Jaclyn Glenn: Fake Atheist, Fake Based, Fake Jewish.

can you be a traditional person who carries on traditions that some people consider religious even though they shouldn't be considered religious because they existed long before christianity i'm not going to go into that rant and i elohim is we did it we get to light all eight candles tonight that's it wait she's religious now that's pretty sweet i'm very excited to have the pride i apologize if there's any hate crimes happy to be loud and proud [Music] my husband is jewish and we have been celebrating hanukkah we do all the traditional things we like the menorah david says blessings and even though he has multiple times over said that he doesn't personally believe in god but that he aligns with the cultures and traditions and that feels very much a part of him we've explained this many times over it just doesn't seem to resonate with some people to the point of actually making people angry with me for promoting religion we actually ran into the same problem with our wedding which i want to make a whole different video on that because the anti-semitism is real yes you can celebrate holidays and traditions that people claim with religion that don't need to be religious mind [Applause] not you i'm jewish i think the hanukkah thing throws people off even more so this comment was actually from my hanukkah vlog and you know david said blessings in it so there are just a lot of people that are confused and i understand so we're going to address it again someone pointed out that you can be jewish and not practice the religion side of it and then she says okay lol jews can be atheists sure thing jews are jewish and practice judaism i suppose the skull cat means her husband is atheist law she's atheist and her husband is atheist but they have a religious wedding because they didn't want to hurt the religious people's feelings and instead go against their own public stance on the issue that was not the reason for doing it and second of all we're not going against any public stance i have always held this stance that you can be non-religious and carry on traditions that some people ascribe to religion people think that you can't be jewish if you're not religious i'm very proud to be jewish you don't necessarily have to be religious actually when we did our 23andme being jewish came up as the majority of my genetics it's a big part of my identity people should really take the time to get to know uh especially in the jewish community get to know their neighbors and get to know the people that comprise the jewish people and uh you know not perceived that it's only ashkenaz jews that are out there only sephardic jews that are out there um and i think it's really tiring to explain over and over again who you are and what you're doing in school every meeting i go like esther said you don't look jewish how do you become jewish i say i also want people to feel proud of being jewish because right now in america there has been a huge spike in anti-semitism and a lot of people feel afraid to show their jewishness and i think we should do the exact opposite the way people think about the american jewish narrative or just the jewish narrative in general is generally a euro-centric astronomic lens you know jewish is like bagel and lox woody allen and barbra streisand and it's very highly cognitively dissonant jewish stereotypes are eurocentric like what's the stereotype of a black jewish person or an asian jewish person or a hispanic jewish person none of those exist because they don't think that we exist enough to even make a character of us my jewishness is a bit of who i am and where i came from the traditions that are important to me and have been important to my family the struggles that my family and generations past have gone through and surviving some of those horrible events so i feel personally that these are my people so yes being jewish can be a part of your identity can be a part of your culture and where you came from and where your family came from and the struggles that your people have gone through and you can have all the jewish identity without being religious i certainly needed mike 23 and me and ancestry and all the things and nothing came back saying christian so there's got to be a difference there right do you get it okay you're from los angeles oh okay you are from israel where uh you're from tel aviv like it doesn't matter you live in tel aviv now okay you you okay so in english i'll do this um i get a frequent question from uh black americans oh that's me yeah yeah your weather you're looking fab okay um whether or not it's safe for black people to come to israel oh wow please yes of course because the perception is the israelis are really racist towards black people so you want herself you want me to go go for it how long have you been here i have no idea who you are i just heard you my name is and i have acne don't look but um i'm here three years three years yes yes and i mean it depends if you're doing a comparison scale but i mean i think people don't like people for me israel is i mean i get a good response um but i think that you know we have a bunch of subcultures here in the market don't like to say my name but in america being black can get you killed in israel being black can just be black if someone doesn't like it's not going to get you hurt unless there's a situation where the police officer did what he did i don't know why he did what he did and then my people had to go crazy but still i told my people here it's now in comparison to look into into america because america we are as a culture we are harmful so america of course so your skin is a weapon here in israel someone doesn't like you because you're black because of the ethiopian struggle because all the time people say ah and i go hello you know so i mean in my in my experience i don't believe so but i know that there is racism but racism is racism exists we're going to get to uh specific examples in a quick second but let me check with you do you think it's dangerous for black people from outside to come here and no i think they're more welcome to come here like that like if you i'm sorry whatever hi i will not do it good to see you please [Applause] the developing world [Applause] they're going to fight have bigger issues if somebody who's american they're going to go oh you're american okay