Controversial opinion on Judaism – particularly my interpretation of it – below the cut.

Namely, that the halachic requirement to “treat converts as just any other Jews and it’s forbidden to mention that they’re converts” is complete bullshit. And just like other laws of Judaism, it occurred in a historical context.

We are an ethnoreligious group, but a few thousand years ago when the law came to be, many of the people who were converting to Judaism were of the same ethnicity as us and we lived in a melting pot. This was pre-
Diaspora, pre-ghettoization, pre-everything. Nowadays, due to that same ghettoization, we are a distinct ethnic group from the surrounding people. To say that a white person, for example, who converts is exactly the same and has experienced the same oppression as an ethnically Jewish person (even a white-passing one) is obfuscating and disingenuous at best and a self-congratulatory way to get out of acknowledging white privilege at worst. Ethnic Jews have different experiences than converts, especially white or white-passing converts, and that has to be acknowledged.

And for the record, my fiancee’s rabbi says the same thing.