Comments on: Jews on NPR: “I’m Amitai Etzioni, but please don’t tell anyone that I’m Jewish/Israeli!”

By: Dershowitz Bombshell: 'Carter Scuttled Camp David II' « Oy Bay!

Dershowitz Bombshell: 'Carter Scuttled Camp David II' « Oy Bay! — Wed, 16 May 2007 07:14:49 +0000

[...] Heart of Darkness”). Due to health reasons, he was unable to fly out. But John “I want a cage-match with Michael Krasny” Rothmann of ZOA & KGO fame was there to save the day. He acted as [...]

By: Oyster

Oyster — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:52:37 +0000

Katie: Thanks for the linkage! And he should definitely be representin’.

Jew-Unit, what-what?!

By: katie

katie — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:42:05 +0000

Yeah, that’s why I don’t understand how he can pass on a latina heritage, I mean maybe he married a Latina woman, but he’s still passing on a Latina/Jewish heritage. If you’re a jew, represent!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitai_Etzioni

By: Oyster

Oyster — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:01:40 +0000

Katie: Whoa, whoa, whoa: he’s a yekke?

By: Oyster

Oyster — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:56:12 +0000

MG: In my very Bezerkeley class “Poetry for the People”, we were forced to use the horrific expression “Latino/Latina/Chicano/Chicana”, or “Latino/a & Chicano/a”, to make sure that we weren’t saying ‘Hispanic’. Sometimes you can be too precise… well, too politically-correct in this case.

Katie: Whoa, my bad! I had Flannery representin’ a whole nother gender! And it tickles me pink that you agree with me on the ‘Jewish nation’ concept.

Shiduri: Rock on, you got it. In the program (which you can listen to from the link I provided), he mentioned that his wife is ‘Latina’.

By: shiduri

shiduri — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:07:31 +0000

i assume he married a latina woman.

By: Katie

Katie — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:44:50 +0000

First, just a technical detail, Flannery O’Connor is a woman.

Second, I agree that Hispanics are definitely constructing an identity that seems to be a racial one.

Third, I heartily agree that Jews are a nation, and this definition includes a broad range of things, from culture to religion. The stick us in a cubby hole so people feel more comfortable about themselves is a great injustice.

Fourth, Amitai Etzioni is a German Jew. How does this give him a Latino ethnicity to pass on to his children?

By: mishgolden

mishgolden — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:02:16 +0000

Maybe someone named Amitai Etzioni thinks it’s needless to say that he’s Jewish?… I don’t know; I think I agree with you more — that he almost sounds as if he were hiding it.

About Hispanics (Latinos, I think, is better) I agree somewhat with Etzioni and somewhat with you. That they’re not a race like blacks is patently obvious (even to the Census Bureau), since there are Latinos whiter than you and ones as black as Sammy Sosa and everything in between — pure Africans, pure Indians, pure Europeans, and all kinds of racial mixes. That Cubans are different from Mexicans is also easy to see. Different countries have very different dialects of Spanish, including mutually-unintellgeable slang (as I’ve found out the hard way while serving Latinos from different countries), vastly different cuisines (Mexican is rather an outlier, it seems), etc. So they’re not one, for sure. And yet there is, at least in the US, a separate Latino identity, stemming from large real commonalities in culture, in how non-Latino Americans treat them, and (not insiginificantly) the fact that a very large majority really does come from one country — Mexico.
(I wouldn’t rely too much on La Raza. From speaking with several Latinos about it, I understand that many perceive it not so much as a unity organization as one with a particular, and not entirely uncontroversial, political agenda. I’ll risk overstating my point with an analogy — La Raza is less like a Federation and more like the ZOA.)