She’s also Ben Shapiro’s cousin, and they hate each other lol
Ben Shapiro having beef with Matilda is not something I ever expected to hear about. Lol
It surprised me the last time I heard about it, then I forgot and got surprised again. :p
Mara Wilson being Ben Shapiro’s cousin? Surprising. You know what’s not surprising? How much money you can save by switching to Geico.
She should do a show with Cody Johnston, the world’s top expert on Ben Shapiro. I enjoy observing when facts do not care about Ben’s feelings.
Well yeah everyone hates ben and ben hates everyone because he’s an idiotic republican man-child.
idiotic republican man-child
Why did you write the same term three times in-a-row?
Well, I’ve never seen Mara Wilson and Daniel Radcliffe in the same room together…
Radcliffe: played Weird Al
Wilson: did not play Weird Al
There was always a clear winner.
Man, I say this a lot and I know it comes across standoffish, but… US ethnic categorizations seem bonkers to me.
What does “half Jewish half Irish” even mean? Isn’t that a Jewish person from Ireland? That would count as fully both things. What are the other two halves?
This is why I have to think about the immigration form for ten minutes each time I get through customs in the US, it’s all “was any of your grandparents a smurf?” and “are you latino and/or lactose intolerant?” and stuff like that. It makes no sense.
What does “half Jewish half Irish” even mean?
One parent is Irish and the other is Jewish.
So what are the religion and nationality of the other parents and why don’t they count?
Yo. Pro tip: Judaism is the religion. Jewish is the ethnicity. A quick search would have told you that.
People can be ethnically Jewish or religiously Jewish and they are separate identities. Historically, religiously jewish people tended to only marry other religiously jewish people, leading to the formation of a jewish ethnicity over time. For many, these identities are closely intertwined, for others they have both but view them separately. And for many others still, they only fit into one category or the other.
Irish, in contrast, is only an ethnicity but not a religion. (Unless you count certain sects of Celtic Paganism, but that’s usually not what people mean)
If one parent is predominantly of Jewish heritage and the other of Irish heritage, then their child might identify as half-jewish-half-irish.
Genetically speaking, they are likely less than 50% of each because that would imply that each parent was completely and totally 100% their respective ethnicity genetically, which is (if possible) very very unlikely and realistically not 100% strictly defined.
People like to categorize things, including categories. For some, a part of their identity is based on the ethnic categories they fit themselves into, and some group these categories under one subsection of their identity, and assign weights to the different components of that category.
I love the funny things our pattern seeking brains do in order to quantify the unquantifiable and to better establish a sense of belonging and self in this amorphous and crazy society we’re all a part of. What’s really great is that none of what I’ve said is even universally true. It’s just (from my observation) the most common way I’ve seen all these categories combined. If you disagree, you’re completely free to do so, and neither of us are wrong until we start using numbers and statistics in our argument
Wonderfully put, kind internet-stranger-sir. I have done the same observations and conclusions. Now we both can add a +1 on the drawer “this specific observation might be objective reality”. And due to the +1 the unquantifiable became a tiny bit more quantifiable. Even though there is no clear numerical target. Which also makes it totally useless to add a +1 😊
Is it just the Jewish part that you don’t get? The US has so many different active cultures going on in the same spaces that knowing someone’s ethnic background can tell you a lot about them and their family. I’m sure some people want to know because they’re racist, but for most people it’s just a cultural shorthand. Knowing someone is Cuban rather than Puerto Rican, or half Spanish and half Irish tells you what kinds of experiences they might have had, what comfort foods they’re likely to eat, how they’re likely to celebrate their holidays. Stuff like that. Especially if one of their cultural identities is one that you share, or frequently share the same spaces with, you’ve probably just found a whole lot of commonalities with that person. Older people might ask. In my experience younger people generally won’t. So either it’s obvious to you or they tell you or you might not know at all.
From a governmental standpoint, they keep track of different statistics based on ethnicity, supposedly so they can make sure they’re not failing any groups of people with representation, healthcare outcomes, policing, etc. It obviously doesn’t always work, but that’s supposed to be why the government is interested.
Aw, you guys are gonna make me answer this seriously, aren’t you?
No, it’s not the Jewish part that I don’t get. I have been around enough to understand that Wilson is implying that she has some (presumably) Ashkenazi and some Irish ancestry, and I am self-aware enough to understand that she would sound insane if she put it that way.
The fact that she’s calling it out as a shorthand for common cultural ground is the part that is strange, let alone the persistent hangup with ancestry and the weird assumption that culture is somehow genetic. I was just trying to break it down gently by being facetious about it.
It’s weird, it’s highly specific to American culture, and yes, I do get the very deep roots in colonialism that lead to this outcome. It’s just weird to me that’s where it landed and how often Americans seem to think it’s universal when it’s actually pretty unusual.
