Lumpy 1
Diamond Member
- Jun 19, 2009
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I've often wondered why Jewish People are liberal, for me it doesn't quite fit. Then I ran across this rather long article explaining it but now I'm not sure that it's a fair assessment.
Admittedly... I'm a complete novice on this subject but I'm interested in understanding the issue better.
So my question... is this article a fair assessment?..
(Go to the link, this is just part of it)
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Beyond simple persecution, the Diaspora Jews have long suffered from serious psychopathologies, and in particular a sort of assimilationist self-hatred. While the early Zionists were rebelling against the religious authorities in Eastern European communities, it became clear fairly quickly that Zionism was also a rebellion against the tendencies by many assimilationist Jews to advocate national self-destruction. The Jewish socialist and communist Left in Eastern Europe, but also many Jewish liberals elsewhere, promoted radical assimilationism, where Jews would cut themselves off altogether from their Jewish culture and roots and assimilate aggressively into the surrounding majority cultures of the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, etc.
Theodore Herzl came from an assimilated home. He was a strong advocate of such constructive assimilationism, before his internal struggle that later led him to advocate Jewish nationhood. Western Jewry was dominated by a strange sort of assimilationism that first emerged long before World War II, although it had precedents and included elements taken from German Jewish enlightenment and German Reform Judaism. The latter had long advocated the denationalization of Jewish identity. In a nutshell, the innovation of German (and later American) Reform Judaism was that the Jews should "define themselves away" as a national entity; in its place they would self-define as ethnic-national members of the majority nations in their countries of residence, but with their own religion.
Is Liberalism Judaism?
Admittedly... I'm a complete novice on this subject but I'm interested in understanding the issue better.
So my question... is this article a fair assessment?..
(Go to the link, this is just part of it)
-----------------------------
Beyond simple persecution, the Diaspora Jews have long suffered from serious psychopathologies, and in particular a sort of assimilationist self-hatred. While the early Zionists were rebelling against the religious authorities in Eastern European communities, it became clear fairly quickly that Zionism was also a rebellion against the tendencies by many assimilationist Jews to advocate national self-destruction. The Jewish socialist and communist Left in Eastern Europe, but also many Jewish liberals elsewhere, promoted radical assimilationism, where Jews would cut themselves off altogether from their Jewish culture and roots and assimilate aggressively into the surrounding majority cultures of the Russians, Poles, Hungarians, etc.
Theodore Herzl came from an assimilated home. He was a strong advocate of such constructive assimilationism, before his internal struggle that later led him to advocate Jewish nationhood. Western Jewry was dominated by a strange sort of assimilationism that first emerged long before World War II, although it had precedents and included elements taken from German Jewish enlightenment and German Reform Judaism. The latter had long advocated the denationalization of Jewish identity. In a nutshell, the innovation of German (and later American) Reform Judaism was that the Jews should "define themselves away" as a national entity; in its place they would self-define as ethnic-national members of the majority nations in their countries of residence, but with their own religion.
Is Liberalism Judaism?
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