Yeah, I'd have to say, that in my experience at least, that I haven't found the Jewish people I know to be anything but good honest people. I've met and worked with my share over the years - we have a fairly large Jewish population here in the northeast. My wife used to work at a Jewish nursing home, so we got to know many of the patients and their families from that perspective. The area from Providence's East Side to Southeastern Massachusetts and up north to Boston and its suburbs have large Jewish populations originating from mainly eastern Europe and Russia. They're hard working, extremely dedicated to their families and their elders especially. I find their customs fascinating.
One experience my wife and I had concerns our son, who we adopted from Russia back in the mid-90s. We had obvious language barrier issues with our newly-adopted four year-old not knowing a word of English and my wife and I knowing hardly any Russian.
The local rabbi heard about our situation and put us into contact with a local family that had just arrived from Novosibersk in Siberia. They were a Jewish family that the local Jewish community had sponsored to get them out of Russia to a place where they could practice their religion in comparative peace.
They have a son who had just graduated high school and was starting at the local community college, and he would come over to our apartment and help us with translation and he made himself available 24/ 7 by telephone if there were any issues.
Now, the family could have said "No", because, first, our son is ethnically Russian, and it was because of the persecution by this groups of people that they left their homes to come here, but they didn't.
Most of the Jewish people I know have what I think is a keener sense of the sacred than most people - but that is just my view. I love to have conversations with people about their religious practices, and I find when I talk with Jewish people that they just light-up.
Maybe it's me - I don't find them to be stuck up - in fact, in my experience, they are quite the opposite.
BTW, if anyone is interested, there is a fascinating book out there that people should get. It's titled
Yiddishland and is a pictorial history via postcards of what Europe used to look like from a Jewish perspective. It's available from Amazon, among other shops:
Yiddishland
This unique book is an unforgettable journey into the heart of Yiddishland, a mythical and real land that has never appeared on a map of the world, but whose frontiers have forged rivers, crossed oceans and spanned continents. Although, tragically, it no longer exists, Yiddishland - a huge area that stretched from Poland to the Ukraine, Belorussia, Romania, Bessarabia, Eastern Hungary and the Baltic States - lives on through the telling imagery of the humble postcard.
Gleaned from the millions preserved in attics, trunks and Jewish family archives all over the world, this remarkable collection brings to life the immutable rhythm of the shtetl. The pages are alive with rabbis, professional marriage brokers, itinerant water carriers, bright-eyed yeshivot students, porters, beggars and brilliant intellectuals, plus synagogues, hospitals, cemeteries and those sadly unavoidable scenes of suffering and persecution. The humble trades that kept entire populations from starving to death are shown in minute detail.
Poignant, touching, and alarming these fleeting moments, frozen in time, portray a civilization which might otherwise have been forgotten. They enable us to relive the past, incite us to remember and record for eternity the history and the legend that is Yiddishland.
http://www.amazon.com/Yiddishland-Gerar ... 400&sr=1-1
Originally I bought it because my mother's father came from what is now southern Poland, although, at the time, "Poland" didn't exist as a country. Also, according to family legend, my great-grandmother was Jewish (who knows...??). And, I wanted to see what the world they lived-in looked like,. Was a real eye-opener.....