that's my experience too but want to check okay it's higher oh yeah they oh they're totally arab yes there is not now and there never has been a genetic definition of judaism and dna technology is improving all the time there will be a test one day to establish how many of your ancestors came over on the mayflower how many came over with each successive wave of ships that crossed the ocean from europe to the united states of america and if we want to we can generate new traditions and new implicitly racist cultural identities out of this knowable history there is no genetic code that defines who is a puritan who is a quaker but we can know and the testing is getting better all the time exactly how many of your ancestors were puritans and how many were quakers when they got on board that ship and decided to participate in the merry little history of slavery and genocide in the colonization of north america there's no genetic definition of judaism what we have instead is a stereotype some people look stereotypically jewish and they're persecuted for it their whole lives long no matter how many times they disclaim and insist that they're an atheist and yeah i would know because i'm one of them there are some commitments you make not to accomplish something positive and not to avert something negative jacqueline glenn's main argument in favor of our celebration of christmas and now in favor of her celebration of hanukkah and of her having an overtly religious wedding ceremony is that it doesn't directly do any harm she has a rather difficult time instead answering the allegation that she is promoting religion she dodges that one and then just deals with this question of doing harm what's the harm if you personally own five or six slaves and you're part of a movement advocating for organizing for the abolition of slavery why should you have to endure the privation of suddenly not having any servants let's say within your own house cooking cleaning taking care of you and taking care of your children and and why should your servants suddenly lack house and home and employment and be cast out into the streets just because you ideologically idealistically support the prospect of one day in the future living in a world without slavery the refusal to employ slaves yourself the refusal to profit from slavery the refusal to engage in the slave trade for you as an individual it may not accomplish anything positive in the world it may even in a particular may have some very minor negative consequences but it is prerequisite to you taking on the role of being a revolutionary of fighting in your small way doing your small part to create that better future that you say you believe in you cannot simultaneously be a slave owner and an abolitionist you cannot simultaneously be profiting from slavery and fighting for its abolition i get email from vegans from time to time who say that they just don't feel like it makes any difference for them as one isolated individual personally to refuse to eat meats to refuse to drink milk they agree with this grandiose goal of one day living in a world that you know doesn't have slaughterhouses doesn't have uh millions of people keeping billions of animals in captivity producing billions of tons of untreated sewage by the way all these terrible ecological consequences apart from the pain and suffering the animals although they agree with that far-off distant goal of a better world a better society and we can describe that transformation also as a kind of abolition they don't see the point in suffering the little bit of inconvenience in their own lives that would be required for them to maintain a vegan diet now i have many answers to that kind of question i don't give the same answer to every person who writes into me or every person who talks to me face to face but for the purpose of this video let me just say ditto you can't stand up and fight against racism you can't stand up and fight against slavery when you are a slave owner yourself and you know what it's a much greater inconvenience to suddenly be deprived of the services of the blacksmith that you rely on to put horseshoes on your horse probably the woman who raised your child from infancy as a household slave people lived incredibly close lives of cooperation and interdependency with their slaves to suddenly cut that off and start living a completely different life tomorrow for the sake of the abstract principle that one day the slave trade should be put to an end yeah you know it's not that hard when you're at the grocery store to think you want to buy a chocolate bar but think ah not this chocolate bar and to keep looking until you find one that just doesn't have any dairy products in it jacqueline you may not think it would make any difference for you to refuse to participate in religious rituals you may think it wouldn't make any difference for you to say that you're not going to participate in a hebrew prayer whether that be at your wedding or during the month of december i'm telling you it makes a difference it matters it matters for the future of the atheist movement it matters that you and i and every single one of the people watching this video commit to endure the inconvenience of refusing to participate in religion whether those be ceremonies rituals celebrations prayers funerals i have refused to attend political events that had nothing to do with a religion just because they were held in a church here in canada and i wrote let the organizers know i'm not setting foot in a that committed genocide here in my own country for all the same reasons that i don't go and hang out with neo-nazis at a neo-nazi rally even though it may be that not a single person at that rally not a single person waving that swastika flag actually has any blood on their hands from any hate crime they didn't participate in any of the atrocities of of world war ii yeah well if you guys are celebrating it guess what i'm not gonna celebrate it i'm going to endure all these little inconveniences and much more just so that i don't disqualify myself for the small role that i can play in that revolution that's to come and if you add it up you and you and you if each one of us just has a little bit of that revolutionary spirit in us if each one of us is willing to do just our small part the revolution in the end might not be so small after all [Music] do [Music] you