1. ) Yes they do. In fact, that's part of their problem. You can't ask "Who is a Jew?" without also implying "who are not Jews?"

From "Jew vs Jew":

It did not, of course, and under the pressure of intermarriage and conversion in the Diaspora, the inherent contradictions of the Israeli system exploded. A series of cases forced the Israeli Supreme Court to begin answering the question that the Law of Return had studiously avoided: Who exactly is a Jew?... The next major case, however, involved a gentile woman from Scotland who had married an Israeli man and was raising their children in Israel. Rebuffed by the israeli Ministry of the Interior when they tried to register the children as Jewish, Ruth and Benjamin Shalit in 1970 won a reversal from the nation's Supreme Court.

The Knesset responded with an awkward, troublesome compromise, amending the Law of Return to be simultaneously more lenient and more strict. For purposes of immigration, anyone with a Jewish grandparent would receive immediate citizenship; but for purposes of national registration, Jewish identity was defined by matrilineal descent or "legitimate" conversion. To add to the confusion, the amendment avoided specifying the criteria for a legitimate conversion. No longer was the question of status simply, "Who is a Jew?" Now it was also "Who is a convert?" and "Who is a rabbi?" In Israel, a homogenous country with an overwhelmingly Orthodox rabbinate, these fine points of debate mattered little. In America, with its boom in both intermarriage and Reform and Conservative affiliation, they could hardly have mattered more. ...

But what looked like the triumph of American-style pluralism instead provoked an unprecedented split between American Jewry and the Jewish state, as well as rifts between American Jewish branches. ... Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir promised in May 1987 to introduce an amendment to the Law of Return requiring the Chief Rabbinate to approve all conversions. This meant essentially that only Orthodox conversions would pass muster. ...

Much of American Jewry reacted with fury and panic. "Israel is the battlefield, but the war is in America,"... The American Jewish Congress branded the legislation "a betrayal of Israel's partnership with Diaspora Jewry." Yet American Jews were themselves divided. ... In a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, an array of American Orthodox groups, from the haredi Agudath Israel of America to the centrist Rabbinical Council of America, blamed the Reform and Conservative movements for breaking with "a clear definition of Jewish identity that was universally accepted among all Jews for thousands of years." Citing the intermarriage rate in America, the ad went on, "The floodgates of disintegration and demise are beating down our very doors."

The book goes on like this.

The point here is to demonstrate quite clearly that Jews argued a lot about the Right of Return policy, and how it was supposed to be involve Jews, Gentiles, Converts, Family members, ect. You can even see the point where the state simply decided to make an excuse to allow people who were only related to a Jewish grandparent, in order to get immigration numbers up.

2. If you think that stuff's bad you should hear the Muslims. No, but really, the point that I'm making is that you shouldn't just attack an entire religious following because there are aspects to that religion that they might not agree with your interpretation of. All religions do this kind of rationalization. It makes no sense to attack a Christian with that line without them agreeing that they accept every line of the Bible as an exact and literal statement of perfect morality... which doesn't even make sense for a Christian to do. I've seen it, but it basically tells you that they are bad at being Christian.

3. You're just asserting that it is. I have no reason to accept your assertion as valid, and I don't think you do either, you just want to.

4. It's not gaslighting, you're using a shitty vernacular meaning of that term. In any case, your arguing that people can simply determining their identity by choosing it. I'm not convinced that's a good argument. You didn't say they followed a specific genetic lineage after I pointed out that they had been genetically interbreeding with Europeans for over a thousand years. The problem with your narrative is that you can't make an absolutist argument about categories that aren't absolute.

Race=lineage & identity. And its hilarious you think one group should accept another that will not accept them and that constantly works against them.

That's not what race is defined as. You're basically using the definition of a Nation, not a race. Race normally doesn't require identification with it. You're also making weird reductive assertions again.