…Part of the problem is that unlike in English which is home to two words, “Jew” and “Jewish,” not so in Hebrew which has only one word, sometimes a noun, sometimes an adjective. Azoulay said, “Any Jew who observes the commandments is for us a Jew. A Reform Jew, from the moment he does not follow Jewish law, I cannot allow myself to say that he is a Jew.”

What Azoulay lacks, I think, is knowledge of Diaspora Jewry and really European Jewish history, he of the Orthodox Sephardi party, Shas. I doubt he has ever heard of the essay by Isaac Deutscher, the Jewish Communist journalist and hagiographer of Trotsky, entitled, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” which is how the majority of Jews alive today see themselves. “Oh yes, we are Jews but we not Jewish in our lives, in our behavior.”

This is not hard to understand. To be born in America is to become an American in law. It is a political status. In this sense, the infamous father and son team of naval officers who spied for the Communists, the Walkers, were 100% Americans in their legal identity but not very American in their behavior, in their beliefs.

The same came be said of most Jews alive today. They define themselves as members of the Jewish people, and those born of a Jewish mother are Jews no less so than the Chief rabbis of Israel.

Still, by their behavior they are not Jews and this is what David Azoulay had in mind when he spoke as he did…