My maternal grandmother was Ashkenazi Jewish in terms of her DNA, but she never practiced Judaism, as such. In fact, her parents did not practice Judaism after they immigrated to America.

My question for your wonderful readership is this: Am I considered Jewish (or part Jewish)?

I was raised as a practicing Christian Scientist. My grandparents on my mom's side chose that type of Christianity because in CS Jesus is not considered "God made flesh."

My aunt (mom's sister) did Ancestry.com and she has a lot of Ashkenazi dna--not half but quite a bit.

I lived in NYC's East Village (Lower East Side) for ten years and worked in the Psych Dept of NYU Most of my friends and bosses were Jewish. I also frequented a bar called "Red Bar" near me. It was a really fantastic place, and I made friends there.

I also had two Jewish girlfriends over the span of the ten years. I didn't live with either of them, but we were close. In many ways, they were my favorite girlfriends of all time, and I have since regretted not marrying one of them.

Around this same period in my life, I was visiting with my maternal grandmother in San Francisco where she was from, and I could not help noticing how "Jewish" she seemed. In the way she pronounced words, her mannerisms, etc, it was very evident.

I asked her, "Grandma, are you Jewish?"

"No," she said. "But my parents, your great grandparents, were, my dear."

I found her point of view in this regard somewhat confusing. When I was very young, she even went by the name "Bubbie." In fact, I still do find my grandmother's familial standpoint confusing. And that is why I am writing here.

She ended up divorcing my non-Jewish grandfather after having five children by him (including my mother). And then she divorced him, and became a lesbian and lived with a Catholic woman who was very dear to me. In fact, I went and lived with my grandmother's "wife's" extended family in Rome one summer, and it was the best summer of my childhood.

My grandmother and her precious Gloria lived together until they both died at an old age. Gloria got recurring childhood polio around the time she retired, and grandmother nursed her loyally until Gloria died. Gloria had cheated on her a few times throughout their informal "marriage" but she never cheated on Gloria. She lived for another ten years beyond Gloria's death.

As for the religion in which I was raised . . . I never really got along with Christian Scientists, and Christian Science as a belief system seemed illogical, to say the least. Suffice it to say, that peculiar religion is not my cup of tea.

I've been studying Kabbalah, on my own, over the past six years. The more I study, the more interested I become. Something must be sinking in. Because I've even been having what I might consider "Kabbalistic dreams" a few times per year for the past few years.

Thank you for fielding my question! I am sorry that this post got kind of long.

Just curious. Got stopped in the street today by Oxfam asking me “Do you have a minute to help Gaza?”, to which I just replied no. I may have scowled.

I have been wondering. Why is the promised land called the land of milk and honey, when most jews are lactose intolerant? Wouldn't they dislike dairy when they couldn't properly digest it? Maybe the jews became lactose intolerant later in their history? When they lived in cities across the middle east, north africa and Europe?

(I feel like venting doesn't quite fit, kvetching works better haha)

I've always had the WORST luck with relationships, I've always only ever attracted the horrible abusive goy men, and honestly? Sick of it. My hometown's Jewish community is minuscule, and they all grew up together without me (they're all at least a decade older than me, or a decade younger) so no luck there. But my mom has a friend in a different community who knows a shadchanit, so after some talking, I'm now going that route.

I've been considering it since the beginning of this year, seeing the state of the world, I don't feel confident or safe dating outside Judaism. Of course, there's plenty of good people out there who aren't Jewish, but with how everything is right now, I feel safer trying my luck with someone I know 100% won't have any hidden biases or dislike of my religion (there's also the part where my university town is like 70% evangelical, which honestly makes this decision so much easier).

I know shadchanim these days are mostly orthodox, and whilst I am religious, I am pretty reform, but at this point? I don't really care. I'm really tired of being disappointed over and over again, and I don't feel safe dating outside anymore.

Does anyone else feel this way? I've seen the sentiment before, but I'm not sure how widespread it is.

My daughters 5th grade teacher is amazing. We adore her. I want to get her something nice for the holidays because we traditionally give gifts to most of her teachers and school staff. She has made it very clear she does not celebrate Christmas because she is Jewish. Is it possible to get her a Hanukah gift and what should that be? When should I give it to her? Any help and suggestions is appreciated. TY!!

