Jewish religious identity

Submitted by zchug (United Kingdom), Sep 15, 2012 at 10:13

You state, in the course of a terrific piece, "Muslims (like Jews) do not consider practice central to religious identity." This may be the case for Muslims, but I don't think this is true for religious Jews - surely for them practice is central to religious identity - and therefore non-practising Jews like myself lack religious identity. I do not consider practice central - indeed relevant -to my ethnic identity as a Jew. And even for religious Jews, it is probably something like an ethnic/familial identity that they see in secular Jews. Whereas for Muslims, their ethnicity is, of course, irrelevant to their religious identity. An atheist Jew, unlike an atheist Muslim is not - I believe - a contradiction in terms.

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