The Wandering Jews

A 97 year old Holocaust Survivor was murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue. His story will be familiar to anyone who knows Jewish history. Sent to a camp, then liberated, then immigration to the United States.

Where exactly was he from?

This question can be asked of 3/4 of the Jewish World today, the Diaspora. A century ago 15,000,000 Jews lived in Europe, or the United States, or the Arab Middle East.

Today almost all of the Jews are gone from the Arab Middle East and Europe. Of the 15,000,000 Jews on earth today, 6,000,000 (Whoops! There's that number again!) reside in Israel and the same number in the United States.

Yesterday we noted our Russian Jewish neighbors, from Lithuania and Ukraine, with friends from all over the former Soviet Union.

Our grandfather's family were Dutchmen on one side (Stroocks) and Krauts on the other (Neuberger, Loeb). Both got out of Europe after the Revolutions of 1848. As noted before the man for whom we are named (our grandmother's father) flew airplanes, in the Great War...for the Kaiser.

Mrs. Stroock is descended from Lithuanian/Byelorussian peasant stock, we mean real Fidler on the Roof stuff. One of her cousins just married an Israeli man. His family was from Baghdad, which was about 45 percent Jewish until 1948.

This is usually the conversation one has when one meets Jews. So sayeth the great, the indispensable, Breitbart's lion, Ben Shapiro:

When we meet another Jew, the first thing we do is play Jewish geography: who knows whom, who is related to whom. That’s the rich side of being part of a global tribe – everyone is one degree removed from everyone else.

Usually in America these are Krauts or Russians and in Israel they're Middle Eastern, though many are descendent from Europeans obviously.

And so In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us and we all end up some place else. Diaspora from Spain, to Russia, to America. Returning home became a religion until itself. Which is why most Jewish holidays end with Next year in Jerusalem.

White Man the Hebrew is Not

This article from Israelycool touches on something that was self-evident a hundred years ago, fifty years ago and even 25 years ago. Jews are not white:

Let’s get rid of a modern myth that plagues the Jewish People. Jews are not white. Jews come in all colors and every shade from dark to pale and being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with skin color. We are not Anglo or The White Colonizer. We didn’t colonize Europe or the United States. The Jew isn’t the White Man who discovered or conquered America and we certainly didn’t lead the genocide in Africa or the slave trade either. Jews didn’t discover America or colonize any region.

And

Where do Jews come from and what is a Jew? According to any dictionary, a Jew is defined as:
-One of a scattered group of people who traces its descent from the Biblical Hebrews or from post exilic adherents of Judaism; Israelite.
-A person whose religion is Judaism.
-A subject of the ancient kingdom of Judah.

We are blessed that our 94 year old grandfather (the old bastard) is still around and remembers people who came from the olde country. His maternal great grandfather, Morris Neuberger, came out of Westphalia, in the 1850s, while the Stroocks came out of Amsterdam at the same time.  We have family photos of them all and they have a distinctly Mediterranean air about them. My father looks reliably middle eastern so much so that when we'd visit my mother's Kentucky relatives people knew instantly he wasn't from around there. Think about that. Because of family DNA tests my father is 90 recent Ashkenazim Jew. The blood lines remained pure through two millennia

Because my old man shacked up with a gentile by the name of Thompson, fifty years ago I could have used the front entrance of any country club. But my father could not have, nor could my grandfather. Jews were long excluded from the old Prod establishment. By the mid 1960s my grandfather was a fancy advertising exec (think Madmen) who actually worked in the Johnson Admin a bit with Sergeant Shriver. When the Scarsdale country club ask him to join my grandfather told them to stick it.

So I'm not white. The ultimate proof? Hitler didn't think so.