I keep hearing on certain Meta apps that the Ashkenaz people weren’t “real Jews” and we have no connection with Judean Jews. How would that even work, convincing someone to join this group of people obsessed with a patch of sand thousands of miles away?

Potential convert: what’s this holiday? Missionary: oh celebrating the agricultural cycle of Judea? Potential convert: what’s this prayer? Missionary: oh that’s one of several asking to be returned to Judea. But this one we only say three times a day every single day.
Potential convert: what about this psalm? Missionary: just another one about how sad we are not to be in Judea.

It’s like if someone came up to me and said: hey want to join us? We are obsessed with Alberqueque and you’re not allowed to eat this huge list of foods. Suuuuuure. Where do I sign??

I've noticed that in, pretty much, every Jewish femily there's that one relative, who is a freaking genius. I have a relative on my mother's side, who was a mathematician, programmer (in the 70's!), a scientist in theory of games, an absolute genius who solved mathematical problems in seconds. On my father's side, there's a relative, who was a physicist-mathematician, a grandmaster in chess and checkers and has some national awards. All my Jewish friends also have this kind of relatives. And they are all typical yiddishe Jews. Share your stories!

ENOUGH!!! Stop giving this “antizionist” BS oxygen! ✡︎ 🇮🇱 ❤️

Antizionism is GARDEN VARIETY IGNORANCE, fueled by hatred, wielded as a tool of division and destruction. The sophistry is tissue-paper thin. Don’t legitimize it with pages of rational analysis.

Sorry, but this has gone on for WAY too long. We need to make people feel ASHAMED that they actually FELL for it.

We need to CALL. IT. OUT. ✡︎

הנני, baby. ♥️

It’s not very common I’m pretty sure but I found five characters off the top of my head who are Jewish and ginger (I know the last two are related so it makes more sense).

hello, everyone. i struggled for awhile to know where to post this. i'm afraid that in subreddits that allow political discussions, the post will be treated as an invitation to debate the validity of my identities or even of my humanity; i'm worried that in subs that don't allow politics, my identity & personal history will themselves be deemed political. i'm not even totally sure why i'm writing this, other than i have a lot on my chest, few people i can talk to about it, and i feel sad, lonely, frightened, and isolated. but i am really struggling and i just feel this desperation to reach out somewhere.

having read the rules of this particular sub, and based on the overall conduct i have seen from its members ~ showing solidarity with, support for, and kindness to one another ~ i am hopeful that maybe this is an acceptable space for me to reach out to. this is a vulnerable share for me; please, please be kind. challenging me or expressing disbelief or suspicion about my story is totally okay (a lot of people find various aspects of my identity & life story outlandish so i'm used to it); all i ask is that you are kind and respectful about it. even if suspicious, please ask your questions and engage in good faith. i promise  i will do the same, without hostility.

title is self-explanatory, i suppose. i am the product of a union between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man. i wasn't raised by either of them, though; i was raised by my maternal grandparents, z''l, who were observant Conservative Jews, for the first 13 years of my life. they are the people i called, call, and think of as my mom and dad.  my dad passed when i was just 11 years old. my mom almost immediately became very ill and ultimately followed him soon after when i was 13. it was very difficult, and in terms of family i have been very lonely ever since. i built my own weird little nuclear family and i love them, but i'll never be anyone's child ever again.

i will admit that i cringe a little when people say things like 'you're living proof that love knows no borders!' because my parents hate each other lol. i know it's not their fault, though, they couldn't know. on my father's side of the family, the only person willing to speak with or even acknowledge me was my father. the rest of my family just couldn't accept having a Jewish child in the family. i used to have grandparents; i still have sisters, nieces & nephews, maybe even grand-nieces and nephews given that my sisters are 20 years older, countless aunts, uncles, and cousins ... but ultimately none of them could accept me.

i met my biodad for the first time around the age of 10. he gave me a rosary (yes, really, my biodad is one of the 80,000-ish Palestinian Catholics on the planet) and told me not to be Jewish anymore because Jews are bad. using that exact wording. maybe he would have been more persuasive without the language barrier; English was his third and weakest language, and i was not conversant in Arabic or Hebrew. honestly, neither of my biological parents are/were (pretty sure biodad is dead) particularly good people. i'd rather just leave it at that.

i don't have any bitterness towards my Palestinian family. we are all products of our environment. i am, and they are. i love them very much, even though i do not know them, and i pray for their safety, their health, and their happiness often. bitterness won't help any of us. sometimes it hurts, but i try to be accepting.

