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Feb. 19th, 2006 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockRandomness:
Brief discussion about religion with my semi-boss (a.k.a. wife of my boss, who writes my paychecks but whom I don't actually work under) this evening. Sprung from a discussion about Freud, now that I'm reading Civilization and Its Discontent for class. She asked me if I was religious and I said no, and then about two sentences later she asked me if I had a Jewish background in my family.
I found this very interesting, as it's never been asked of me before. Most people assume I'm Christian unless I tell them otherwise, and although you don't have to be of Hebrew descent to be Jewish, looking of Hebrew descent certainly plays into people's assumptions. I don't look Hebrew at all, being very Celtic and freckled, with a healthy dash of Saxon for flavoring.
All in all, very interesting.
Like a much smaller version of the conversation last year where one of the guys working in the campus cafeteria asked me what country I came from. I was like, "Uh... California?" He said he'd thought I was an exchange student, somewhere European. I just blinked at him in dumbfoundedness, thinking "From his perspective, that means my West Coast Standard American accent is very good... or very bad. Can you have a bad natural accent?"
Brief discussion about religion with my semi-boss (a.k.a. wife of my boss, who writes my paychecks but whom I don't actually work under) this evening. Sprung from a discussion about Freud, now that I'm reading Civilization and Its Discontent for class. She asked me if I was religious and I said no, and then about two sentences later she asked me if I had a Jewish background in my family.
I found this very interesting, as it's never been asked of me before. Most people assume I'm Christian unless I tell them otherwise, and although you don't have to be of Hebrew descent to be Jewish, looking of Hebrew descent certainly plays into people's assumptions. I don't look Hebrew at all, being very Celtic and freckled, with a healthy dash of Saxon for flavoring.
All in all, very interesting.
Like a much smaller version of the conversation last year where one of the guys working in the campus cafeteria asked me what country I came from. I was like, "Uh... California?" He said he'd thought I was an exchange student, somewhere European. I just blinked at him in dumbfoundedness, thinking "From his perspective, that means my West Coast Standard American accent is very good... or very bad. Can you have a bad natural accent?"
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Date: 2006-02-19 02:13 pm (UTC)Well, that'll learn me to rely on memory after having stayed up all night. :) I dunno, I guess people have pretty varied ideas of what it means to "look Jewish". I had a whole lot of Jewish friends of all sorts in middle school, and conversely, my dad is occasionally mistaken for Jewish (we're a big bunch of Protestants), so the stereotype in my head has gone through some refinement, which I suppose could also be the case for the semi-boss.