my apple tv arrived today. you may not be seeing much of me for a while.
it's almost done copying my itunes library. not sure what i'm going to test out first. did i mention that i bought a new TV too? hooray for tax refunds. my old-school 1995 TV is finally being decommissioned in favor of a flat-screen LCD model that should last me just about as long. i hooked it up to my laptop with a VGA to DVI adapter and watched some star trek: the next generation on DVD right now. (it had been my winter resolution to watch star trek: the next generation from beginning to end. i don't consider winter finished so i haven't broken the resolution yet.)
this is sick. sick as in awesome. it's christmas! i haven't felt this gadget-giddy for a long time.
in other news, yesterday i attended a meeting at which there was a passionate presentation on the future of american jewry. the presenter brought up the high percentages of interfaith marriages and relationships and threw out all sorts of statistics indicating that jews who tend to date or marry outside the faith also tend not to practice or participate in basic rituals. the people around me had a lot of different opinions and feelings about this.
being one of the only non-jews someone asked me for my take on it. i got distracted with someone asking me for tech support right then but had i had a chance to answer i would have said i didn't feel weird at all. i come at it from a different angle being a non-jew with a jewish mother. mom went the other way, converting into the faith and then marrying a jewish man. i imagine she represents a statistic of, oh, .0007% of the population? i'm not even sure what statistics mean in terms of direct personal relationships. i can only comment on what i know, the things i have observed among the people who are close to me.
speaking for myself, hearing people discuss the future of their ethnic identity threw up some questions in my mind about my own ethnic identity. no one is even having a discussion about the future of franco-americans and their rate of assimilation as far as i know. not to be dramatic, but i think it's already over for us. out in western mass, where i grew up, there were tons of french americans around me (larocque, lafleur, laflamme, etc etc) but even in french class we never talked about our shared heritage (i wasn't french-canadian and i wasn't catholic either, being huguenot, but still...). you would have thought it would have come up at least once. even our teacher was of french descent and he didn't feel a need to bring it up.
i've personally never dated anyone with my own heritage and i don't have any friends who come from that background either. there are some ethnic and cultural traditions i am going to have to work hard to preserve for my children if i have them someday. in terms of religion it's going to be a little harder since i don't practice but i'll want them to understand our huguenot heritage. they should at least know that much. ultimately it'll be their choice what they want to incorporate into their lives but they should be aware and have it available to them. i'm glad i did. it means something to me.
on a side note, there are a few interesting historical parallels between the experiences of the huguenots and the jews. as i was reading wikipedia's article on huguenots it mentioned that after the wars of religion ended, huguenots' french citizenship was restored. this may be the first example of the right of return being enacted into law. i remember reading on some huguenot listerv once upon a time that theoretically this right of return could even extend to the living descendants of huguenots expelled from france (although this right was revoked in 1945), but i doubt anyone could win a case on those grounds today. it would probably be easier just to move to france and file the paperwork for naturalization as everyone else does. intriguing, though.
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