Is "Jew" gender-neutral?

Solution 1:

According to the OALD, Jew can refer to either sex, while Jewess is old-fashioned and usually offensive.

MW also agrees with the neutrality of Jew and possible offensiveness of Jewess.

Solution 2:

To me Jew is gender-neutral while Jewess is feminine and old-fashioned but not necessarily offensive. It's like poet and poetess.

Solution 3:

Jew is offensive due to associations with anti-Semitism.

Jewess is even more offensive, due to associations with anti-Semitism, and it is sexist on top of that.

As @Monica Cellio said in a comment elsewhere here:

Jewess and poetess are offensive because they move the emphasis from the thing being talked about (Jewishness, poetry) to "ess", as if women are in a different class than men. Women are poets, or Jews, same as men, if you want to avoid giving offense

Both Jew and Jewess are fairly "loaded" terms and are likely to cause offense. It is my personal recommendation that non-Jews avoid both terms. However, given that, Jew is orders of magnitude less offensive than Jewess. You can use the word Jew to mean "a Jewish person", if you use the word very gently. That is, it is important to not convey any sense of an "us-vs-them" mentality. But never use Jewess unless you know you can get away with it. If you have any doubts as to whether you can get away with it, then you can't, so don't use it. If you don't have any such doubts, you didn't need me to tell you. So, if you weren't sure going in to reading this paragraph, then the answer for you is "no, never use the word Jewess".

After watching this 1980 Saturday Night Live sketch for "Jewess Jeans", I'm not sure what to think.