this is not my board so I have no authority to ban people for trolling on it.

To repeat, "Jew" or "Jewish" has three meanings:

• 1. A member of an ethnic group whose pre-Judaic ancestors are called "Hebrews," one of the tribes that the Canaanites splintered into. In this sense the Jews are most closely related to the Palestinians and Lebanese (Canaanite descendants) and more distantly to the Arabs, Assyrians and other Semitic peoples. Due to the intermarriage that is common among peoples who migrate and/or are conquered, today it's difficult to identify a specific "Jewish" population by DNA. Nonetheless both "Jews" and "non-Jews" try very hard to do so. Hitler arbitrarily defined a Jew (circularly) as any person with at least one Jewish grandparent.
• 2. A person who practices the Jewish religion. This includes only a portion of the Jewish ethnic group, and also includes converts, whose numbers are small because Judaism is not an evangelical religion. Judaism is a religion of laws rather than doctrine, and its members argue over the meaning of every word in the Torah, so they do not present a uniform spirituality; it is possible to be an atheist and still qualify. The core belief of Judaism which binds religious Jews together is:
  Their ancestors made a Covenant with God; they promised to spread his word throughout the world and in return he freed them from bondage in Egypt. (This made them the "Chosen People.") They failed to uphold this Covenant (he had to send down two more prophets and many of us still have not accepted his word) so he has been punishing them relentlessly ever since--from the destruction of the Temple to the Holocaust. To be a Jew in the religious sense is to believe that you and all of your descendants will be subject to God's wrath forever.​
• 3. A member of the Jewish community. According to Jewish law, you are Jewish if and only if your mother is Jewish--regardless of whether you practice the religion and regardless of how tiny a percentage of your DNA comes from Jewish ancestors. Conversion is possible, but as I said it's very uncommon because most people don't want to unnecessarily doom their children and great-great-grandchildren to an eternity of God's wrath. So many people who have Jewish "heritage," live among Jewish people, and celebrate the major holidays (at least Passover and Yom Kippur) are considered Jewish even if they never had a bar mitzvah and can't read a word of Hebrew. This is especially true in the USA, where the Reform congregation is strong and the old rules such as keeping kosher and not driving or flipping a light switch on the Sabbath have been suspended, so being Jewish does not require being obviously Jewish.

Don't try to generalize from a one-percenter. He doesn't represent any consensus. America has something like ten million Jews, and only a tiny fraction of them decide to emigrate to Israel. (And a lot of them come back, especially the women.)

Most European Jews are Ashkenazim and their families spoke Yiddish, regardless of which country they came from. They tended to migrate to whichever country treated them the least poorly in any century. But in these cities they're generally not Sephardim, the Jews from Spain, Africa and the Middle East.

Of course they are. They have to let Chinese people live there because they all love Chinese food. And they need Koreans to do the laundry.

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No American neighborhoods are quite as segregated as our Afro-American neighborhoods, and even they have plenty of Latinos and university students. There is no such thing as an "all-Jewish neighborhood." That is sheer hyperbole.

That's probably a good comparison. Irish culture has a lot of similarities to Jewish culture. They were occupied for centuries, they nearly lost their language, their religion was outlawed, they were discriminated against in countries they moved to.

Many young people go through a phase where they become nostalgic for "roots" they never really had. Look at all the second-generation Mexican-American university students (with too much time and not enough work) agitating for La Raza and Aztlán. Many of them can't speak Spanish any better than I do, and I can write it better than perhaps most of them.

Have you seen the Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters? He was born in Canada and can't speak any Indian language except English, but in his 20s he got "homesick" for a home he never had. So he saved his money and paid for two weeks in India. All the way over on the plane he was telling everyone how proud he was to be Indian and how he was going to reconnect with his culture. Then the plane landed and he walked up to the door and practically fainted. To quote, "Nobody told me about the smell." He spent his first day looking for a place where all the other Canadians and Americans stayed.

And then there was the Afro-American who took a trip to Africa. A week later he spotted a Euro-American, and he ran up and hugged him.

My wife took a trip to Israel on her hippie walkabout in the 1960s, long before we met. She signed up for a stint on a kibbutz. After a few weeks she went AWOL.

Let's see how this Jewish fellow feels after a couple of years in the Holy Land. A lot of Israelis have emigrated to the USA.

You're overlooking the fact that until very recently Hebrew was strictly a liturgical language. It stands for four thousand years of unbroken tradition. To move to a place where people speak it in daily conversation must be quite an experience. And don't also overlook the fact that there are quite a few Jews who consider that blasphemy, and continue to speak Yiddish or the language of their former host country outside the synagogue.

You're the religious person here. Why don't you tell us? I thought it was all inspired by God.

Don't forget that it's an icon in Jewish tradition to long for a return to Israel, the "homeland." This is something they have sustained for two thousand years. Even in their middle-class homes in turn-of-the-century Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and London, Jews ritually made the toast "Next year in Jerusalem." This should not be confused with an actual desire to abandon their homes and move to the fucking desert; for the most part they considered themselves Europeans who were Jewish, not Jews who lived in Europe. But it shows how a tradition can dwell deep inside a people and be passed down through the generations. The Zionist movement played upon this.

