Lester Golden
2 min readAug 1, 2024

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My late father was tall, thin and blond. My late mother was short and dark. So it's a near certainty that due an 18th or 19th century Cossack who couldn't keep his pecker out of the shtetl, I'm both. That changes nothing about my Jewish NATIONAL identity, which is no less valid than any Brooklyn or Jerusalem Haredi yeshivabucher. We're a club that's easy to be born into and very hard to join through conversion. As an atheist I could never join, but I belong just as much due to random birth. Like Groucho Marx, who replied to a restricted (no Jews) country club with his immortal, " I'd never join a club that would have me as a member", I don't have to join.

You need to read Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews to understand how Jews are a people, a non-missionary faith tied to a particular place that makes no sense without the tie to that place--Israel--and a nation like the Italians, Brits, Germans, Japanese and any other whose sovereignty is never questioned. The Jewish identity supermarket is 4000 years old and has many shelves to choose from. We choose, you goyim don't. Get over it.

I don't tell you how to be Italian while Italian unification is an ever partially unfinished work in progress and Cavour said, "adesso che abbiamo fatto l'Italia, dobbiamo fare gli Italiani."

So cut out the Nazi-like genetic tests for Jewish identity, whose pseudo-scientific idiocy also produced the Dr. Mengele whose experiments on my late Hungarian Jewish twin friend Otto Klein ruined his teeth and eyes. Otto was totally secular, observing holidays only out of tradition, and Mengele didn't care. Your Palestinian friends who chanted Heil Hitler at the Olympics don't either.

I don't hear you asking Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza to take DNA tests. But, of course, they don't need to since a Muslim who immigrated from Yemen or Algeria to Ottoman Palestine is automatically and magically b"indigenous", while a Jew from the same places is a "settler colonialist".

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

Jewish national identity is a myth. I wrote three articles about it.
Palestinians do not claim to be superior to all other human beings because of their birth. Zionists do that.
And " a Muslim who immigrated from Yemen or Algeria to Ottoman Palestine"…

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