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Posted on 09/29/2002 1:24:55 PM PDT by Richard Poe
IT'S NOT EASY being a half-Jew.
Not long ago, my name came up on the letters page of the neo-Nazi Web site VanguardNewsNetwork.com (VNN). The VNN-ites were poking fun at my vain attempts to explain – to persistent questioners on my RichardPoe.com message board – that I am not Jewish.
" `Poe’ is Jewish in every possible way, shape or form," snorted VNN editor Alex Linder. "…`Poe’ squirts around like a greasy kike squid, squirting ink… Quit jewing the truth, Pogrebissky."
Pogrebissky was my grandfather’s surname before he changed it to Poe. Nazi writers often call me Pogrebissky, in order to "expose" what they consider my "true" identity.
Now, most half-Jews have never had their family history scrutinized quite so bluntly by actual Nazis. But I recommend the experience. It is wonderfully clarifying.
It teaches an important lesson: If you reveal your half-Jewishness in public, you can and will become a target for people who hate Jews.
However, you will also anger many Jews, in the process.
Jewish tradition holds that there is no such thing as a half-Jew. You are either Jewish or Gentile. Simply uttering the phrase "half-Jew" can earn you a harsh rebuke from some rabbis.
Yet half-Jews exist. There is no denying it. And therein lies our dilemma.
My father was of Russian-Jewish descent and my mother of Mexican-Catholic heritage. Only the mother’s identity counts in Jewish law. Born of a Gentile mother, I can only be a Gentile. As a baptized Catholic, I can only be a Christian – unless, of course, I convert.
It all seems so simple. Yet, there is more to the story than rabbinical musings would suggest.
An April 6, 1997 article in The New York Times began:
It was 1938 in Berlin, and 19-year-old Hannah was shocked to hear that her father had been arrested by the Nazis. She had been raised in the Lutheran faith of her mother, and her father's being a Jew had never been an issue... So she went to the Gestapo to complain.
Officers said they couldn't help her and told her to go to the Jewish community center. Once there, she told people what had happened and was questioned about her upbringing. "We don't help your kind," she remembers being told. Determined, she went back to the Gestapo to protest. This time the officer in charge took her into a back room and asked two leering junior officers if they "liked what they saw." The commander left, and the two men raped her.
The article said that many such accounts were gathered by Bryan Mark Rigg, then a 25-year-old Texan doing graduate work at Cambridge University. Rigg had taken it upon himself to explore the fate of the mischlinge – the half- and quarter-Jews of Nazi Germany.
For a people who don’t exist, we mischlinge have a long and mournful history.
We confront it in different ways. Some, like my friend Jamie Glazov -- a noted cyberjournalist -- demand acceptance from Jews. Like his father before him, Jamie styles himself a "Catholic Jew."
The Glazov family suffered persecution as Jews in the USSR. But Jamie's Jewish father embraced Catholicism and his mother was Jewish on the "wrong" side – her father’s side. Jamie is therefore three-quarters Jewish – but still not a Jew by Halakhic law.
In a FrontPageMagazine.com article, Jamie declared that he was a Christian Jew. The reaction was predictable – a flood of letters telling him, "NO!"
I wish Jamie well. But he is trying to stop a juggernaut. In any case, Jews have a right to their ancient traditions. And so do we mischlinge have a right to ours.
Sadly, some Jews exhibit scant regard for our rights – even the right to be left alone to be ourselves.
The Web site HalfJew.com – dedicated to "establishing an identity for HalfJews" – receives enough hostile mail from irate Jews that its editors had to address the problem on their "Frequently-Asked-Questions" page, thus:
QUESTION: … I don’t understand why so many people keep posting on the site saying that if someone doesn’t have a Jewish mother, they aren’t Jewish. I thought this was a half-Jewish site, not a Jewish site.
ANSWER: It baffles us as well. We don't know why they are so angry, or what they are afraid of…
Neither do I.
The mischlinge of Nazi Germany formed their own support networks after realizing that help would come from nowhere else. Through such Web sites as HalfJew.com, America’s fast-growing population of modern-day mischlinge is learning to do the same.
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Richard Poe is a New York Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
New Link: Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)
.....or maybe a Son of God. Go figure.
It's a shame they don't have a chatroom. Oh, the havoc Freepers could wreak there.
I'm sure they would love the opportunity to 'spread the word' amongst conservatives.
BTW, I think resurecting a concept like modern-day mischlinge is contemptable, given its origin. The boy's over at VNN and their ilk would disagree though, Adolph had it right.
Those changeable "who is" and "who ain't" rules to determine who gets into The Club are only man-made rules. They are not from God. To see the GENETIC trail click on this brief ISRAELITE HISTORY.
You can convert. What did you say that made them think you're nuts?
BTW, I'm blonde too, my kids too, my wife used to be, but her hair turned brown over the years.
David in the OT was described as "ruddy and fair". Sounds like a light haired (Red?) Irishman to me. Israelites Found In Ireland.
Make sure you delete whatever Nazi cookies your computer may have picked up.
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