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Just yesterday, I mentioned that a variety of more rural Canadians that I met on my last visit to the area all expressed some form of concern about their "culture changing" with respect to significant immigration. I didn't have great examples, because I'm still mostly an outsider to them.
This morning, my wife shared this with me. The Moncton city hall has, for the last twenty years, displayed a large menorah around Hanukkah. That tradition ends this year. The city cited "separation of church and state" as the driver of their change of course, as if something in the legal landscape has changed in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. Spoiler: nothing in the legal landscape concerning separation of church and state has changed in Canada in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. The city is getting mostly derided in social media, and a common talking point is that they're putting out this claim while, at the very same moment, prominently displaying all sorts of Christmas decorations.
So what has changed? Here is where I have a little bit of insider exposure. I don't have public sources for this, and so I'm not actually even sure of how accurate it is, but it's the story "on the street". Basically, there's not that many Jews in the area, anyway, maybe a couple few hundred, but they've been there for a long time. Part of the community. Part of the culture. On the other hand, the sense was that circa ten years ago, there was almost no Muslim presence whatsoever. I was told that ten years ago, the only mosque in the area was really just a small house that had been repurposed. Since then, massive amounts of immigration from Francophone North Africa. They've come with a predominant religion and, well, different cultural understandings. This is what seems to have changed.
Obviously, the cherry on top of what's changed is October 7. It's tempting to think that that is the only thing that's changed, and even if they didn't have all the immigration in the past several years, the city of Moncton would have made the same choice. However, I can't help but be reminded of the old quote about how you go broke two ways: first, slowly, then second, all at once. It's hard to detangle the two.
EDIT: I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.
Maybe the motive was bad, but the removal of Hanukkah from public celebration makes sense. It’s a minor Jewish holiday, not one of the six mandated festivals in the Torah or one of the high holy days. It commemorates a small middle eastern nation defeating their enemy in war. There’s nothing morally or culturally interesting about it, either for humanity entirely or for Canadians specifically.
On the other hand, Christmas celebrates the birth of a new religion and ethical system, which was so important that it restarted our calendars and indirectly inspired developments like global abolition and the Magna Carta. All of the important founding Canadians were Christian afaik, which means they believed Christmas to be the most important day in human history. It’s poetically and symbolically beautiful even if you think it’s just a fable, and it was a mainstay of Western art and music for 1500+ years.
The reason this particular Jewish holiday is by the Christian majority elevated, is that happens during the Christmass season. When a decorated conifer is put up by the state, a litigous Atheist could sue claiming it is a religous symbol, but if Mennorah is placed beside it, neutrality is preserved.
Even in celebrating a Jewish holiday, non-Jewish motives play a role.
Growing up in the '90s, at my primary school we learned roughly equal amounts about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa come December - despite Hanukkah being at best the third most important Jewish holiday and Kwanzaa not really being an actual thing. In my year we had no Jewish or black kids.
Ironically we did have two Zoroastrians but we never got to learn about their cool religion.
Our local library still does this, despite everyone in the area being Catholic, Protestant, or irreligious. Also, the "Christmas" part of things was super generic, just reindeer and trees, while Hanukkah and Kwanzaa were more specific. I don't think I'll be taking the kids this year, last year they found the only person in town who celebrates Kwanzaa, and she spent a long time talking rather quietly, until the kids were so restless I had to leave. For Hanukkah, they played a dreidel game to win chocolate coins, so that some kids got a ton more treats than others, like they were trying to emphasize things people were most likely to make fun of Jews for.
I would much prefer to do something for Christmas in December, Passover in Spring, and Ramadan/Eid as an interesting roving holiday. Passover is way more interesting, and told by multiple religious traditions. Lacking that, I would rather just have Festivus decorations than fake representation (this is basically what my school district does, with lots of elf stuff, and I'm not really into it, but it does basically make sense as a December religious truce).
Easter is a pretty big deal in Christianity, as in the biggest feast ever to religious christians.
I know. And they're related. If it were up to me, we would celebrate that too. Pascha is the best holiday. But if the library is going to celebrate a Jewish holiday for equity reasons, I would rather it be a good one. Sukkah also seems pretty neat.
DEI isn't about reflecting what's meaningful in other cultures. I'm pretty sure that's cultural appropriation. DEI is about making a token acknowledgement of other cultures while you do something for the mainstream. Hannukah is a perfect example of that; it's not actually a very big deal in Judaism, but it's pretty hard to mistake it for being Christian.
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Same deal here. Someone really wanted Kwanzaa to take off.
My Kwanzaa related education in Southern California consisted of "Kwanzaa is a holiday that happens close to when Christmas does... it celebrates African culture." And that was about it.
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