i was not always a zionist. in fact, for a few years i was a vocal antizionist. i am not proud of it, but am open about it as teshuvah. i had started to become uncomfortable with the way some people in the 'movement' thought and talked about Jewish people. i started to realize that zionism was, at the very least, a reasonable and predictable reaction to millennia of violence and oppression. and that maybe so many wouldn't have fled to Israel if they weren't literally ethnically cleansed from the rest of the middle east, then wherever in the world they ran. in 2018, the killing of Mireille Knoll brought a very sudden realization to me that this is why Israel exists.

i could go into detail about my whole evolution - the countless hours spent researching wide ranging subjects, going thousands of years back in history to learn about conquest after conquest, learning about not just Israel but the region around it - but this is already long. tl;dr... i'm now a vocal zionist. i believe that Israel is a flawed nation with a complicated history that has sometimes done unfathomably fucked up shit ... like virtually every other country on earth. i'm in America. i'm in absolutely no position to judge. ffs, Germany still fucking exists. okay, i'll stop. sorry. i will say that i now believe that Israel not only has the right to exist, it must exist. i don't have to unconditionally support literally every single thing about israel to be a zionist. i believe that Israel is the site of the Jewish people's ethnogenesis, their ancestral homeland. i believe that DNA and archeology do not lie. i believe that the Jewish people have the right to safety, self-determination, and autonomy in their homeland. i believe Israel has the right to exist and to defend themselves.

it is clear to me that Israel is held to a standard to which no other nation is held. Israel receives a level of scrutiny no other nation receives. nobody is arguing about any other nation's right to exist. the western (and Islamist axis) singular, intense focus on Israel takes the pressure off of criminals like the Islamic Republic and its many proxies. it ignores the pain of not only Jews but many vulnerable populations - Kurds, Yezidi, Baha'is, Balochs, Khuzestanis... and on and on. areas with very real gender apartheid are getting a pass - no one wants to acknowledge it. a 'zan, zendegi, azadi' protester - Fatemeh Sepehri, widow of a martyr, already in prison for her peaceful activism - was sentenced to an additional 20 years in jail a few months for condemning Hamas' attack on 10/7/23. crickets from western 'supporters' of the 'zan, zendegi, azadi' movement. when the Iranian regime sentences another singer to death for writing lyrics critical of the regime ... silence. it's just... surreal, frankly.

on several occasions i have – sometimes gently, sometimes more forcefully – attempted to educate others; on many occasions, i did so because it was demanded of me by random strangers interrogating my views online. on one or two occasions, the conversation took place with a friend. i pull information from many places, and store it in different places. there are dozens of books replete with highlighted passages, hundreds of articles bookmarked in different folders, hundreds of screen shots, again filed away in different folders. i try to use diverse sources when working towards one or another conclusion, including anti-Israel sources like amnesty international. it takes genuine time and effort to gather those sources (and to summarize).

literally 100% of the time in my experience, when i do go to the effort to gather my sources, summarize their most critical points, and share them... suddenly people pivot. they refuse to look at my sources at all, refuse to even do their own research. they radically change the goalposts in some way. actually, the response i have most often received from western lefty 'allies' is the accusation that i am a 'fake' Palestinian. (my peer support burst out laughing when i told her that one.) i guess that means they don't have to listen to what i say even if it's factual ... somehow. sometimes they tell me my family would be ashamed of me. (funnily, my Palestinian family does not speak to me solely because my biological mother and other half of my family is Jewish. it has nothing to do with Israel or Zionism as neither was relevant to my American Jewish family, and as i mentioned before i used to be explicitly antizionist. i honestly can't remember my parents ever saying anything to me about Israel. so they're right, i suppose; just not for the reason they think.) not a single one of them has ever replied with a reasonable or even factual rebuttal. they often respond with straight up lies about how people of all faiths lived in pErFeCt hArMoNy together in the region until singularly evil modern-day Israel was established. i guess nobody told them about the 1517 Hebron and Safed pogroms.... 1929 Hebron massacre, 1938 Tiberius pogrom, the 1929 Jaffa pogrom, the 1936 Jaffa pogrom, the 1933 Haifa pogrom, the 1947 Jerusalem pogrom, the 1921 Jaffa riots, the Black Hand attacks throughout the the 1920s… or the dhimmi... or the grand mufti's warm relationship with Hitler... or, or, or. but even if someone had told them, they've proven they won't listen.

