Jews
When you talk about Jews the first thing that probably comes to your mind is Hanukah over Christmas. But Jewish Culture is much more than that. The Jews have suffered a long history of persecution in many different lands, and their population and distribution per region has fluctuated throughout the centuries. Today, most authorities place the number of Jews between 12 and 14 million.
Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief, and has been called not only a religion, but also a “way of life,” which has made drawing a clear distinction between Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish nationality rather difficult. In many times and places, such as in the ancient Hellenic world, in Europe before and after the Enlightenment, and in contemporary United States and Israel, cultural phenomena have developed that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious.
Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with their surroundings, others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to from the religion itself. Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed lashon ha-kodesh, “the holy tongue”), the language in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people for centuries. By the fifth century BCE, Aramaic, a closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken language in Judea. By the third century BCE, Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek. Modern Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of the State of Israel along with Arabic. Educationally the childhood of a regular Jew is very similar to any other teenager of his age – Summer Camps, Cheerleading and playing basketball.