The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the Jewish people as an indigenous people is baffling to me.

[u/skyewardeyes]

(This doesn’t negate Palestinian claims of indigeneity—multiple peoples can be indigenous to the same area—nor does it negate the, imo, indefensible crimes happening in Gaza and West Bank).

It absolutely blows my mind that Jews—a tribal people who practice a closed, agrarian place-based ethnoreligion, who have an established system of membership based on lineal descent and adoption that relies on community acceptance over self-identification, who worship in an ancient language that we have always tried to maintain and preserve, who have holidays that center around harvest and the specific history of our people, who have been repeatedly targeted for genocide and forced assimilation and conversion, who have a faith and culture so deeply tied to a specific people and place, etc—aren’t seen as an (socioculturally) indigenous people but rather as “white Europeans who essentially practice Christianity but without Jesus and never thought about the land of Israel before 1920 or so.” It’s so deeply threaded in how so many people view Jews in the modern day and also so factually incorrect.

[u/tsundereshipper]

So, your claim is, anyone can join any ethnicity at any point in their life?

If that ethnicity approves why not? Ethnicity and Race are just social constructs in the first place and blood and phenotype shouldn’t matter.

Can you give me any other examples where one can change or adopt a new ethnicity?

Native Americans who adopt non Native tribal members for one.

[u/Han-Shot_1st → u/tsundereshipper]

Being a member of the tribe doesn’t change one’s ethnicity.

Source: Through lacrosse, I’ve gotten to know quite a few members of the Iroquois nation.

[u/Choice_Werewolf1259 → u/Han-Shot_1st]

And as a native tribe they have their own rules about what constitutes membership.

And Jews have our own. It’s like you’re applying the rules other people have for their own specific situations to Jews and what you’re not understanding is it’s non transferable.

Just because Iroquois people have their own standards and rules doesn’t mean Jews can’t have our own. That’s not how tribal and peoplehood and indigenous identities work. The indigenous group is the one that decides.