I was not kidding about the census categorizations that get repurposed on immigration forms, though. They are full of apples and oranges in all sorts of arrangements and I have never once felt I fit on any of the categories or that the categories themselves make any sense.
Part of the reason she’s bothering to be that specific is for the “dammit ratcliffe” joke, it would be unnoteworthy except in a a”genetically predisposed to” context otherwise, but by being unnecessarily specific the cumulative effect of the joke gives a bigger payoff.
Essentially the “two nickels” joke but she’s allergic to nickel
the weird assumption that culture is somehow genetic
Do you think parents’ ancestry plays zero part in a child’s cultural experience in the US? Like as soon as you’re born on US soil you’re only allowed to eat KFC and burgers, and you can never hear folktales and history from a different country. Not to mention how cultural heritage plays into how you are perceived.
There’s a difference between people saying “my great granddad was irish so I’m basically from Ireland and st paddy’s day is the greatest holiday woooo!” and a Japanese American kid getting teased in elementary school for a foreign sounding name and eating pickled plums during lunch, or a Jewish kid in predominantly Christian areas never having their cultural holidays off school and feeling left out.
Like I said, we’re quite mixed here. Take Hispanic as an example. You could be Hispanic and Latino, or one or the other and consider yourself white, or black or an indigenous American. This stuff is more about cultural identity, and crucially your cultural experiences and expectations, than it is about genetics. Plenty of families are actually wrong about where they’re from, for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t matter all that much. In Florida, for instance, Spanish families generally have more in common with Cubans and Italians than they would with recent immigrants from Spain because of when the most significant waves of immigration happened that have historically shaped our communities.
I’d also like to point out that all of this doesn’t seem from colonialism either. Lots of people leave their home countries for lots of reasons and end up here. There is a vocal minority of people who don’t like that and think their kids aren’t American enough, but to the rest of us they’re American as hell. So you can be American and whatever, and doesn’t make you any less American. It can’t be universal, because most other places don’t have this kind of population. But it’s relevant here because there are so many American experiences that if you want to know where you share cultural touchstones, or experience and acknowledge other cultures, it gives you a place to start from.
I really appreciate the child of colonizers telling the children of immigrants how they should act.
Bang up job.
America is a melting pot of ethnicities and cultural heritages, so it’s useful to be able to identify when those of a common background. I’m German and Jewish, and saying so lets me find common ground or complimentary differences with those I meet that are of similar or different backgrounds. I might discover that someone I met has a shared culrural heritage including foods or traditions I share, or have experiences entirely different than mine. I’d rather know the difference if the person I meet celebrates one set of holidays or another, so I might be polite and not assume. I don’t think it’s strange at all, as though culture isn’t entirely tied to ethnicity, they frequently overlap greatly. It often has nothing to do with ethnicity as well, as often someone will reference how they were raised as a cultural background and not as the arbitrary boundaries we place between people that look slightly different.
It has nothing to do with useless categorization and everything to do with a country filled almost entirely with immigrants from around the world. Other than indigenous peoples, everyone that lives here has only been here a few generations at most. The people around me during my day to day life have dozens of different backgrounds and languages, which is true in many places around the world but especially in a country of immigrants. We don’t have a long shared cultural heritage like most countries do. We bring our histories with us from everywhere else. Race is an entirely social construct, so being able to distinguish oneself as German rather than French, or Turkish instead of Armenian, or Japanese rather than Korean can help the person you’re speaking to have an idea of what cultures you’ve been exposed to, since such a blend of different ethnicities means it might not be apparent. I certainly don’t have any of the common traits of anyone of my heritage except my skin tone, so when I meet someone with shared heritage we can connect by simply saying so.
Right… because I’ve never met a European who verbalized their white ethnic backgrounds before.
I think the confusing part is that Jewish is considered by most people to be both a religion and an ethnicity.
Yeah I’m still not sure about that.
I think it’s an ethnic group with a religion and sometimes a non ethnic person join them?
It’s an ethnic group and a religion. The vast majority of the religious group is from the ethnic group because they usually don’t try to convert people. Her note about being secular indicates she is part of the ethnic group but not part of the relegious group.
How difficult is this concept?
Mother from Ireland Father from Israel, ethnically Jewish
50/50 ignoring realistic genetic history.
I’ve never heard one say “I’m half English” either.
Personally it just seems a way to label people to let them know they’re not proper Americans.
I’m America they think white people come from some mountains in Armenia or something. The same classification system was invented in the 19th Century and also lists “mongoloids” as an actual race of humanity, in earnest.
Maybe she’s America Ferrara.
That’s fucking brilliant
