Rockland Jewish Family Service

Ok, so I’m not very religious but I want to show people that i am jewish, what is the best way to do this?

Wear a shirt that says "I’m Jewish" .

Nazi (officer I believe) changes identity, even has surgery to change his voice and of course, facial features. I think it was in order to be "undercover" in a particular concentration camp. While there he falls in love, ends up marrying a jewish woman and continues to live as a Jew. They have a daughter and son. Son studies Jewish history including Nazi’s heavily involved in persecuting the Jews. He reads information about a German officer, is able to see pictures of him and in the end frantically shaves his own beard in order to determine how much he actually looks like the man, who is indeed his father (pictures are prior to his identity change).

I saw this movie in 1988-1989 but have no idea the title or name of the officer. Would love to see the movie again. All of my Google searches have been a wash. Please help!
The one I’m looking for isn’t as old as the Orson Welles movie. Thanks for the suggestions, but I’m quite sure it was about Nazi’s as the Jewish concentration camp was an outstanding part of the movie.

There’s an Orson Welles movie from 1946 called "The Stranger" that sounds similar to the plot you described.

There’s also the River Phoenix film "Little Nikita" that came out in 1988, although this concerns Soviet spies and not Nazis.

He is of the Davidic line, but since the destruction of the temple,no Jew really knows if he is from this family.Can he spend a part of his life not knowing his true identity, only to suddenly realize who he is ?

All this focus on the person of the Messiah isn’t Jewish. It actually comes from Christianity’s insistence that Jesus is the jewish Messiah. Since he didn’t accomplish ANY of the tasks, they only have things like genealogy to work with.

For judaism, what truly matters is the results. If there is world peace, we’re not going to quibble about documented ancestry.

There are families who claim to be from the Davidic line and preserve that knowledge just in case. Modern genetic research shows that the Kohanim have retained a remarkable congruency in their line, so it’s quite possible that the claims to be from the Davidic line are accurate. But if someone else was able to bring about true universal peace, that would be sufficient proof.

We don’t know details like whether this person would be aware of it from an early age. There are different traditions, like the idea that there is a potential Messiah in every age, waiting for the rest of us to get our acts together, but we simply don’t know.

I’m looking specifically for an answer containing: The Torah, OR The Prophets, OR The Writings
Any further information, regarding the history of that division and how it applies to political aspects of jewish identity, or specific examples would be appreciated.

From Jewish Identity and the Torah by Rabbi Baruch

"Both Biblical and Rabbinical perspectives understand the Torah as a unit. This means that Torah is only observed when all of its commandments are potentially possible to be fulfilled. James also alludes to the Torah being a unit when he says,

"For whoever keeps the entire Torah, but stumbles in one (commandment), he is guilty of all." James 2:10

Rabbinical Jewish Law says in regard to a Torah scroll, that it is only Kosher when all of its letters are correct. This means that if one letter is missing, or one letter written in a wrong place, then the entire Torah scroll is not valid.

Hence today because there is not a Temple in Jerusalem, the Torah cannot be observed in its totality and if not in totality then it becomes not in force. This should not be a surprise because the prophet Hosea wrote about the period of time when the Torah would not be in force, saying,

"For many days the Children of Israel will dwell without a king, without a government official, without a sacrifice, without a pillar, without an ephod, and without Teraphim. Afterwards the Children of Israel will return and seek the L-rd their G-d and David their King, and they will fear the L-rd and His goodness in the last days." Hosea 3:4-5

These two verses are critical in understanding the time in which we are living. Hosea informs the reader that the Children of Israel will go through a long period without a king or a government. There will be no sacrifices offered nor will there be any remnants of the Temple, nor will there be any active Priesthood. However in the last days the Children of Israel will return to the land of Israel and seek the Lord. How? They will seek G-d by means of the Messiah. Notice that the text actually says David. This is of course a reference to the Son of David, i.e. Messiah. Why is this text so important? It is important because it reveals that since the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. that the Torah could not be observed. This is the basis for the shift away from the Priest and Levites and the leaders of Israel to the Rabbis. Now it is rabbinical law which is binding according to judaism and not the Torah. Therefore, when one speaks about Torah observance today, the real allusion is to rabbinical law and not the Biblical Torah. It is amazing to me that people find it hard to believe that the Rabbis teach that the Torah is not in force. Here is a classic example to illustrate this point.

