Even if Rabbi Kahn's remarks were wrong (and I don't think there are; not sufficiently clear, maybe, but I get what he means w/o much effort), the idea that you have someone who was doing digital blackface and has a *long* history of racism writing this piece is embarrassing. https://twitter.com/JewishJournal/status/1281724924755955713

I think applying the language of "indigenous" to Jewish people is just flatly weird. Even the attempts by Rabbi Davidson to clarify an alternative stance come off as just weird. Even if Jewish national identity were forged in Israel, that wouldn't be relevant.

American national identity was forged in America. That doesn't mean that being American is an indigenous identity. Conversely, Creek national identity was formed in America; that fact is separate from the indigenous status of that national identity and those people.

If we were to denote areas to which Jewish people are indigenous, that denotation would be all over the place, because Jewishness is porous with respect to country of origination. Some Jews would be indigenous to Turkic regions, others to north Africa, others to the Middle East.

There are open anthropological questions about the status of shared origin of those people, migration over time, etc. But those don't get you the politically and morally salient sense of indigenous, and that's what Kahn is talking about, as applied to Israel.