JTA: Dissing Benjamin Cardozo?

The organized Jewish community has long tried to establish alliances with the American Hispanic community. The JTA just sent out a piece of disinformation to establish the credentials of at least some Jews as Hispanics:

Dissing Benjamin Cardozo?

The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor has some observers asking if a former Jewish justice was really the first Hispanic member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Read more »

Perhaps the census policy has changed, but normally American forms tracking Hispanics specifically exclude European Hispanics, to wit, Iberians from the group statistics.

Thus Americans normally mean Latinos when they refer to Hispanics and do not include Iberians or Ibero-Berber refugee populations such as the Muslims or Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula during the 15th and 16th century.

Sotomayor as a Puerto Rican is definitely a Latina. Cardozo definitely is not a Latino.

[BTW, Hispanic has probably become the common term for Latino in the USA because American English tends to reject foreign gender endings.]

I discuss the Spanish, German (including Austrian and Swiss), and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi components of the American Jewish community in The Strata of American Judaism.

The willingness of American Jews to reject Zionist ideology in order to inject themselves into the story of Sotomayor and Hispanic-American achievement is somewhat disconcerting because normally American Jews argue despite the facts that there has been a unique Jewish people (Volk, race) since antiquity and that this distinct, eternal, and unchanging Jewish people has title to Palestine as the Land of Israel.

As part of the logic Jewish Zionists reject attempts to discuss historically Arabophone Oriental Jews as Jewish Arabs to the point that in modern conceptualization Jewish has acquired the meaning non-Arab.

Yet the same Jewish Zionists seem to have no problem with the concept of Jewish Hispanics when its convenient. Sphere: Related Content