Is being Jewish antiquated?

As the world progresses one thing from the ancient Past remains in high profile: the Jew. I struggle with this idea, as this blog makes very obvious. Whether you consider yourself Jewish or not how can this make any sense?

One of the big issues for me is whether the Jews are a group or not, and whether this group membership is supposed to confer anything on individual Jews. And what if it confers something bad on the members?

One classic example of this is what happens when there is a Good Jew? It looks to me like all the Jews give themselves a pat on the back and share that achievement. But this type of thinking is always a double edged sword.

Would the writer of this piece have done so had he known that Melvin Calvin had nothing to do with the discovery of the chemistry behind Photosynthesis and in fact completely eradicated the real discoverer, a Swede called Benson, from history and stole his place. Never having the honour to ever acknowledge the truth. All the worse cos Benson's discovery of a cycle complete disagreed with Calvin's own theory. He not only didn't discover it, he even opposed it leaving his once collaborator Benson to work alone. 

Now Jews believe in God too and God knows perfectly well that Calvin is a fraud, and so Calvin was even more deluded. What a completely irredeemable person! In fact this is the definition of Evil: a person who puts themselves before God. So there are bad Jews because there are bad people. Being Jewish does not protect you from this.

Now this is the question: if Calvin was a bad person, are all Jews tainted by this? If not then Jews do not benefit from all the good Jews either... including Abraham.

Which ever way you twist it, being Jewish ultimately amounts to nothing. This kind of tribal thinking has no place in the modern world. As pointed out before a very obviously example of Tribal thinking is White Supremacy. It is widely acknowledge that there is no such thing as a "white" tribe, and even if there was it is irrelevant to politics. Why then do the "Jews" still think tribally when everyone else is so much more advanced? I put "Jews" in quotes cos obviously there is no objective thing called a "Jew" its just a designation that "Jews" give themselves. In that sense it is circular. SRH?

Ah perhaps this is the problem I noted before.

Can a Gentile define a Jew? I think not. Its a common thing in Identity Politics that only a Black, or a Homosexual, or a Rape victim can truly speak about the matter.

So only a Jew can really talk about being Jewish. It is something that a Non-Jew would never understand. Jewish conversion is possible, but I wonder whether Jews really view the convert as a true Jew? This is kind of critical to this argument.

Anyway lets get rid of one avenue here:

Somebody somewhere must be able to determine who is a Jew (else we have no Jews). And if that person must be a Jew we have:

∀x∃y | I(x,y) ↔ J(x)

OK not sure about the logic here, but if I(x,y) is true if x identifies y is a Jew and J(x) is true if x actually is a Jew. So together it means: For everyone, there is someone who x identifies as a Jew iff x is a Jew. In other words if x is not a Jew then no way what they say can be true. That means even if I identify Abraham as a Jew, because I am not a Jew that opinion does not count. What actually identifies Abraham as a Jew is based upon other people, who are Jews*.

* I realise problem here. The Nazis sent Jews to concentration camps. Now if the Nazis were not able to identify Jews then they did not send Jews to concentration camps. So the Gentiles must be able to identify Jews. Either that or the Nazis took the self-identification of people as the test. If someone said they were not a Jew then the Nazis would ignore them. Not sure that is true. So it must be that Gentiles can in fact decide who is Jewish and who is not. That is quite interesting and needs to be considered some more. But assume this is not the case, Lets go down the other avenue cos its interesting.   

But we can see the tautology here. If I reject the idea of "Jews", then as far as I'm concerned it does not matter if people keep calling each other Jews, it's a fantasy. But on the other side, because I am not a Jew those who call themselves Jewish will ignore my opinion too. This needs to be fleshed out but if the only definition of Jews depends upon the opinion of Jews then its circular. You should be able to get a really neat contradiction out of this by SRH.

The way out is to open up the definition of Jew to non-Jews. Interestingly the Nazis thought they knew what a Jew was. But it turned out to be much more complex than they initially envisaged. Some say that even Hitler had Jewish ancestry. How quickly would history have changed course had the international community realised you can't really define a Jew! In many ways the "Jewish" insistence that such a thing is rock solid has been the foundation of much politics both positive and negative!