Is this anti-semitism?

My sister lives in England, in Leeds, and I think may be in some degree of denial, in that she's always harping on about how secular it is in the UK across the board, and how Jews are pretty low-key, etc. Though to my ears it sounds like the same as my other family in Australia: totally secular man, once you discount Christmas celebrations and Easter parades and all sorts of Christian stuff built into everyday life except no one *really* takes that at all serious. Like, my sister talks about Jewish friends she has who have Christmas tree, because nbd, it's just what everyone does.

Sort of reminds me of folks in the UK who are progressive and thoughtful and friendly and totally defensive about golliwog dolls.

i have no doubt that life is better for jews in the UK than it is in most other places

Sort of reminds me of folks in the UK who are progressive and thoughtful and friendly and totally defensive about golliwog dolls.

You own a time machine I take it?

josh even though you provide value as one of ilx's most consistently entertaining and voluble idiots you might want to do some research about how many people in the uk like golliwog dolls, and whether or not they would describe themselves as 'progressive'

Mordy might have a poll to hand.

idk what that means, is it an englishism?

xpost Man, everybody is in a snit on ILX this morning. I just mean that you can still find them in shop windows in some places. In my limited experience.

No idea, I'm not English.(xp)

so just incoherence

the poll results are interesting, certainly if one wants to know how people feel rather than how they ought to feel, although the statistics about emigration wishes and fear of the future need to be read alongside the general levels of things-are-a-bit-shit-really cultural pessimism of the uk as a whole ('two in three families surveyed want to emigrate due to the economy, weather and a loss of national pride')

the more worrying figures are the 94% rise in antisemitic hate crimes in the uk coinciding with the recent palestinian conflict, similar to the second intifada period and set against a high proportion of those crimes being committed by muslims even during relatively calm periods in the middle east (links to the relevant cst papers in here)

there also seems to be a pan-european movement towards non-muslims sympathizing with palestinian victimhood in order to add moral lustre to their extant antisemitism, evident in the popularity of dieudonné in france extending well beyond the banlieues of paris and marseille

I'm a barmitzvah'd Jew who owns Christmas trees -- did I do something wrong?

well, i assume u don't worship jesus so probably no biggie

the christmas tree elements of josh' post also makes little sense because the ubiquity of christmas trees etc in the uk does not derive from secularism, which is a positive ideology favouring the quarantining of religion in public life, so much as the very pronounced tendency towards irreligion here, certainly compared to america but most of europe too

christmas as enjoyed by most people in the uk owes very little or nothing to abrahamic religion any more than nordic trees themselves do, though it does owe a lot to the traditional practises of northern europeans adapted to high latitude winters, fattening, celebratory drunkenness etc

i have split feelings. on one hand, since it's originally a pagan custom and not christian that means that having a tree isn't really paying homage to jesus and therefore isn't such a big deal. on the other hand, judaism frowns on pagan costumes even more [somewhat - christianity is like pseudo-pagan] than christian costumes so i'm not sure that makes it better. in conclusion, i don't really care if jews have a christmas tree tho i'd never have one myself.

costumes lol

the 'christmas is, actually, a pagan solstice festival' claims of tryhard neopagan types are mostly vapid, removing the christian observance does not make it revert to some latent form it just emphasizes the same climactic and geographical conditions that have always obtained

it's true that context is important + normally i'd agree but there are special laws in judaism about not deriving benefit from objects of pagan worship and i'm not sure that its disuse for centuries as a pagan object of worship helps matters. (iirc there's a type of tree in the talmud that you're not allowed to derive benefit from for similar reasons - and the reason jews aren't supposed to drink wine w/ gentiles is bc wine drinking used to be a part of a pagan ritual -- so even post-context some kinds of obligations still apply)

that's a shame because gentiles have all the best wine (with exception of the rothschild chateaux)

obv this is all theoretical since no jew who cares about Talmudic prohibitions is going to own a tree in the first place

I don't really care how anybody celebrates anything, or what and why they identify as one thing over another. But it is called a Christmas tree, pagan roots or no, and I grew up seeing it as a symbol of conformity. I mean, I understand there are Christmas trees and celebrations all over, say, Japan, and that fits the mold differently. It's not a largely Christian country, and the holiday is celebrated as a secular thing (which I define as non-religious). But in a largely or overwhelmingly Christian country, I can't see the trappings and traditions of Christian holidays as anything less than religious, at least not until I see other religious traditions being celebrated, too.

