Is this is a criticism of the article? Because it seems like the author takes great pains to distinguish between a person who is Jewish and a person who practices Judaism.

I also don't think that ethnic group really captures it either.

For me, being Jewish is just its own thing, sui generis, that only partially overlaps with these other concepts (religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc) but isn't any of those things.

> It frustrates me when Jewish people, especially very smart Jewish people like Freud, fail to understand that Judaism is more than just a religion, it's also an ethnic group.

This is because the waters have been, seemingly intentionally, muddied. I have seen criticism of Judaism, oddly enough even criticism by ethnic Jews, as being considered "anti-Semitic" and similar terms. Furthermore, the distinction in my experience seems to be rejected by many Jews who consider "being Jewish" as being essentially and intrinsically related to the Jewish religion enshrined in cultural practice.

I disagree. Judaism is not an ethnic group, it's many absolutely different and disjunct ethnic groups, that only have religion in common. A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common with a Jew from Poland. Different language, different food,. different music, different physical resemblance, different interpretation of the Torah, etc.

I recommend reading The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand.

As a practical example. When my father (Ashkenazi) married my mother (Sephardic), my father's grandma was devastated, because he was marrying a non-jew.

I think the article itself failed to understand or counterpoint the issue about Judaism. Judaism as a religion and ethnic group is known by criticizing themselves, even in the extreme orthodox side. "Freud as Talmudist" could be more generally seen as "Freud as a Thinker".

I think 'ethnicity' is a complicated term, since it's a catchall for all sorts of identities we can't quite assign to something easier to parse. In the example of the Australian Indigenous, that identity is a Venn diagram of overlapping ideas about lineage, culture, language, and tribal affiliation. Any one or more of those attributes could be potentially disrupted and yet maintain Indigenous identity and acceptance by the larger community - perhaps precariously.

A counter example would be the American designation of 'Latino' as an ethnicity, independent of race, language, and culture, and based entirely on national origin.

I don't think it's that simple.

From the Catholic perspective, it is primarily a theological identity, as evidenced by the way the New Testament uses the word. Jesus, his mother Mary, the Apostles, the first so-called Christians, were all "Jews", and so in some sense, we can speak of the Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, and those Jews who did not. The New Testament describes the latter as "the Jews", and since there is no ethnic difference between the former and the latter, it follows that "Jew" in this context is not an ethnic, but a theological concept[0]. This isn't to say there is no ethnic sense, but the theological concept is the real focus.

Among Jews, Jewishness is taken to be communicated matrilineally, and the interpretation of such phrases as "children of Abraham" (or "seed of Abraham") is understood in carnal terms. Most Jews today are not observant, yet they still view themselves as Jews and are viewed as Jews even by observant Jews. Cultural Jewishness might seem like one way to be able to maintain Jewish identity without the theology, but because Jewish culture in the traditional sense is so theological (and frankly, all cult-ure ultimately is), one has to ask what kind of Jewish culture are we talking about? Once the underpinning and sustaining beliefs are gone, the culture loses its force and meaning, even if it takes a while for the old attachments to wither to completion. Some new theology would need to take the place of the old while maintaining the old name. Without the old theological basis, carnal identity begins to take on an even greater importance.

I might also touch on the civilizational definition of "Jewish", though because civilization is ultimately determined by religion, the question is ultimately a question of theology. Koneczny's definition comes to mind.

So the word is overloaded. But generally speaking, we are very much living in a period of identity crises. Some claim that the uptick in racial politics is the result of the decline of religious identity in the West.

[0] Incidentally, this is why some of the accusations of antisemitism that are made of Catholicism are wrongheaded and involve some kind of modernist projection of categories alien to Catholicism. "Antisemitism" is a term coined in the 19th century (conventionally attributed to Wilhelm Marr) that has in mind a racial and ethnic meaning of "Jew", but the conflict between Catholicism and Judaism is not ethnic or racial, but theological. The Rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the Crucifixion, with the destruction of the Second Temple that left the Jews with no temple sacrifice and no priesthood, is taken to be defection from the Faith, something analogous to Protestantism (recall that the Old Testament is a history of such defections, and is the history of heretical Christian sects). Judaism is taken to have transformed from a faith centered on sacrifice to one centered on observing the law. The sacrifice and the priesthood are taken to continue in the Church--the New Israel--and in the mass, now bloodless and perfected[1].

[1] https://catholicexchange.com/church-new-israel/

A constant worldview-pervading awareness of Jewishness as an ethnicity is only really widespread in 4 groups of people: particularly ethnic-chauvinist Jews, the hardest-core antisemites, and their victims.

Wishing for more Jews to become much more aware of their ethnicity would be one of those monkey's paw wishes.