I totally forgot about Anthony Goldstein! Hoorah. I can stop taking the circuitous route via Christianity into the existence of Jewish wizards - it always annoys me that Hogwarts is a Christian school (especially since the wizards seem to have inaugurated their highly secretive society in response to the Christian witch persecutions in the mediaeval period, so why are they not pagans/heathens?), but the hymn-singing is fairly conclusive in terms of wizards having the same religious traditions as Muggles.
I wrote about Snape being Jewish here (http://gair.livejournal.com/19312.html#cutid1) - he seems to conform to a particular set of Victorian/Shakespearean anti-Semitic stereotypes (clever, effeminate, amoral, outsider, hook-nosed, sallow, greasy-haired). That tends to make me want to write him as actually Jewish, rather than just 'abjected because he conforms to the negative characteristics that have been attributed to Jews', in a kind of reclaim-y way, but it's problematic, I know, partly because it's not my tradition to reclaim and partly because it's giving too much credence to the anti-Semitic stereotypes in the first place, to connect that set of characteristics to Jewishness. (Actually, it's a bit like Rowling's thing that you can tell Dumbledore was gay because he had a tragic, sentimental, probably unconsummated love affair with an evil yet seductive foreigner in his youth and then lived ALONE AND CELIBATE AND DAMAGED FOREVER. And that, of course, is what gay people do.)
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I wrote about Snape being Jewish here (http://gair.livejournal.com/19312.html#cutid1) - he seems to conform to a particular set of Victorian/Shakespearean anti-Semitic stereotypes (clever, effeminate, amoral, outsider, hook-nosed, sallow, greasy-haired). That tends to make me want to write him as actually Jewish, rather than just 'abjected because he conforms to the negative characteristics that have been attributed to Jews', in a kind of reclaim-y way, but it's problematic, I know, partly because it's not my tradition to reclaim and partly because it's giving too much credence to the anti-Semitic stereotypes in the first place, to connect that set of characteristics to Jewishness. (Actually, it's a bit like Rowling's thing that you can tell Dumbledore was gay because he had a tragic, sentimental, probably unconsummated love affair with an evil yet seductive foreigner in his youth and then lived ALONE AND CELIBATE AND DAMAGED FOREVER. And that, of course, is what gay people do.)