David Perlmutter wrote: “defining what a ‘Jew’ is is a thorny issue.”

This is a question that has been endlessly debated: Are we a race, a religion, a nation, a people, a culture? The answer, of course, is all of the above.

My own preferred definition is the one offered by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the 20th-century founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, in his book Judaism as a Civilization. The Jews are a global, transnational civilization with its own religion, languages, customs and practices, and a history stretching back millennia.

And incidentally, there is no need to constantly refer to “Jewish people,” as if there were something vaguely distasteful about “Jew” as a noun. I say this not to police your language or take faux umbrage at your vocabulary choices, but just to point out a trend I’ve been noticing a lot lately, as if people were somehow squeamish, for no good reason, about calling a Jew a Jew. It’s a perfectly benign word, except to those who choose to assign some sinister baggage to it.