All religions ask for preferential treatment. Why else would so many get so fluffed up about "they're taking away Christmas!!!". for christ's sake, lol.

Every year someone asks what I am doing for Easter. My response is always "When is Easter?". Like I am supposed to know everything about their belief and traditions while just by asking they show no such respect for mine. Their beliefs take some kind of preference so that everyone can respect it, yet show not in return.

1.- I'm not a "jewish person", but I know that this is one of the classic "arguments" anti-Semites keep coming back to: given that Jews have been discriminated against and ostracized for nearly 2000 years in so many societies, there must exist a good reason for that, because people don't discriminate others just for fun, without any good reason, do they !?
2.- No, they did not demand any "special treatment", and BTW any God is unprovable, and the Christian God is the same as the one Jews pray to.
3.- No. anti-Semitism has nothing to do with religion; in Nazi Germany the secular Jews were sent to the gas chambers along with the orthodox ones.
4.- Even IF they had asked for special treatment in the Roman Empire, why the hell should any sane person punish them for this 500 or 1000 or 1900 years later?
5.- This is just bullshit

I’m not Jewish sorry to disappoint if you really wanted answers from a Jewish perspective. I can only speak for myself as I wouldn’t presume to speak for “the rest of the world”…I don’t hate Jews or wish to single them out for any particular virtriol as a race or because of their religious beliefs. Whilst saying that i think you may be onto something when you ask If their assertion that they are God’s chosen ones may have alienated many to them. Jews are unique amongst all other people on earth that they are both a religion and an ethnicity..regardless of country of birth, a Jew is a Jew, an ethnicity handed down generation to generation through the mother, and regardless of whether you adhere strictly and religiously to your Jewishness or are pretty ambivalent about observing the rituals of the Jewish faith. That perspective alone singles out Jews from all other religions and ethnicities, and may be the reason that they have throughout history been treated with suspicion and hostility. I myself can only admire and marvel at how many of our most celebrated and eminent philosophers, scientists, doctors, musicians, writers, academics and other lumaries, over the years have been Jewish…and yet they have still been held by many in contempt as a race and castigated. Hitler tried to annihilate them completely from Europe in the Holocaust, and sad to say there is still lingering antisemitism around, but why?

When the Jews were granted the mandate to found their own state in 1948 and the Jewish State of Israel was born they were aware that they were going to have to share the land with the people of Palestine and that it was never going to be welcomed by them or by their Arab neighbours in the surrounding countries. They were always going to have to defend themselves and their territory, however they themselves in establishing their state, turned from being the oppressed into the oppressor by treating the Palestinians as an occupying force and through military conquest and in contravention of International Law systematically stealing Palestinian land and building Jewish settlements on the West Bank, whilst at the same time kettling the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza into a decreasingly small area against the coast and.controlling access by either land, sea or air. That situation is unsustainable, it’s why Hamas has managed to gain such power in Gaza…it’s the stuff of injustice that terrorism thrives on. That is why I really despise the State of Israel, and it’s PM on and off for the past 16 years Bibi Netanyahu and I’m not antisemitic when I say that.

I don’t despise Jews, I don’t despise or hate any individual or group of people because of either their ethnicity or religion. I think the State of Israel has the right to defend itself, but only within the parameters of international law and the Geneva Convention. I believe it was a mistake by the UN to allow the State of Israel to have been founded without clearer boundaries and safeguards in place for a parallel Palestinian state, quite separate and autonomous in all respects from Israel. Now 75 years later the consequences of the foolishness of the deal done in 1948 are clear in the shocking bloodshed being spilled today.

My answer is agnostic inquiry .