i dont have an ax to grind in this thread and had decided before to stay out of it because i think race is a dubious at best category--nation too for that matter---both are products of the 18th century zeal for putting things in boxes and arranging those boxes into trees and then comparing them--this tree is better because its my tree, but that one...
but this:
Quote:
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the last person that said there was no jewish race...tried to eliminate the entire race from the face of the earth
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is entirely wrong if it refers to hitler. nothing about hitler's politics even start to make sense without the most idiotic possible conception of race. and the tree thing and the comparative tree thing. it was because there *was* to his mind a jewish race that he felt justified in initially marginalizing and brutalizing and later trying to exterminate the jewish people. in fact, you'd think that after a nimrod of that magnitude was able to do that much damage based on the category "race" that folk would maybe wonder more, and more deeply, if there isn't something basically fucked up with the idea of race.
at this point, curiously enough, it'd be easy to wax nietzschean about these boxes/classifications more generally, what they organize, what they say, what folk imagine them to say: that we can arrange the world by type means that we know where in our own grid to put things, where they "go"--but that doesn't mean, outside the confines of a pretty superficial loop, that we know what these things *are*---i can't think of a different parallel (this one's a little stupid) but it's like imagining that you know what a coffeemaker is and does because you know that it goes in a cupboard.
now obviously these orderings are points of departure for accumulating and organizing other more information and so it doesn't seem reasonable to oppose taxonomy---but even so, it seems stupid to forget how superificial they are, how much a point of departure they are and nothing else--not a whole lot explanatory follows from them, all the more as you deal with increasing levels of complexity in living systems.
so you could say that judiasm as a social system has developed a matrilineal way of marking itself as distinct from other groups and thereby maintaining a sense of continuity or coherence over time. what does shifting to the category of "race" do in this case, beyond taking a convention and jamming it into some bizarre-o notion of essence? so many of the most basic categories the west had cooked up to order the social world are about fantasies of self-enclosure and self-referentiality--race, culture---and they aren't even useful descriptively. they do considerable damage ideologically, they have deeply problematic histories---but like sf says, they're floating about in the bigger world and there's not much in the way of end-arounds to be taken.
but that doesn't make the categories like race any less stupid.