* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *
Geeze, I take a day off from the internet and my board has been taken over by politics!
I don't mind discussions rambling a little bit off topic, into science, humor, history or personal issues. But please take the politics to the Politics board. I'm not going to spend half an hour editing and deleting posts because you all have miraculously managed to keep the discourse civil. But from this point forward please stay on topic, and the topic is the use and connotations of various words for Jewish people and their culture. Obviously history plays a legitimate role in this topic, but current events generally do not.
Are there any negative connotations with regards to this as a descriptor of the inhabitants of Israel (or the diaspora in general)?
Speaking as a man with many Jewish ancestors and even more in-laws, I can assure you that the word "Jew" is virtually devoid of any stigma in the 21st-century USA, notwithstanding the quaint but somewhat out-of-date opinion cited in the O.P. There are many ways a person can qualify as "Jewish" depending on the focus of the conversation. "Jew" is a perfectly acceptable shorthand term to mean all of them inclusively or any of them vaguely.
- People who practice the Jewish religion are Jewish. That includes Sammy Davis Jr., an African-American convert.
- People who are born and raised in the Jewish community, identify with it and adhere to a few key Jewish cultural traditions such as Passover are Jewish. That includes a lot of atheists, as well as many people who outmarry and whose children are raised in a different religion by their spouse.
- People who have matrilineal Jewish ancestry are Jewish and qualify for automatic Israeli citizenship. That includes some people who were raised outside the community and have no religious heritage.
- People who have one-fourth Jewish "blood" were Jewish under the rules of Nazi Germany and were sent to death camps. That included a lot of people who did not qualify under the first three definitions.
That said, in response to the specific wording of the O.P., "Jews" is a satisfactory name for the Jewish people of the Diaspora, as well as those who migrated to Israel. But as others have pointed out in this thread, it's not such a good name for the people of Israel, since many Israeli citizens are not Jewish by ancestry, religion or culture. If you really want to distinguish the Jewish people of Israel from the others, Israeli Jews is the way to say it. Otherwise Israelis means all citizens of the modern state, and Jews means all people on this planet who qualify as Jewish under one or more of the definitions (depending on context) that I noted earlier.
"Israelite" refers to the members of the tribes of Israel during the biblical era, i.e., the Jews of antiquity. "Hebrew" is sometimes used by Christians to identify a person who is of Jewish ancestry but does not practice the religion, or especially one who is a Christian. It's also used by anthropologists and linguists to identify the ancestors of the Jewish ethnic group before the Jewish religion was founded. Since, due to lack of evidence one way or the other, it is possible that the founding of the religion was the catalyst that divided the Canaanite people into the two populations who became the ancestors of the Jews and the ancestors of the Palestinians, I prefer to just call them all Canaanites and limit "Hebrew" to the ancient and modern versions of the language.
So ah, when a nigger calls a nigger, a nigger, (rotfl) it is generally ok because malicious intent of the racist variety is lacking.
Yes, and even though you clearly had no "malicious racist intent" when you wrote that sentence, I assure you that it will cause every anglophone who reads it to gasp. Even in jest, even on the Linguistics board.
Just as you, a Jew, has no problem calling other Jews, Jews.
Of course I defer to anyone else's experience, but in more than 60 years I have never encountered a situation in which a Jewish person (by any definition) objected to the use of the word by anybody.
I've lost track of your context, but for the record, in those quaint places like the halls of government where people are tracked according to the color of their skin, Jews are counted as "white." All the Semitic peoples--Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, Lebanese, Assyrians, Ethiopians--are "Caucasian" in the old paradigm. (I am impatient for the dawn of the era Haile Selassie described, when "the color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes.")
During America's shameful past, some Jewish Americans owned African slaves.
