I hope this isn't too much of a derail. It's been brewing in my mind for a time as kuwisdelu's been doing these very interesting threads about culture, religion, identity and race. I apologize in advance for the text wall. But it does tie in explicitly with the OP.
If nobody minds I'd like to talk about the Jewish-American experience, or rather the Jewish-American experience as perceived by a 52-year-old New York-born male with Polish and Russian Jewish ancestry who is by natural inclination an atheist. In short, my experience as part of a particular culture with associated religion, brought up in a particular historical period and place.
In a sense that's all any of us have of our cultures, the past as given us in the present and thoughts of the future.
Judaism is, if one is struggling with categories, four interconnected things: a religion, a culture, an internally defined people, and an externally defined race and religious role.
1. Judaism is a religion. As a religion, Judaism is classified as one of the three Abrahamic religions (for obvious reasons), but it is qualitatively different from most forms of Christianity and Islam because it is not an evangelizing religion. Indeed, it can be quite difficult to convert to Judaism. Some groups don't allow conversion at all.
Judaism isn't run or thought of as a universal religion. It's a religion of a particular people. It's also a religion focused on practice, not faith. It is what a person does and how they do it that matters in Judaism, not what they believe.
I've said before that it's possible to be an atheist Jew, and not difficult to be an agnostic one.
The differences in the various branches of Judaism aren't essentially doctrinal; they're differences of practice.
The fundamental question is how are the people supposed to live and act. Rabbis argue about this, creating variations, sometimes making major splits into categories of Judaism.
The observances are a combination of personal and cultural activities. There are commandments on individual actions and commandments for how the people as a whole are to behave.
These commandments are rooted in a particular set of books which for neutral terminologies sake I'll call the Hebrew Bible. If you're used to reading the Christian Bible, reading the Hebrew Bible is difficult, because there are a number of Christian teachings that universalize the Hebrew Bible, producing a radically different text.
The Hebrew Bible is a sacred history of a particular people. It chronicles, among other things, where people messed up and what corrections were done in that mess-up. If you look through the Hebrew Bible, you might notice one vital thing: there are no infallible human characters. Everyone messes up in ways that cause consequences and need correction.
Personally, I was brought up with various teachings of Judaism in a relatively relaxed environment. My parents didn't keep kosher (though my grandparents did), but did observe the holidays. We didn't go to temple, but I was Bar Mitzvah at 13, having been tutored by an interesting young Conservative rabbi (in the spectrum of observance strictness, Conservative is around the middle).
2. Judaism is a culture. Actually, this is a lie. Judaism is many cultures, thanks to the Diaspora. Jews scattered all over the place around 2000 years ago, and in each place they set up communities with various degrees of assimilation.
In America the dominant strain of Judaic culture came in from eastern Europe. It had a special language, Yiddish, and various different cultural experiences, from the shtetl (small town life) to the ghetto to the partially accepted middle class Jew to the rare upper class personage.
These amalgamated in New York during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and formed what people think of here as Jewish culture. It produced a particular strain of humor and literature, and because of a cultural emphasis on scholarship, a lot of nerds.
But there are other Jewish cultures in the US and many others elsewhere with different customs, languages and attitudes.
One of the crucial elements in the culture and in the religion, indeed one that is brutally reinforced several times in the Bible, is endogamy. The people are supposed to marry within the people.
In a number of traditions, being a member of the Jewish people is matrilineal. That is, if your mother was Jewish you are counted as Jewish (more about this on the matter of race below).
For me, the decision to marry outside the people didn't matter much. I was never very observant and my wife matters to me more than any of the culture. But it was a conscious choice. I knew that by most standards my children would not be of the people.
But, interestingly enough, the older generation of my family didn't care about anything but love. No one in my family has any problems with my wife or my sister-in-law or any of the next generation. My children and my nephews are part of the family, ergo part of the people. My family still has Passover seders, and my children were taught the stories of their ancestry. At some level they will decide what of the culture they choose to take with them.
But not everyone is as open minded. There are Jewish families, temples, and communities that, had I been born into them, would have shown me and my wife the door and not acknowledged the existence of our children. The different levels of strictness determine how the culture treats the people who might belong to it.
And therein lies the reason I'm posting this on this thread. Who decides who belongs? Can a person do so on their own or do they need to be welcomed by part of the culture? And if they are rejected by one part can they be accepted by another?
3. Judaism is an internally defined people. As noted above, Judaism is something one is born into. The Reform movement in Judaism allowed for either parent to be Jewish. The Conservatives are debating the point (The rabbi who tutored me is one of those leading the charge for change).
Being born into something like this leads to an aspect of self-definition and introspection. To be born with the claim that one has certain inherent responsibilities which one may later consciously choose to follow or not is, to my mind, part of the tension in the question of cultural and religious ownership/stewardship.
I am not an observant Jew (and I am an atheist). I don't think I can make any proper claim to much of Judaism. But I find myself having to take up the cultural and religious position of a person born and educated to Judaism in order to challenge certain positions and cultural assumptions.
So, without seeking to, or feeling properly qualified to, I find myself in a position of stewardship toward the culture and religion.
4. Judaism is an externally defined race and religious role. As a race, Jews have a completely different external definition from the internal one in 3.
It's pretty clear that most people who are prejudiced against Jews don't care about matrilinealism, cultural differences, conversions or much of anything else connected with the internal realities of Judaism. They're bigots. They define on their own terms and for their own convenience.
Part of this bigotry is tied to a reinforcing religious role. For millennia, the telling of the Christian passion involved the specific laying of blame on the Jews as a people. Thus there was a yearly reinforcement of this external, racial view.
Consciousness of this fact and the historical horrors it's produced also pushes a sense of stewardship. There is a real awareness that letting the matter go without comment is actively dangerous.
Unchallenged prejudice does not go away. It grows. The pogrom and the Holocaust are memories in my family, warnings about the fact that it may not matter how I define myself and my children define themselves. Others will impose their own definitions.
Thus cultural stewardship is, in part, a responsibility.