Oresta

A gentile joins the discussion:

I'm surprised that Workmen's Circle hasn't been mentioned on this thread.

http://www.circle.org/

Here is an organization that preserves a cultural heritage in a secular organization. I have attended secular bah and bar mitzvahs of friends whose children have been given an education of their heritage through this organization, which includes the aesthetic, scholastic, political and social history of Jews. I have heard a couple of exellent papers read by teenagers at their rites of passage: one on Yiddish theater in America and the other on Hester Street in New York.

Nataraja

No, religion in general. Most people who have a grain of sense don't really take it seriously.

Dibble Helix

I was born to an atheist-Jewish mother. Therefore I had no Jewish religious training. My mother was very conscious of her Jewishness - she had been victim of anti-Semitic bullying as a child. She viewed her Jewishness not only as a purely racial thing, but as an emotional thing as well - "being Jewish is a feeling" she would say.

I made a decision at an early age that I was not going to follow her in this line of thinking. I am afraid I view this identification with one's ancestral racial group as an essentially divisive thing. I would always prefer to focus on those things that make us all similar rather than those that make us different.

I know this is not a popular view (and it sounds a bit 'preachy'!) but I have found that forgetting (rather than 'denying') my racial background has been a liberating experience.

Dibble

Oxymoron

I'm:
- Jewish by birth
- Atheist by all other metrics
- Comfortable with that

I ditched the whole show after my Bar Mitzvah, which was tedium and torture smothered in bitter chocolate. My liberal-to-moderate parents picked the bits of the religion they felt comfortable with (synagogue on the big festivals, hypocrisy regarding milk and meat, almost complete ignorance of what it was all about...) so I just extended the practice somewhat.

I find Jewish culture promotes victimhood and too much staring back at the past feeling bad about persecutions long-gone. It was a huge weight off my shoulders to drop out of that whole scene.

Harumi

No, I wasn't thinking of the "all Jewish are smart" talk. But in general, many that I've met put education as their top priority. The only student who got a perfect score on the PSAT's last year goes to my school, and is Jewish.

I've talked to others, and they have admitted that in their families, education was very important.

So I guess they may seem smarter.

But the thing that I heard was when we went to the Holocaust Memorial in Detroit. Our guide told us that when the Jews were captured as slaves, because they valued education, unlike the other slaves, they could count, read, and write. The ruler automatically set them up as tax collectors, and that of course, earned them the enmity from the population, and the stereotype that Jews were dirty, money-grubbing, nasty, sick people came about.

It's so sad and irrational. Why can't people know better?

thebeave

This might be slightly off-topic, but is there a source for info on Jewish culture, particularly regarding young women? I dated a non-religious Jewish woman for a while last year, and I suspect that part of the reason things didn't click was that I didn't understand or relate to Jewish female behavior or culture. At this point I'm not sure what was her personal idiosyncrocies or Jewish culture idiocyncrosies . She mentioned attending Jewish camps as a kid, and I kind of got the feeling there was a lot of indoctrination and/or social conditioning going on there. Anyone help me out here? Just trying to understand other lifestyles here.

Vienna

Hey, thebeave.

I'm not sure I could give you any insight into Jewish women. I'm sure they're just as enigmatic as the rest of the gender.

But I can give you an idea about the camps. When I was a kid, I attended a Jewish youth group, and went to a couple of their camps. Mostly, they're just social clubs for Jewish kids, really. But, I guess it depends on what kind of camp it was your ex-girlfriend went to. There are obviously more ultra-Orthodox ones, too. But even in the more liberal ones, like the one I went to, they still make sure the kids learn about Judaism (the festivals, the Torah, the traditions).

Hope this helps.

Wiploc

I know a guy who quit being Catholic, became an agnostic, and then --- as an agnostic --- became Jewish. I was invited to a thingy, a Jewish church service, and he was the one down front being the rabbi. So, the answer seems to be yes.

I was also told that the orthodox Jews are presumptively theists, and the reformed Jews are presumptively atheist, though you actually find some reformed believers and some orthodox atheists.

crc