According to the Torah if a jewish individual knowingly and willfully transgresses the Sabbath day the punishment is death. However if a secular Jew today chooses not to follow rabbinical law in regard to the Sabbath law, a rabbinical court cannot inflict any punishment on this individual whatsoever. It is most clear that Torah law and rabbinical law differ in many points."

Every jewish comedian, every jewish interviewer, every jewish reporter has to mention his jewish identity,, his race, his ancient history and so on.. if they cant take the heat then get out of the Kitchen
He Muslims don’t own the media , the media targets them but the Jews are attention seekers

Excellent question – yes jews are over represented in the media and in politics as well – yet they do whinge and whine constantly about non-existing persecution and that weasel phrase "anti-semitism" etc etc

These people really do like to have their cake and eat it.

They control the media and yet they still want to shake down the host society for every penny by being squeaky wheels – I believe it is called "being shameless"!

They are an immature and sad people who constantly cry: "look at me, look at me" and have tantrums because they cannot get everything for nothing.

A good example are the talentless attention seekers Jonathan Ross – always banging on about Jews and anti-Christian in his views including his tirade against "The Lion Witch & the Wardrobe" some time ago and of course the seriously unfunny and unoriginal Sarah Silverman who is unrelentingly promoted and given a high profile despite her lack of talent simply for being a Jewess.

Jewish Punk
Though few people would associate punk rock with Judaism, the punk movement was created by Jews from Brooklyn and Queens.
By Saul Austerlitz

Is punk Jewish? At first glance, what music could be less (stereotypically) Jewish? Punk rock, in its classic, Sex Pistols-and-Ramones form, was all about simplicity, rebelliousness, anti-intellectualism, and shock value. Its foremost practitioners kitted themselves out in matching swastikas or dressed like a white-ethnic biker gang straight out of "The Wild One," but it was essential to the project of punk that its musicians appear brutish, Neanderthal, evil–anything but bookish, or well-spoken, or worst of all, nice.

And yet, as Steven Lee Beeber documents in his book "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s," New York punk was primarily a movement led by Jewish boys (and a few girls) from solidly middle-class families, born and raised in the outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn but drawn to Manhattan’s club scene like a moth to a flame. The sons and daughters of shopowners and accountants rebelling against their parents’ comfortable but too-confined existences–what could be more familiarly, soothingly American? But what is the significance of the Jewish angle, if there is one at all?

The facts undoubtedly bear out a significant over-representation of Jews in the first wave of New York punks. Lou Reed, Joey and Tommy Ramone, Suicide’s Martin Rev and Alan Vega, Jonathan Richman, Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, Richard Hell, Blondie’s Chris Stein, CBGB’s founder Hilly Kristal–the list of Jewish punk notables is lengthy, and impressive. According to Beeber, the common thread for many of these Jewish punks was a desire to overturn the stereotype of the feeble, brainy Jew, the yeshiva student or the bespectacled clerk, replacing him with a brawny Jew in closer touch with his inner beast, and intent on shocking society out of its narcotized comfort.

The new punk Jew was inspired in equal parts by the warriors of the Israel Defense Forces, the comic-book superheroes scripted by an earlier generation of jewish artists, and an instinctive revulsion at the musical excesses of contemporaries. Stripping down to essences after the overblown pompousness of rock in the mid-1970’s, punk cut away everything it saw as being unnecessary, including any prior identity. Punk was not merely a musical genre; it was a rebirth, with each newfound punk reborn in the movement, baptized in the flaming guitars and pogoing bass. How could punks be punks, and be Jewish too?

