Stop Saying "Jewish" and "Jew" - You Are Judean
This may be controversial, I don't know - but please hear me out. I think it's time we started phasing out and objecting to the terms "Jew" and "Jewish" for ourselves; and for that matter, "antisemitism" as the word for racism/xenophobia against us. This may be rather radical to some, but it really isn't if you look at the approach other indigenous peoples have had to this same problem. It is more respectful to call Diné people Diné than "Navajo", for instance; I myself am half Amazigh, and while the term "Berber" still sees use, it is widely being rejected as disrespectful. I am convinced it's time for Judeans - Yehudim - to follow this approach. The words "Jew" and "Jewish" (or, for that matter, their equivalents in most languages of peoples who oppressed us) were not our creations, and while we have put substantial time into getting comfortable using them (whether it be through the insistence on "Jewish people" or even reclaiming old slurs like "Jewess"), I think it's time we accepted that they've done more harm to us than good.
Calling us "Jews", "Juden", "Juifs", etc., has so often been used as a slur, and more than just that: it actively distances us from our roots in a way that's made our sociopolitical alienation easier. "Jewish" also has myriad problems; how many times have we heard ignorant Judeophobes insist that we aren't "real" Jews/Israelites/Hebrews - merely "Jew-ish". It's distortions like these that have made the job of those hostile to us easy, and our job in combating them all the more frustrating. A "Jew" has no country, can be called "just a religion", can be called "the Jew" as if a mere abstraction, an object. "Jewish" people - even if recognized as people - need not truly be what we claim to be. Our own indigenous name for ourselves - Yehudi, Yisrael - generally does not share these problems. It can't be said that a Yehudi is "-ish". A Judean is very unambiguously of Judea, just as a Russian is of Russia or a Japanese person is of Japan; or a Diné of Dinétah; or an Amazigh is of Tamazgha.
Antisemitism is another term that was invented by our oppressors, and has been twisted more recently to use as another form of identity-denial. Antisemitism as an imagined form of racism against "Semites" may have made sense in the 19th Century when A.) the only real "Semites" familiar to Europeans were Judeans, and B.) "Semite" was conceived of as a "race", but in the 21st Century there is absolutely no reason to keep using a term that is routinely misunderstood to be applicable to any and all "Semites". Judeophobia is a far better term for prejudice against Judeans; and it makes it seem less exotic/exclusive. Judeophobia is of a kind with Sinophobia, homophobia, etc. "Antisemitism" is an antiquated, ambiguous word whose utility to fight Judeophobia has been outweighed by its utility to the Judeophobes themselves.
Seldom would you hear "Judean" used as a slur. "The Jew" is an alien; might as well be another species. But the Judean is just somebody who comes from Judea. And all Yehudim and Shamerim are Am Yisrael - we're all Israelis, by tribe, if not by citizenship. In the same way someone might say they are Han Chinese, we can (and should) say that we're Judean Israeli. The same phrasing is even attested in our historic texts - in the Talmudic period, Judean Israeli was exactly the name we used. We're now in an era of decolonization: Eretz Yisrael is now home to Medinat Yisrael, so we as Am Yisrael should embrace the new paradigm - seriously engage with what that means for our identity as the land's First Nation, and remind the world what we're actually called.
Couter-arguement: Not all Jews are Judean. When the kingdom of Israel split Judah was the larger of two tribes in the southern kingdom and thus it took on that name. But the Beta Yisrael are of the tribe of Dan, Bene Yisrael are Menashe, Cohanim and Levi'im are Levi, Gerim are not from any of the 12 tribes. The only word to properly refer to all of our people is Am Yisrael and if you want the adjective form of that it's Yisraeli. Like every other nation we have already named our country after our people, but we are the only one's who don't use it for our diaspora.
I agree that the diaspora should call themselves Israelis, but I don't think it's inaccurate to use Judean: after the Babylonian Exile that is the identity into which the tribes and kingdoms collapsed and led to the word "Jews" in the first place. "Jews" = "Judeans", not just Judahites (i.e., literal members of the tribe of Judah) it's just they have semiotically diverged due to our colonization by empire(s): i.e., in Galut, estranged from Judah/Judea, and moreover with Judah/Judea being deterritorialized and renamed, "Judahite" to "Judean" to "Jew" represented the transformation of what began as a simple demonym into an ethnonym and then into a slur. It's actually valuable that you mention Beta Yisrael here specifically, because their case makes my point all the more clear: they adopted the name Beta Yisrael precisely because the word Ayhud (the Amharic form of Yehudi) became a slur weaponized against them by their oppressors. I think the case is somewhat different with languages in which there is clear differentiation between "Jew" and "Judean", in which the latter is something reclaimable due to the relative lack of pejoratization, the greater clarity as a demonym, distinction from Shamerim, etc., and that is why I believe both Judean and Israeli are terms we should be using instead of "Jew" or "Jewish".
Israeli is somewhat trickier because we find ourselves in an era when in addition to Judean Israelis there are also Arab Israelis, Samaritan Israelis, Druze Israelis, etc. With the Samaritans it's easy because we can just say "Israeli" to mean both Yehudim and Shamerim (i.e., Am Yisrael), but Druze and Arab Israelis are not part of Am Yisrael, not even as gerim, they are instead part of Ezraḥut Yisrael - which requires us to give Israeli dual definitions as a demonym (i.e., civic nationality) AND an ethnonym (i.e., tribal nationality) depending on the context. My suggestion is essentially that we should do what Beta Yisrael did, except that in English we're lucky to still have a direct translation of Yehudi that's closer to our intended connotation AND is essentially free of the centuries of baggage that "Jew/ish" has.
I didn't bring up Beta Yisrael just as an example of another tribe but also because they were never part of the kingdom of Judah. Their diaspora predates the splitting of the kingdom. And overall I don't see much value in trying to claim a group name to shed the ill-will of other people because it will never work. Every name used by jews will become a slur in the mouths of those who hate us, so the only real value could be in finding names that more accurately describe the whole group.
There are already ways of using the same word to mean two things. If a person says for example "I'm puerto-rican, but i'm not from puerto-rico" that tells you they're the ethnicity not the nationality, and vice-versa. I suppose I haven't personally felt the need to single out non-jewish Israeli's in conversation because speaking on the national level they are "the foreigners among us" and are treated as one of our own. I'd honestly be in support of dropping the term Ger to refer to converts, who should be just considered as all other jews and it could then be shifted to refer to non-jewish israelis (this is all thinking out loud and not anything im married to).
