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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Most Jews in America are Ashkenazi and are essentially German, Polish, Ukranian for them most part.

i.e. 'Zuckerberg' 'Sandberg' 'Goldman'.

They are genetically not different from other Europeans other than for some possibly some minor specific linkage way back. That wing of the diaspora has been in Europe for at least 1000 years, originating in the area from Netherlands down to Frankfurt and spreading Eastward towards Russia.

Even many Sephardi jews, from the Med (i.e. Spain, Greece, Turkey), are more European than they are Middle Eastern at least genetically.

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The point here is to show the silly consequences of categorizing people by "race", not to argue about the minutiæ of how to properly do race discrimination.

So I think that's a fair point, at the same time I don't think 'race' is quite a silly thing, just not a hugely important thing.

If race is silly, then is BLM a silly concept?

We could say the same thing about 'silly culture' or 'silly language' or 'silly attitudes' or 'silly politics' ... so that we can just all focus on the truly important things like our 'iPhones'.

At very least it's history, and interesting on that level, more controversially, it's part of our identities at least in a broad sense.

I find this [1] basically fascinating.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews

Not necessarily, as historic rates of Jewish interfaith marriage were until recently extremely low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfaith_marriage_in_Judaism:

Interfaith marriage in Judaism was historically looked upon with very strong disfavour by Jewish leaders, and it remains a controversial issue among them today. [..] In the early 19th century, in some less modernised regions of the world, exogamy was extremely rare—less than 0.1% of the Jews of Algeria, for example, practiced exogamy. In the early 20th century, even in most Germanic regions of central Europe there were still only a mere 5% of Jews marrying non-Jews.

To underscore how very disfavored mixed marriages were, Bernard S. Bachrach's Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe states (speaking about the 6th century, but it is unclear how wide-ranging this policy was):

According to Jewish custom a woman who willingly and openly went to live with a non-Jew was considered dead by her family and by the Jewish community. Legally it was the duty of the community to stone her to death if she could be found.

So they are a sub-group of whites. they have distinct culture and also some distinct genetic make up (look for Ashkenazi Jewish Genetic Panel)

If this sub group has more privilege, don't we want equity for other sub groups?

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