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What is a Jew?

The synagogue was a bare, shabby place, airless with all the windows shut, where forty or fifty men, mostly aged and bearded, faced east to the Holy Land, humbled themselves before their fierce, demanding God and wailed their songs of endless sorrow. I stood there swaying with them, but only mechanically, for I was raised in the Reformed Temple that these traditional religionists would spit upon, and in recent years I had even strayed from this watered-down Judaism, occasionally doing lip service on the holy days now but coming to believe that if love for your fellow man is in your heart you need no superstructure to dramatize it for you. And if it isn't, no God and no Church can put it there. So I stood there swaying and wondering. What is a Jew? The anthropologists have proved it is not a race, since the only scientific category is the Semitic, which includes Arabians and Assyrians, some of the most fervent anti-Jews in the world. And if it were merely a religion, all Jews like me would have to be excluded. And if it is only a unit of national culture it is withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century may have been inherited by Israel, droning in his yarmolka at my side, but were thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as his younger brother.

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