browsing deer
Silver Member
Guy who has not been jewish for three generations and has not been part of the religious for more generations has been forced into embracing the faith of his fathers despite himself because of the distasteful ways of the leftists
He found out the stupidity and crassness of his friends on the left. He doesn't like it much.
Why a militant atheist Brit decided to become a Jew
LONDON — Despite not being Jewish, atheist Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known journalists, had never had a problem with his surname. It was, he thought, part of the furniture.
On his paternal side, the family had “abandoned their religion, so he wasn’t Jewish, and more to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to Orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew,” says Cohen.
But then in 2007 Cohen wrote a book, “What’s Left?”, a provocative and witty account of his belief that British liberals had lost their way. According to Cohen, “all hell broke loose” in the wake of that book’s publication.
“The book was an attempt to answer a question which is not asked often enough,” he says. “If I were to show you a newspaper article defending a movement that was misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or decided to kill any Muslim who had decided of their own free will to change their faith or have no faith, and ask what kind of newspaper it was, you’d say, obviously it is a left-wing newspaper.
“The book was an attempt to ask why the Left was going along with ultra-obscurantist, fascistic and extreme right-wing movements,” says Cohen.
Amid the howls of outrage from the Left which greeted his book, Cohen began to detect a growing number of those who said, “Oh, he’s only saying that because he’s a Zionist.” Cohen was denounced as having shifted to the “warmongering, liberal-imperialist, neocon right.” But Cohen will have none of it.
He has, it is true, pretty much given up on the Left — out of despair, he says, that it has endorsed movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. But Cohen, a lean and rangy 55 year old, has now invited even more controversy with his latest column for The Observer news paper, Britain’s left-leaning Sunday publication, which is owned by Guardian Newspapers.
In “Why I’m Becoming A Jew And Why You Should, Too,” Cohen suggests that it is hopeless to continue telling people that he is not Jewish when he is challenged over his views, particularly in regard to “the anti-Semitism that has spread so far from the extreme left into the mainstream that it now threatens to poison the Labour Party.”
His initial attempts to insist that he was not Jewish were “dishonorable,” Cohen says.
‘I sounded like a black man trying to pass as white or a German arguing with the Gestapo that there was a mistake in the paperwork’
Instead, he says, he decided to embrace the challenge.
“Racism changes your perception of the world and yourself. You become what your enemies say you are. And unless I wanted to shame myself, I had to become a Jew. A rather odd Jew, no doubt: a militant atheist who had to phone a friend to ask what on earth ‘mazel tov’ meant. But a Jew nonetheless,” says Cohen.
So, intellectually — and in no other way — Nick Cohen has begun to define himself as Jewish.
More at the site.
He found out the stupidity and crassness of his friends on the left. He doesn't like it much.
Why a militant atheist Brit decided to become a Jew
LONDON — Despite not being Jewish, atheist Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known journalists, had never had a problem with his surname. It was, he thought, part of the furniture.
On his paternal side, the family had “abandoned their religion, so he wasn’t Jewish, and more to the point, my mother and my grandmother weren’t Jewish either, so according to Orthodox Judaism’s principles of matrilineal descent, it was impossible for me to be a Jew,” says Cohen.
But then in 2007 Cohen wrote a book, “What’s Left?”, a provocative and witty account of his belief that British liberals had lost their way. According to Cohen, “all hell broke loose” in the wake of that book’s publication.
“The book was an attempt to answer a question which is not asked often enough,” he says. “If I were to show you a newspaper article defending a movement that was misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or decided to kill any Muslim who had decided of their own free will to change their faith or have no faith, and ask what kind of newspaper it was, you’d say, obviously it is a left-wing newspaper.
“The book was an attempt to ask why the Left was going along with ultra-obscurantist, fascistic and extreme right-wing movements,” says Cohen.
Amid the howls of outrage from the Left which greeted his book, Cohen began to detect a growing number of those who said, “Oh, he’s only saying that because he’s a Zionist.” Cohen was denounced as having shifted to the “warmongering, liberal-imperialist, neocon right.” But Cohen will have none of it.
He has, it is true, pretty much given up on the Left — out of despair, he says, that it has endorsed movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. But Cohen, a lean and rangy 55 year old, has now invited even more controversy with his latest column for The Observer news paper, Britain’s left-leaning Sunday publication, which is owned by Guardian Newspapers.
In “Why I’m Becoming A Jew And Why You Should, Too,” Cohen suggests that it is hopeless to continue telling people that he is not Jewish when he is challenged over his views, particularly in regard to “the anti-Semitism that has spread so far from the extreme left into the mainstream that it now threatens to poison the Labour Party.”
His initial attempts to insist that he was not Jewish were “dishonorable,” Cohen says.
‘I sounded like a black man trying to pass as white or a German arguing with the Gestapo that there was a mistake in the paperwork’
Instead, he says, he decided to embrace the challenge.
“Racism changes your perception of the world and yourself. You become what your enemies say you are. And unless I wanted to shame myself, I had to become a Jew. A rather odd Jew, no doubt: a militant atheist who had to phone a friend to ask what on earth ‘mazel tov’ meant. But a Jew nonetheless,” says Cohen.
So, intellectually — and in no other way — Nick Cohen has begun to define himself as Jewish.
More at the site.