My younger daughter this year - she's 7 - was upset, asking why everything closes for Christmas, and everyone gets time off, and everyone puts up decorations and sings songs, but they don't do that for Chanukah. I could only say, first, that Chanukah is not that important, but also that there are not many Jews, period, so Jewish stuff is not that important to anyone else.

(Maybe not Japan, but China?)

Only Jews think Christmas is about Jesus.

pretty sure there are at least a couple religious christians who think it's about jesus

We're there stats around how that poll was conducted? There were about the other poll of non-Jewish opinions4u on Jewish people but I didn't see the working behind the emigration survey at the time.

This suggests not: http://www.jpr.org.uk/newsevents/article.1012

from the author of the piece i posted this morning, an addendum on the theme:
http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2015/01/jews-lose-big-media-david-edition.html

pretty sure there are at least a couple religious christians who think it's about jesus

We don't have a whole lot of those in Britain anymore.

we have A LOT of those in the US

Yes, but Josh's original (pre-golliwog) post was about Christmas in the UK, which he hasn't experienced, unlike his sister whose opinion he seems to prepared to dismiss.

...one to too many

unlike his sister whose opinion he seems to prepared to dismiss.

Duh, she's my sibling, of course I'm prepared to dismiss her.

Ha, right!

My younger daughter this year - she's 7 - was upset, asking why everything closes for Christmas, and everyone gets time off, and everyone puts up decorations and sings songs, but they don't do that for Chanukah. I could only say, first, that Chanukah is not that important, but also that there are not many Jews, period, so Jewish stuff is not that important to anyone else.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, January 22, 2015 10:35 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was pretty mad about Christmas around that age, then I got over it for a long time, and then recently I've started being mad about it again. My parents went through a lot of effort to come in to school every year for the early part of elementary school to share Chanukah traditions or make sure the winter concert had a Chanukah song in it or whatever (I was one of I think two Jews my age all through elementary school, and my sister was younger).

having an xmas tree is the one "Christian" tradition my wife has insisted on maintaining, and it has nothing to do with Jesus to her so I don't really care. I do sort of enjoy needling Christians about their ignorance of their own traditions when it comes to Xmas (which is p striking/common, at least in the U.S.), that's good enough payback for me. You can have your silly pagan ritual that you don't even understand, what do I care. At least Hannukah has some kind of consistent logic to it.

also, more fire

less fire than the two put together when you put your menorah under the tree (don't make my mistake folks)

I don't really care how anybody celebrates anything, or what and why they identify as one thing over another. But it is called a Christmas tree, pagan roots or no, and I grew up seeing it as a symbol of conformity. I mean, I understand there are Christmas trees and celebrations all over, say, Japan, and that fits the mold differently. It's not a largely Christian country, and the holiday is celebrated as a secular thing (which I define as non-religious). But in a largely or overwhelmingly Christian country, I can't see the trappings and traditions of Christian holidays as anything less than religious, at least not until I see other religious traditions being celebrated, too.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 22 January 2015 18:35 (51 minutes ago) B

there are a few problems with what you wrote because you are conflating one explicitly 'secular' country where 40% of people go to church weekly, and another country with a state protestant church where 6% of people go to church weekly and 'christianity' is mostly a vestigial descriptor

this sort of vestigial religious identity is very common here, christians who never went to church, atheist muslims etc, and the hegemonic mass culture is christian only in this sense; active christian practice is no more common then rationalist nu-atheism

in america and in some european countries under the aspect of christian democrat parties it makes a lot more sense to use this sort of inter-denominational analysis to understand identity and prejudice but so much of england is dechristianized or vestigially christian and it works slightly differently -- this country's antisemitism derives from the blood libels but in its current expression it is not exactly christian

nor are the antisemitic beliefs of muslims entirely religious in origin either, it mostly seems to be the same conspiracy garbage everyone else believes, like mordy's favourite socialism of fools quote it is quite as universal as socialism was in the last century

It always feels a little bit futile to try to outline the exact parameters of an irrational religious prejudice. With muslims antisemitism, for example, I'm sure it's usually some combination of religious, political (over Israel), and pre-existing conspiracy theories that can be drawn on in confirmation (yes of course they are oppressing our people because they are part of an evil cabal that controls the world). Christian antisemitism too -- the christ-killing/savior-rejecting thing is already stacked against Jews, and then it gets mixed in with association with trades/industries seen as unsavory, sheer otherness, convenient scapegoatability, etc.

antisemitism is def an overdetermined phenomenon. there are just so many reasons to hate jews (and many of them contradictory - like when jews were simultaneously representing capitalism and communism)

