Lists of celebrity Jews ..

God forbid! I would never trivialize the holocaust. 6 million Jews were murdered. It is by far one of the biggest tragedies that has ever happened to us. The fact is however, in the next generation we stand lose even more Jews to assimilation and inter-marriage than we did in the holocaust.
In Nazi Germany men, women, and children died to be Jewish. Countless stories of people risking and losing their lives to light a shobbos candle or hide a pair of teffilyn. In today day young jews fight to marry a goy, to eat pork to desecrate the shabbos. The choices we make effects our Great Great grandchildren more than one would think. My great grandfather decided almost a century ago to become more liberal in his judaism. He joined a reform shul. He had a backround in torah learning and kept a kosher house but strongly encouraged his children to become involved in secular studies, go to college, be a jew on the weekend, on shabbos and yomtov. So his son, my grandfather, grew up with a little less torah than he did. He kept kosher in the house, but not outside. His children, my mother and uncles, did not attend a jewish school, they only went to shul occasionally on shabbos and yomtov. My uncles, all but one, and my mother married goyim. Thus only 6 of my cousins are Jewish, 2 of them have no idea they are jewish. Who knows what will happen to my cousins in this generation and the next, but I will be damned if I let my children grow up in a world without their cultural heritage because I wanted to go to a movie on friday night. Or because I "feel" it is ok to eat out at a non-kosher establishment. The reality is that if every Jewish family in america and the rest ofthe world behaved this way, chosing on whims where they want to be jewish, then in the next hundred years you will see a disappearing of Jewish Americans, they will become American Jews and their kids will just be americans of Jewish decent and on down the line untill there is barely a whisper of judaism left, like the morranos of spain.

The mitsvot are the things that kept us alive through 2000 years of Galut(exile). they kept us a people. without our laws and customs we are just americans losing our Jewish identities over generations of watered down Judaism to the point of nothingness. To the point that millions of Jews either do not know they are Jewish or have no Idea what that means.

Yes we have free will, but our choices not only effect us they effect hundreds of years of our decendants. WE have a Choice to give them their heritage or let them fall into the abiss of white bread america, only to be read about in history books.