I repeat the old joke:

Q: What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?

A: A Jew.

I’ve maintained before not only that many people —like myself—consider themselves to be both Jewish and nonbelievers, but also that this nonreligious but cultural status is far more pervasive among Jews than among those of other faiths.

Now that status has been given official recognition by the Israeli government.

As the American Prospect reports:

Yoram Kaniuk has won: The prominent Israeli novelist is now very officially a Jew of no religion. Hundreds of other Israelis, inspired by his legal victory, want to follow his example and change their religious status to “none” in the country’s Population Registry, while remaining Jews by nationality in the same government database. A new verb has entered Hebrew, lehitkaniuk, to Kaniuk oneself, to legally register an internal divorce of Jewish ethnicity from Jewish religion. . . . Kaniuk certified the change of his religious status this month, after a Tel Aviv District Court judge overruled bureaucratic objections. The writer gave two reasons for his choice: Because his wife is an American-born Christian, his daughters and his infant grandson are registered as having no religion; and besides, he “has no desire to be part of a ‘Jewish Iran,’” a phrase he did not parse but was apparently aimed at any form of state-linked religion.

The author, Gershom Gorenberg, explains the ambiguous status that nonreligious Jews have endured in the U.S.:

Those who migrated to America arrived in a country that was tolerant of religious division than ethnic separatism, Liebman explained. It’s acceptable in America for Catholics to have parochial schools, but separate schools for Italian Americans would be illegitimate. As a result, American Jews switched categories: They identify as a religion but often behave more as an ethnic group. For many, synagogue membership really means belonging to an ethnic club, and Israel functions as a replacement for the lost “old country” of Eastern Europe.

Nevertheless, anti-Semitism has been a strain in America until recently, and I think still contributes to some of the sentiment involved in the “boycott Israel” movement. My dad wasn’t allowed to join any fraternity except the two all-Jewish fraternities existing at Penn State when he went there in 1936, and even I was called a “dirty Jew” in junior high school by a group of bullies, which involved me in one of the only two fights I’ve had in my life.

So if being Jewish is not a religion, can it be an ethnicity? I previously thought that “ethnicity” was a genetic term, referring to the group from which one descended, but I find in my dictionary that it means belonging to a “social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.” In that sense I can consider myself an ethnic Jew.

(A side note: a genetic analysis of my Y chromosome did show that my DNA on that bit is completely derived from Eastern European Jews. I had myself tested to determine if my name, “Coyne,” denoted that I was descended from the elite and priestly subgroup of Jews, the kohanim, supposedly descended from Aaron and the only ones allowed to perform special rituals in the synagogue. When I wrote WEIT, I thought that searching for my own ancestry in this way would be a good metaphor for how evolution represents the ultimate search for ancestry. I didn’t include that story in the book, but I did find out that I’m a garden-variety Cohan, Cohane, or whatever the name was before it was changed in America. But I am not a kohen.)

Golenberg sees the notion of an official “Jewish state”—however one defines “Jewish”—as invidious and unnecessary:

Real freedom of conscience would require the state to stop registering religious and ethnic identity. Actual separation of synagogue and state would mean abolishing the official rabbinate, enacting civil marriage, and ending government involvement in religious education. Kaniuk himself might have contributed more to understanding the confusions of Jewish identity by writing a novel than by hiring a lawyer. But to be fair, he’s 81 years old and said in his suit that he didn’t feel he had much time left to define himself as he chose. . . . Israel doesn’t need a Palestinian stamp of approval to be a Jewish state. Nor does it need the registration system that Kaniuk used to voice his anger. It needs only a majority that considers itself Jewish in one not-quite-consistent way or another and that has the freedom to conduct a roiling, constant argument about Jewish culture. If Kaniuk’s suit reminds the rest of the tribe of how messy the issue of Jewish identity is, how unsuited it is for sharp delineations, he will have performed a service.

But do we need a “Jewish state” at all? Surely the official trappings and approval of religion should be abolished in Israel, but, as a cultural Jew, I’m not quite sure about abolishing the idea of a “Jewish state” per se, however one defines “Jew.”

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, USA, religiosity still reigns among the Orthodox Jews: Jewish women are forced to sit in the back of a bus run and largely used by Jews, even though it’s under a New York City franchise. That’s both immoral and illegal. Every time I find pride in being a secular Jew, it’s eroded by something like this.

h/t: Michael