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Love this thread. Experience from other forums tells me that any post to do with Jews can break all records for longevity, irrelevance, ignorance, delusion, genuine misunderstanding, and hilarity - and this applies whether the correspondents are black, white, or khaki, atheist, agnostic, or devout, educated or bigoted, have-never-met-a-Jew-in-their-life or were born Jewish, re-discovered their Jewish roots, emigrated to Israel, or grew up suckled by wolves.

All human life is contained within this heartfelt question - many Jews struggle with it themselves.

Was the thread prompted by the Jewish Free School debate, or next week's Channel 4 program on Britain's Jewish lobby?

Some theories for the interested ones among you to get your teeth into (by the way, to resolve the debate about Chomsky, you can both settle for the term "public intellectual", surely?):

Abram Leon, a Jewish-born marxist, wrote a book called The Jewish Question. He described Jews as a people-class within medieval society.

Yuri Slezkine, a Russian now living in the USA, suggests in his book The Jewish Century that Jews are the pre-eminent Mercurians (entrepreneurial minorities) within societies of Apollonians (food-producing majorities) and that the modern world - modernity itself - is the triumph of the Mercurians (urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible).

This last book is highly recommended, because it highlights what many others leave out - the extent to which Jews became prominent in both Soviet communism AND American liberalism - and the relationship between the internal Jewish revolution (against rabbinical - and perhaps, also, parental - authority) and the external Russian revolution.

In flat view you can use the 'Reply to this post' link on the bottom right-hand side of the box in which the post is you're replying to.

In threaded view, it can sometimes be difficult to follow exchanges when there are numerous threads between other users.

Apart from that, I've liked your posts so far!

From wikipedia

"Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability."

No doubt Nim will eventually rise to the level of "celebrated chimpanzee intellectual". But his primary fame rests on his opposition to the Vietnam War and his involvement in the chimp-influenced New Left during the 1960s.

Of course, many chimpanzees have described Nim as a "self-hating chimp" because he has publicly (though rather unintelligibly) ranted against the Zee-onist state.

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Also on the subject (somewhat) of "what is a Jew?"

We all know that Hollywood has a Jewish sensibility - so how come someone felt that Gregory Peck could pass himself off as a Jew in Gentlemen's Agreement without the audience laughing at the goy. Surely the worst casting ever?