The consensus of the Jews (by any definition) I know is that the people who have treated them best are:

• #1. The Chinese. During the Diaspora a group headed east and made it all the way to China. In the Middle Ages, having just assimilated their Mongol "conquerors," the Chinese were a very cosmopolitan people. The Jews shared so many Chinese values--sanitation, education, good business practices, paying taxes, obeying the law--that they were accepted unremarkably as neighbors. This utter lack of hostility resulted in complete assimilation; today only archeologists can point out the old Jewish neighborhoods and only anthropologists can point out the occasional Roman nose.
• #2. The Americans. In my lifetime there were neighborhoods where they were not allowed to live, and there is still hate speech and an actual core of antisemitism here, but they were never discriminated against the way Africans, Chinese and Japanese were. Actual racial violence against them has been exceedingly rare. Obstacles to success existed but were surmountable: the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice (Louis Brandeis) was appointed 94 years ago. Today's American Jewish leaders lament the fact that their people are so well accepted here that they are assimilating in droves, threatening the existence of an American Jewish community, just as in China.
• #3. The English. England was always a class society and the Jews were not structured into the upper class, but they did not fare much worse than other lower-class people. Signs in Yiddish were legal when signs in Irish were not. Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1868, half a century before Brandeis.
• #4. The Ottomans. Jews were second-class citizens in the Ottoman Empire, but second-class citizenship came with well-defined and enforced rights. They were free to own property and transact business, and enjoyed police protection. There were no pogroms. Until the democratization of England and the rise of the United States in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was the high-water mark of tolerance in Jewish history.
• Honorable Mention. The Haitians. During World War II, a couple of shiploads of Jewish refugees tried to dock at an American port. For reasons best left for another discussion (i.e. I have not researched them fully

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  ) they were turned away. They sailed for Haiti, where they were welcomed. Yes folks, by the same people whom Pat Robertson said God punished with an earthquake because they're not good Christians!

 

You are one of the most outspoken religionists among our members. For you to berate people for letting their behavior be guided by myths is yet another example of your trademark intellectual dishonesty. The fact that Judaism includes the specific myth of a return to a homeland is nitpicking, considering the volume of outrageous myths that comprises any religion.

Both Christianity and Islam include the myth that everyone outside of their community of believers is inferior, and to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the particular sect of Christianity or Islam) our rights may be violated in order to "show us the light" and "save us from eternal damnation." Excuse me but I find this universal contempt for ALL outsiders far more despicable than the Jews' contempt for the Palestinians, who comprise only about one-third of one percent of the non-Jewish population.

As I pointed out earlier, as a pious Abrahamist you are in no position to criticize any other Abrahamist for the peculiarities of his own bullshit religion.

It is indeed unusual for people to retain a desire to move back to their ancestral homeland, but it is not unknown. It's hardly universal among Jews. The vast majority of American Jews are happy where they are. As I have noted in other discussions, it's been argued that most of the Jewish refugees from Europe would rather have been resettled in Europe, and in my youth I certainly met Jewish refugees in America who said they'd much rather go back to Europe than emigrate to Israel. The major Jewish migration to Israel has been from places where they were not welcome like postwar western Europe, or places where all religions were suppressed like the Soviet bloc, or places where the well-honed business acumen that had helped them survive was suppressed--also the Soviet bloc. There has never been a strong stream of Jewish emigres from countries where they were well-treated. Except India, and we have only your word that they were happy there--a person whose astounding lack of understanding of the Jewish people, their history, religion and culture, outside the narrow context of the Israel-Palestine conflict, has become a running gag on SciForums.

All of the Abrahamic religions reinforce our species's tribal instinct in many ways. The Jews express it in their memory of a homeland, but you Muslims express it in your ways and the Christians do the same. You all regard the rest of us as unenlightened outsiders who in a crisis are less important than your own people and in a conflict are expendable.

And as Quad pointed out, the percentage of the Jewish people in America who migrate to Israel is statistically almost insignificant, and is outbalanced by more than one order of magnitude by the disillusioned Israelis who migrate to America.

The entire issue you have raised, about American Jewish emigration to Israel being a curiosity that flags the Jews as significantly different from other Abrahamists, has been refuted, since the majority of immigration goes in the other direction. You must cease pursuing it.

Moreover, I responded to this topic the first time you raised it. My remarks were a challenge to your assertion about the oddity of young American Jews' struggle to recapture old traditions that their parents didn't teach them. It is not so odd; it occurs in other ethnic groups as well. I put it in perspective by identifying one specific other ethnic group--American-born Latinos--who desperately search for roots they were never given by their assimilated families. A return to the homeland is not their particular motif--probably because they've all been there dozens of times as tourists and visited their relatives. But they're compulsive about learning the language they were not taught at home and campaigning for the recognition of Aztlán, the Aztec homeland fancifully recreated for the mixed-race descendants of the Aztecs and their conquerors, and fancifully relocated several hundred miles north so it now encompasses northern Mexico and the southwestern USA and completely misses the Aztec capital.

I would like to see a breakdown of these emigrants to Israel by congregation. I'll bet most of them are from Reform families where Jewish traditions are lax, not Orthodox families who kiss the mezuza and don't cook on the Sabbath.