What does jews mean

We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. The verb jew down is also perceived as offensive, because it perpetuates the stereotype of the shrewd Jewish moneylender or haggler.

Originally, however, both the adjective and the verb were used in a neutral way by Jews and non-Jews. How to use Jew in a sentence But the enemy of the new emirs is neither the Jew nor the Christian, it is the godless militant defending secularism. For many Israelis, news that the rabbinical judges were turning to DNA testing was shocking, but for Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi, it came as no surprise. Farber, who has been living in Israel since the s, is the director of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization that helps Israeli Jews navigate state-administered matters of Jewish life, like marriage and conversion.

In the past year, the organization has seen up to 50 cases where families have been asked to undergo DNA tests to certify their Jewishness. Those being asked to take these tests, Farber told me, are mostly Russian-speaking Israelis, members of an almost 1 million-strong immigrant community who began moving to Israel from countries of the former Soviet Union in the s. Due to the fact that Jewish life was forcefully suppressed during the Soviet era, many members of this community lack the necessary documentation to prove Jewishness through matrilineal descent.

This means that although most self-identify as Jewish, hundreds of thousands are not considered so by the Rabbinate, and routinely have their Jewish status challenged when seeking religious services, including marriage. For almost two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant community in the face of what they see as targeted discrimination. In cases of marriage, Farber acts as a type of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a case for his clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges.

He fears that DNA testing will place even more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian-speaking community. Despite public outrage and protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA testing, and reports continue to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used.

One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for genetic material to prove that she was not adopted. Another man was asked to have his grandmother, sick with dementia, take a test.

Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian-speaking community, told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of shame. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this.

What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community, which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian-speaking immigrants in Israeli society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. As well as being deeply humiliating, Shindler told me that there is confusion around what being genetically Jewish means.

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