Well they're both modern forces in opposition to some kind of pure, idealized, eternal european way of life

the worst part of interdenominational analysis is that it means this highy irreligious country has an important cottage industry of religious hierarchs speaking on behalf of people who do not ask to be spoken for

the archbishop of canterbury the residual spritual overlord who speaks for a large and currently schismatic communion few of whose current members are in this country, now less about fire and brimstone than appealing to secular liberals

there is a chief rabbi (ashkenazi although this is not often mentioned) who ostensibly speaks for jewry even though he doesn't really represent secular jews, liberal jews, sephardim etc

there are several muslim 'community leaders' such as this knightly opinion4u maven not all of whose opinions are all that nice and who is sort of presented in the media as if he were a cleric for a religion that does not have a hierarchical clergy in the christian sense

Anecdotally, most antisemitism I've seen in the UK has seemed to be the legacy of a cocktail of old suspicions passed through the generations without any explicit link to current religious or political beliefs.

A history teacher at school, who was a minor expert in the rise of fascism in Europe, hypothesised that British people aren't particularly good at telling who is Jewish and who isn't but a host of negative / supposedly negative traits like intellectualism (for example Ed Miliband), nouveau riche flash or a non-specific, vaguely European sinisterness (for example Michael Howard) are widely applied unconsciously as antisemitic tropes divorced from any conscious prejudice.

British people aren't particularly good at telling who is Jewish

Woman I work with thought Ed Miliband was 'Indian or something'.

those are the traditional prejudices of the people london who interact with jews mostly in the professions xp, a lot what antisemitism exists now in the uk is an 'antisemitism without jews' to deploy a phrase used about the present eastern europe, your average lincolnshire protocols reader probably has never met jews and he doesn't need to rely on gossip for his ideas

i am quite worried about the future of jewry in europe, i remember a couple of years ago talking about this on here with mordy and saying that he was a bit too pessimistic about the fate of french jews, but if it weren't already bad enough there it's got a lot worse, the uk is a different case but it's still worrying

Your average Lincolnshire protocols reader is not your average antisemite though. Agree that it is 'antisemitism without the Jews' for the most part but it is still mostly in the same vein as antisemitism in London, I think.

Not sure whether it's true but I read that the huge spike in antisemitic incidents last year came after a historic low. It's understandable to be concerned but I'm not 100% sure the general trend isn't in a positive direction (or more bluntly that people were even worse in the past) as with most racisms.

Well, it's difficult to tell who is Jewish once you've removed yourself from the country you've lived in, because said country (subconsciously?) teaches you that all Jewish people have very similar physical characteristics, traits and all generally look very similar.

For example, in Los Angeles there are many dark-looking, hairy Middle Easterners who are Jewish. It turns out, for the typical Angeleno, that is what a Jewish person looks like. And I had to clarify that the stereotype I was used to was something very different. Very few Angelenos realise that these types of Jews in LA are Iranian Jews (I know there is a term for this, but my apologies, I don't remember it at the moment), who are a specific subset of them, and are a minority within the Jewish community. I guess most of them moved to Los Angeles a really long time ago? Anyway, the point is, this is the image of Jewish people Angelenos have, which is not representative of them.

And as if the Spanish caste system hadn't taught us how ridiculous it is to try to define someone by their race and ethnicity, some Americans and surveys in America consider Jews to be under the same category as 'White', which pretty much confuses me further. So, a dark-skinned Iranian Jew can consider her or himself white. I mean, anybody can call her or himself whatever they want. There is a point where some societies (American, e.g.) use race, ethnicity and colour of skin because they believe it increases their social status. What a sad world this is. There is a point where each little group of people all over the world comes up with their own concepts (right or wrong) and we just stop being able to interpret what they mean. For example, the other day I was reading that Mexicans living in Texas, near the border, consider themselves 'White', for very different reasons, even though some have darker skin. How about we stop asking for your ethnicity and race and focus more on building a safer, more equal society (for *everyone*, it's worth repeating)?

they like to call themselves persians

My current neighborhood has definitely reduced my confidence in my own ability to "tell who is Jewish" because there are so many Israelis of various ethnicities, Bukharans, Russian Jews (who you'd think would be an easy call for me but not so much), etc.

mordy:

That is not what they have told me (I work with them). They schooled me and said Persians is basically synonymous with Iranian, except it has
a superiority meaning to it, referring to old, ancient Persia. They used some other term, because Jews are actually a minority in Iran.

interesting - all the persian jews i've ever known (quite a few - i went to college w/ a bunch) have referred to themselves as persian