For somewhat more detail than Eric's response, with a lot of my own perspective:
DamianaRaven wrote:What's the deal with the yarmulke?
See Eric's response: it's a reminder about God or something silly like that.
Is "Jew" an offensive term when used (neutrally) by a Gentile? For example: "Eric's a Jew, so he might not want to come to the Christmas party."
Some people think it is but no, not inherently. You have to deliberately use it offensively, e.g. as a verb ("Eric just jewed me out of my money!") or in a sentence that would insult a Jew no matter what phrase you used (e.g. "Jews are so damn greedy.") If a Jew gets offended by benign use of the word, he's oversensitive and Talmudic law mandates you slap him so he toughens up. (I made that up but it really should be in there).
As I understand the Holy Books, the Torah is more or less the same text as the Old Testament, so why do you never hear Jewish people freaking out about homosexuality and other old-school issues of morality?
The Old Testament includes the Torah, Ketuvim ("writings", which includes, among other things, Psalms and the Book of Job), and Nevi'im ("prophets", which includes, among other things, Isaiah and Joshua). Tanakh is actually a Hebrew acronym for Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim.
You still hear the Orthodox going on about premarital sex and homosexuality, but Jews as a whole tend to be pretty progressive, and I really don't like the orthodox Jewish community. The most popular branches of Judaism are Reform Judaism (which holds that any Jew can interpret Halakha (Jewish law, basically the Jewish equivalent of Sharia) for himself) and Conservative Judaism (which leaves interpretation in the hands of professionals, but tends to make substantially more liberal interpretations than the orthodox Jews). Both of these philosophies lend themselves well to not adhering to archaic ideas of morality and Biblical literalism in the face of scientific evidence. It should also be noted that half of American Jews doubt the existence of God in the first place, so it shouldn't be surprising that we mostly don't adhere to religious views of morality.
But really, Jews not taking the Bible literally is a pretty time honored traditional that far exceeds current branches of Judaism. The 9th century philosopher Sadia Ga'on believed that the Bible was literally true, but thought that Aristotelian reasoning and evidence substantiated and aligned with it. The 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonedes (also known as Revi Moshe ben Maimon, or Rambam for short) said that, for example, the creation story should not be taken literally. The Orthodox Jews really like Rambam's Torah commentaries, so they kind of ignore his philosophies. And by the 16th century, Spinoza was already stating that God existed only to create the universe and that he didn't interfere with any events.
Jews for Jesus... is this really a thing, or is somebody just fucking with some heads? If it is... ???
It was started by Christians as a means of converting Jews. Jews will tend not to consider "Messianic Jews" Jews: they weren't an offshoot of Judaism and believe that a Messiah came to Earth. (Interestingly, so do many of the Chabadniks, though many will also deny that or try to change the subject).
Is keeping kosher still important in the Jewish community and if so, is it still the same as the Torah dictates? I'm sure it's no coincidence that the "unclean" meats are all the ones which, without modern appliances, were most likely to cause deadly food poisoning.
So, it really depends on the Jews. My family keeps pretty much kosher in the home but not really outside. My uncle and his family, who are orthodox, keep strictly kosher everywhere. In Israel, everybody keeps Kosher because everything is already Kosher, so it doesn't really require extra effort. But in America, Jews will tend not to keep kosher much, if at all.
The modern laws of kashrut that, for example, my parents and I follow in the home and that my uncle and cousins always follow is
not the law expressed in the Torah. That's because Jews don't follow the laws expressed in the Torah. We (in theory at least) follow the laws expressed in the
Talmud, which is a series of Rabbinic commentaries on the Torah by various Rabbis nearly 2000 years ago (though there have been many famous commentaries since). Talmudic law often seriously deviates from, and occasionally just contradicts, the laws of the Torah.
The thing is that, by the time the Talmud was written, much of the Torah was 1000 years old already. And considering that the Torah demanded things like sacrifices at the temple, and that the Romans had recently destroyed the Temple, Jewish law seriously needed a revamp. So the Talmud focused much more on prayer as a religious ritual than sacrifice, which really saved Judaism. Otherwise Judaism would have died with the second Temple in 70 CE.
Also, I don't really know of a correlation between Kashrut and health at all. Chicken are perfectly Kosher but will give you salmonella. Pig isn't Kosher even though it (particularly with modern sanitation) is very unlikely to give you a parasite. Cracked makes the argument that Islam and Judaism ban pork because pigs are too expensive to raise in the desert, which I find an interesting hypothesis. Ultimately though, who the hell knows: those prohibitions were invented 3,000 years ago by superstitious desert people. Maybe one of them had a phobia of shrimp, it's impossible to know.
DamianaRaven wrote:Wonder what that would taste like? Probably pretty awesome, considering the event!
Probably, but the Essenes were somewhat of a fringe group even at the time (they wrote the dead sea scrolls), and of the groups in existence at the destruction of the temple, the Jews are really the successors of the Pharasees. That's why it's a bit uncomfortable for even an atheistic Jew to read the New Testament: when Jesus is bashing the Pharasees, he's sort of bashing the philosophies that founded modern Judaism.