Pig At Feed Trough, 1955. Photograph By Joe Munroe. This Photo Is Genuinely Haunting To Me.

Pig at feed trough, 1955. Photograph by Joe Munroe. This photo is genuinely haunting to me.

Pig at feed trough - Joe Munroe Collection - (ohiomemory.org)

Circleville, Ohio, USA 1968 pumpkin queen contest. The contest started in 1902, and shown in the photos is miss Peggy Mayo, the pumpkin queen.

Source: Miss Pumpkin Queen photographs - Ohio History Connection Selections - (ohiomemory.org)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, May 2, 1897

Mourning dove By: Arthur A. Allen From: The Book of Bird Life 1961

29 Palms, California. Mojave Desert. Highway 62

Can leftists on the internet please stop suggesting Judaism is just a religion, or just a racial group?

It literally predates modern conceptions of both religion and race. ‘Religion’ as commonly understood in the West is largely an outgrowth of the Reformation, followed by the Enlightenment, which saw a change in the meaning of ‘belief’ to ‘intellectual agreement with a set of doctrines’, and developed an understanding of ‘religion’ that primarily centers around doctrinal commitments. When applied to non-western ‘religions’ (and, to a degree, when applied to non-Protestant christianities) this conception often forces a mold that does not fit the thing in question (in this case, that thing being Judaism).

Judaism also crosses modern conceptions of racial and ethnic lines, because Jews have lived in a very widespread array of regions, usually had some level of intertwining with local populations, and developed unique Jewish cultures in various diaspora communities.

Imposing the concept of ‘religion’ onto Judaism, imposing the concept of ‘race’ onto Judaism, is to disregard much of Judaism to make it fit with categories that are foreign to it.

Mordecai Kaplan was right: Judaism is a civilization. Daniel Boyarin was right: Judaism is a people. It cannot be reduced to the category of religion, nor of race, nor purely of ethnicity in a straightforward sense.