Beeber’s book sees punk as a specifically Jewish outgrowth of post-Holocaust awareness–and shame. A new generation of Jewish boys sought to express their horror at the concentration camps by caustically embracing fascist aesthetics and an iconography of raw power. Rather than sink into what they saw as a mire of self-pity and narcissistic victimhood over six million dead, the Jewish punks preferred to rock out with swastikas, pose meaningfully with Nazi flags, and do their utmost to shock the living daylights out of their parents. Seeing the Holocaust as a moment of tragic weakness, the Jewish punks sought to never be weak again.

Or so Beeber says. The punk movement was never quite as uniform as Beeber has it, nor was its Jewish component as explicitly Jewish as he makes it out to be. Key figures like Tommy Ramone preferred to keep their jewish identity in the shadows, preferring a white-ethnic, outer-boroughs style hilariously dubbed "Juido." Moreover, being an all-embracing, all-encompassing lifestyle more than a mere musical distinction, punk sought to displace Judaism, as it displaced any religious or cultural affiliation. Punk was a calling, a source of meaning, and a religion of its own. To point out that there were many Jewish punks is akin to pointing out that there were many Jewish Communists; while true, it ignores the fact of the newer identity essentially canceling out the older.

The punks kept faith with judaism less in the ideas they espoused than in the position they took vis-à-vis mainstream society. Having far more in common with their immigrant parents and grandparents than they might have been comfortable, or familiar, with, the Jewish punks simultaneously sought to maintain their status as a people apart, divorced from mainstream culture, while desperately in search of the approval of that very same uncomprehending mass. What, after all, was the significance of the punks’ embrace of Nazi culture and other similarly toxic aesthetic motifs, if not an angry response to the seeming inability of the bourgeoisie to grasp the nature of their revolution?

The Jewish punks, like their immigrant forebears, sought to fit in and stand out, to be celebrated and to be ignored. Like their predecessors, the punks also flocked to the dingy, crime-ridden, tenement-dotted city, only in far smaller numbers, and as a lifestyle choice, rather than because there was nowhere else to go. For the punks, the very nature of their beliefs made them a people apart, divorced from society at large, and yet, deep in the marrow of their bones was a clamorous urge to be celebrated, and to be accepted.

How apropos, then, that so many of the New York punks were also Jewish. Punk may not have been Jewish, but its push-and-pull dynamic regarding American culture at large might as well have been.

No, Punk Rock is dead.

There are two ways that come to mind to define the Exodus experience as found in the Old Testament
1) Story of a birth of people, social unity and the forging of identity
2)Delivery from oppression, birth of freedom, and divine sanctioning of rights and responsibilities.

How do you think this Exodus experience has evolved in contemporary jewish life?

im not sure what you are asking but if its how it connects to modern day:
Jews were slaved and tortured in Egypt
The Jews were saved
The Jews recieved Israel

This century-
The Jews were killed enslaved and tortured in Europe
We were saved
We recieved Israel again

I am a Reform Jew and plan on moving to the Netherlands, where I will belong to a synagogue. I don’t plan on hiding my jewish identity from people, as it is something I am very proud of. I’ve heard that there is some anti-semitism there but wanted to know if this is true, and if it is, how bad is it?

ya know what? stop beeing afraid and assert yourself. Im a jew and I carry a gun and Im a big muscled up dude who dont take no crap from nobody! I smash fools who wanna get stupid with me!

I just can’t understand it. How can there be blue-eyed blonde jews and asian jews, for example, too? o.o
How is it possible that people from these two groups I exemplified share the same ethnicity?
Is the jewish identity actually a complete conspiracy, like some people say?

I think you are confusing a religion and an ethnic group.

Children born of Jewish Mothers are considered Jews, but people who study judaism might be considered Jews too.

There are every race of Christians just like every race of Jew, Hindi or Buddhist.

Out of the Jews living outside of Israel, more than 50% of Jews in almost all countries are marrying people who are not jewish. How do you feel about this?

Does it ever concern you that this could lead to the decline in jewish identity, and would you prefer if most Jews just married within their religion?

oy vey