Laelia wrote:
I think you're devaluing the role a person's cultural heritage can have. Certainly for some people it's irrelevant, but those are probably not the people joining Jewish social groups. You mention your friend who deliberately eats pork on holy days - clearly he recognizes some of the elements of his own culture, even if he doesn't view them as important. My own heritage is Dutch, and there are things I share with my Dutch friends that my other friends don't get. They aren't necessarily obvious or particularly important, but there are things like certain foods, phrases and jokes that I only share with friends who have the same heritage as I do.
You clearly recognize that gender can influence social interactions, but whether you see it or not a shared culture can too. I don't disagree that interacting only with people of the same culture can be limiting, but wanting an environment where you can hang out with people who have shared cultural touchstones doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. Bringing an outsider into a group interacting around shared culture (even if the nominal activity isn't directly cultural) could be just as uncomfortable as bringing a guy into a group of women interacting around their shared gender.
This. Although, this position has been poo-pooed for several pages. I also take issue with calling these people bigots. According to our "hypothetical", they invited the new guy to "hang out half the time". And, continuing with our story, when the new guy is invited, things go well and he fits in nicely. That appears to imply that this group of people, some of whom have known the new guy for only a couple of months, are regularly including the new guy and he's enjoying the experience which further establishes that these people are treating him well. Now the established group have planned a ski trip. This is clearly a much bigger event than drinks at the pub. New guy is not invited. I can think of many reasons for this, but let's just jump straight to discrimination and bigotry, shall we? Instead of seeing how this group is including the new guy in many of their gatherings, and possibly even working him into the group as a regular, they're condemned for the times they don't invite him? Another problem with our hypothetical is its one-sidedness. Our hypothetical new guy needs to either embrace the good times he has when he's invited to spend time with this group, or tell those bigots to "fuck off."