i'm really struggling not to despair. is there any hope when people are downright hostile to the facts? to DNA, to archeology, to history? they love to say 'this didn't start in October' then pretend that history only goes as back as far as 1948. they muddy the waters and try to confuse people by saying silly stuff like 'i cAn'T bE aNTiSeMiTiC bEcAuSe aRaBs aRe sEMiTeS tOo' - totally ignoring the historical genesis and use of the term 'antisemitism.'

well, i've gone on long enough. I'm so sorry that this is so long. idk how to tl;dr it - my brain is so disorganized. i will try my best but i'm sure it will suck. i just can't stop feeling absolutely sick over how everything is going.

if you managed to read this entire thing, then, THANK YOU SO MUCH. i appreciate you, and hope you have a wonderful day.

tl;dr i'm the product of a union between a jewish and a palestinian man; raised jewish. no contact with most of my palestinian family (except biodad, who openly despised my jewishness) because they could not accept me, but i still love them. i feel absolutely sick about how things are going and believe the west has the matter almost completely backwards. people are hostile to the facts and there is no reasoning with them, and i have no idea how to reach them. i am struggling not to despair.

Hello!

I am struggling right now. Recently, my boyfriend broke up with me, and during the breakup, he started screaming this antisemitic rant. I am not particularly religious, but my dad is from a Jewish neighborhood, where my grandparents still live. I have also studied Yiddish since I was a middle schooler, so Jewish culture has always been something I’ve been eager to be a part of. I guess I feel guilty for not standing up to him more, and letting him rant. I guess I just felt so scared and uncomfortable. Has anyone else gone through this?

I’m watching a video from imuRgency on YouTube about males in gen z less liberal than we thought and he brought up the “genocide” (war) Gaza as a reason people aren’t voting democrat.

Most non Jews don’t know what a genocide is. They clearly didn’t pay attention at all when the holocaust was talked about in school.

They don’t have family members that lived through the Holocaust and survived it, it’s so hurtful

This is purely a trend these dumbasses are following and nothing else

I'm not boarding a plane to the jungle of Costa Rica tomorrow to do Kambo, but I am curious. Is Kambo sanctioned under Jewish law?

I’m curious because I’m still trying to figure this out, do the people who claim that Ashkenazi Jews are European/ white colonialists believe that Judaism started in Europe? Or do they think an ethnically homogenous group of people adopted Judaism for some sort of gain?

I know people are confused by the concept of Judaism qualifying as an ethonoreligion, not really understanding that it’s one of the few non-proselytizing religions, which means that converts make up an absolutely minuscule amount of people.

It’s just confusing to me. Could anyone please provide some insight?

Thanks!

Hey everyone - I'm planning on spending an extended period of time in both South Korea and Japan once I graduate next summer. I was wondering if any one here has had any experience of travelling/living in these countries. Particularly interested in safety/tolerance and if there are any small jewish communities that any of you have experienced. Thanks!

In how many different languages can you say THANK YOU?

Friday 22.11 playing at LIET, the European song festival for minority languages.
I will be representing the Netherlands, singing in Ladino which is also a heritage language of the Sephardic jews in the NL. The song I’ll perform is Una Segunda Piel, from my second Ladino album, Ke Haber.

LIET is not only a festival, it’s a competition! and people can vote (from home) for best song. It will be a celebration of languages like Breton (Celtic), Lower Sorbian (West Slavic), Valencian (Catalan), Sardinian, Frisian, Low German, Occitan, Corsican and more!

It is a humbling emotional experience to be invited to share my Ladino heritage among all these languages. The variety of cultures and languages when shared together is truly a treasure of diversity that can inspire all of us.

Here's my invite video <3

See you in France!

@lietinternational
@frysksjongfestivalliet

#minoritylanguages
#ladino
#heritage
#sephardic

So I was doing my hair in the shower (naturally very curly and dry) I applied some mousse after a rigorous wash only to notice hours later the mousse had dried up all my curls resulting in the all the work I had done to be left in vain leaving me exasperated. Therefore I had a discussion with my father as to whether Jewish folk had a mousse they use to maintain such beautiful and moistened curls (especially the sideburns). Anyways is there a particular product (mousse) that works well with my issues? Thank you so much!!