I don't want this to sound like "some of my best friends are. . ." However, let me give this a shot. Reading through all this, it occurs to me that many of the respondents just are not all that familiar with Jews. They probably aren't around you in any great numbers. You don't have them as neighbors. You don't work beside them.
Cincinnati, as I described earlier, has a big Jewish population. We have a Jews who are practicing all up and down the spectrum from non-practicing all the way to Orthodox. I've had Jewish doctors, a Jewish dentist, several Jewish bosses, and a Jewish accountant. My father, although Lutheran, was born at Jewish Hospital. I grew up with my parent and grand parents shopping at Jewish-owned stores.
While most of the 20th Century was filled with anti-Semitism. I experienced a lot of exactly the reverse. To a stranger to this way of thinking, y'all might label us Jew-lovers. That doesn't quite cover it. The point is that for a bunch of Protestants living in a town with a lot of Jews, the Jews have added a whole lot to the quality of our lives. Good food, fair business partners, great doctors, and phenomenal lawyers. I currently live in a neighborhood that is maybe 25-30% Jewish. It can be a little strange at times, but on the whole, I have good neighbors.
I would be the first to tell you that, despite growing up in the middle of it all, I still find my Jewish acquaintances to be eccentric. For the most part, they loathe firearms. However, if they've spent any time living in Israel, that changes. They can be hard to understand at times, but if you get down to the heart of it, there is a basic obsession with fairness. You'll get into the dangdest arguments over small stuff, but the core of the argument is what is going to be fair. Arguing as a means of deriving truth is big with them. So is negotiating. A Protestant finds this obnoxious. It's just not the way we do things. However, when you get to the bottom of it, most Jews are striving for a Win-Win outcome, so that both parties get what's coming to them.
