My father was a secular, assimilated Jew in Poland. He considered himself a patriotic Pole. Yet he, and many others like him, were readily labaled as Jews and persecuted by the Nazis. Many such people perished in the Holocaust. We count them as Jews among the 6 million. Yet nowadays assimilants just like my father are considered "lost" Jews by other Jews.
I, in a similar way, am a born Israeli, and, like many other secular Israelis, am totally assimilated into Western culture, though some people find the concept hard to grasp. I am fiercly secular. I consider myself Jewish only by genetic ethnicity. Judaism doesn`t mean a thing to me. My identity and culture are Hebrew, not Jewish. I, too, am a "lost" Jew.
So who is a Jew? The definition for "Jew" is very elastic. So are the numbers. |
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