"Fifty percent of all American Jews marry outside their religion. An estimated 70 percent of young Jews profess scant interest in their heritage, don't attend synagogue and have never visited Israel. Further, the United States' 5.2 million Jewish population is shrinking and aging." http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16087524.htm
i thought "jews" were a "religion".....or is it a race of eastern european imposters?.........i get confused.......what I do know is that if the answer to the first question is affirmative, then America itself will be destroyed from within.
Looking at this from an individualist perspective instead of a collectivist one: Complete cultural assimilation- becoming Americans first and Jews second, is actually the <b>best</b> way for Jewish individuals to have a future in America.
I disagree. The most successful Americans have culturally DISassimilated from American society. Otherwise they would be average Joe working stiffs like everyone else. American society and its values totally SUCK, just like every other society on earth. They just suck a bit less than Nigeria or Cambodia's values. There is no more guaranteed way to become a loser than to try to become one of the crowd. Even if you become the richest guy on earth, you will be essentially a sheep. Your choices will be those of other people, not the choices of your heart or your mind. Also, one of the first steps is to stop thinking of yourself as a Jew. Fuck that. Do you think I give a shit about English people? Just because my parents lived there does not mean I must automatically assume the values of English society. Once someone realises "I am me. I don't give a shit about anything else", then they are on the way to true freedom. The "American Jew" who thinks of himself as either American or Jewish has automatically limited himself in an important way. He or she would be far better of thinking of themselves as an ass-kicking SOB first, and place their country or ethnic group of origin way down the list of important factors in their makeup.
Silly straw-man argument. I'm saying that Jews need to rid themselves of the Shtetl-Jew mentality, NOT become mindless borgs! Larry Ellison, Michael Dell & Ayn Rand <b>assimilated</b>, in that they didn't isolate themselves in segregated Jewish-only communities, wearing black hats and beards while speaking more Yiddish than English. However, that does NOT make those three individuals 'crowd following sheep' by any stretch of the imagination! Get my point?
America is less about where you came from as a member of a group and more about where you are going as an individual. All are welcome. Everyone assimilates.
Because Jews are neither race, nationality nor increasingly even a religion, they face self induced extinction. The Reform movement was the beginning of the end.
"Hyphenated Americanism" Speech - Excerpts Former President Theodore Roosevelt, October 12, 1915, in an address to the Knights of Columbus, Carnegie Hall, NYC. "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else. For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic. Americanization The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population - no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens, it must possess American citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is to not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them. The policy of "Let alone" which we have hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from two stand-points. By this policy we have permitted the immigrants, and too often the native-born laborers as well, to suffer injustice. Moreover, by this policy we have failed to impress upon the immigrant and upon the native-born as well that they are expected to do justice as well as to receive justice, that they are expected to be heartily and actively and single-mindedly loyal to the flag no less than to benefit by living under it. We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. We cannot afford to leave American mines, munitions plants, and general resources in the hands of alien workmen, alien to America and even likely to be made hostile to America by machinations such as have recently been provided in the case of the two foreign embassies in Washington. We cannot afford to run the risk of having in time of war men working on our railways or working in our munition plants who would in the name of duty to their own foreign countries bring destruction to us. Recent events have shown us that incitements to sabotage and strikes are in the view of at least two of the great foreign powers of Europe within their definition of neutral practices. What would be done to us in the name of war if these things are done to us in the name of neutrality? One America All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in what way we may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to shoulder in a united America for the elimination of race and religious prejudice. We must stand for a reign of equal justice to both big and small. We must insist on the maintenance of the American standard of living. We must stand for an adequate national control which shall secure a better training of our young men in time of peace, both for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties. Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do a great work for all mankind. This great work can only be done by a mighty democracy, with these qualities of soul, guided by those qualities of mind, which will both make it refuse to do injustice to any other nation, and also enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other nation. In our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of spirit which lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important of all, we must strive for the establishment within our own borders of that stern and lofty standard of personal and public neutrality which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and which shall insist in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties both to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in the future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all mankind." Too bad our current leaders can not see things so clearly, or if they do lack the balls to stand up and say so.
Wow, really? That's amazing. You know, what? I am going to take a wild guess and say you're American. I can tell you this - there are a couple of billion people who disagree strongly with that statement. Sure, a lot of people dislike American foreign policy. But a hell of a lot of people look at America as the land of opportunity, which it still is. Difficult to know how to respond to this - I think it's so self-evidently wrong that it's hard to know how to point out why it's wrong. Wealth doesn't bring happiness by any stretch. The one thing it does allow is freedom of choice for many things. Not everything, of course, but many things. I spend time with my Jewish friends and their families and I talk to their kids. One thing that has leapt out at me is the sense of identity these kids have. I have a feeling that many of them won't feel the need to 'follow the crowd' and be accepted by the crowd by i.e. smoking cigarettes or trying drugs or fucking up in school because it's uncool to be a bookworm, simply because they don't need to fit into that crowd - they already know who they are. Granted, some of these kids go to Jewish schools, but not all. To say that 'I am me' cannot include 'I am Jewish' or 'I am Latvian' seems arbitrary to me. Some ET members have said publicly that they are prejudiced against or 'have a problem with' Americans of non-European extraction (not naming any names of course...). I think that needs to be remembered when reading threads like this. PS - Just read the post by Brandonf above this and I want to make clear that I'm not advocating the PC multi-culti ethos at all. If you want to live your life according to Sharia law, go to an Islamic country. I was responding specifically to Cutten's post and saying that I don't think it's necessary to say 'fuck my cultural heritage' in order to be free. Clearly, we need to turn the tide and show people that living in the West means publicly adopting the values and laws of the West. If you don't like it, go back to your country. You are free to practice your traditions in the privacy of your own home.