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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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It's a control group to compare with Jews who live in Christian majority countries showing that Jews only care about Hanukkah if they live in a place where Christmas is culturally dominant.

Halloween was much bigger in the US than other countries, and still is. Different countries are...different. Suffice to say I don't think the presence of difference WRT holiday celebration/importance means much. There is no "true" Judaism from which all other Judaism must be compared.

That doesn't mean that Hanukkah isn't a major Jewish holiday in America, which is what the guy was saying. Cultures are different in different places.

Let's review. We have Kwanzaa (fake holiday made up in the 1960's), Hanukkah (a non-important holiday in Judaism celebrated by an ethnic group that is less than 2% of the population in the US), and Christmas, which according to polls approximately 85% of Americans celebrate. Furthermore, it was the Christmas Season until very recently, and Christianity is the religion of the vast majority of Americans now and historically. Yet now it is "The Holidays". Let's take this down to Sesame Street level logic here. One of these things is not like the other. It's really that simple. And the only reason it's even considered important is because it happens around the same time as Christmas, and some Jews wanted to have a holiday near Christmas and because it's useful as a narrative tool to make the cultural change to Holidays instead of Christmas.

It's frankly absurd it has as much cultural cache in the US as it does considering all those factors. There's almost as many Indian Americans as Jews. Diwali should be considered just as important as Hanukkah by this logic. It only makes sense since it happens during the holiday season. Diwali is the most important festival of the year in India after all.

I wonder if you live in one of the few areas with a high % of Jewish residents, because I grew up in one and Hannukah was fairly high profile but now I live in a place without many/any Jews and there's no Hannukah presence which makes me feel as though there was no "astro turfing" but rather a natural reflection of the population of a place.

Yeah, American Jews wanted a holiday for their kids to celebrate around the time their Christian friends were celebrating Christmas and so Hanukkah rose in importance. It's quite clearly a major Jewish holiday in America.

Which one of these is not like the other?

  1. Hanukkah - an objectively non-important holiday in Judaism celebrated by an ethnic group that is less than 2% of the population in the US

  2. Kwanzaa - fake holiday made up in the 1960's

  3. Christmas, which according to polls approximately 85% of Americans celebrate. Furthermore, it was the "Christmas Season" until very recently, and Christianity is the religion of the vast majority of Americans now and historically.

If you need more evidence, there literally wasn't a "Happy Holidays" until after WW2: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22happy+holidays%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

It really didn't even start being a major thing until the New Left and proto-SJWs started showing up in academia and pushing for inclusiveness and PC shit in the 1980's.

an objectively non-important holiday in Judaism

You keep stating this but it's simply not true. It's important to many American Jews.

Yet now it is "The Holidays".

Don't Christians celebrate New Year's right around Christmas as well? I always assumed "the Holidays" started as a Christian thing and not an inclusive thing.

A little bit, but also St Nicholas Day, Epiphany/Theophany, and Three Kings Day.

New Year's is an important holiday in the Catholic Church but not Christianity more broadly, and it's not really that important of a secular holiday- just a day off work.

Where I live it is always happy holidays since mid December if you don't expect to see the person till the next year. But on 24-25 it is Merry Christmas and on 31-1st it is happy new year. And if you are fossil enough to send a postcard it is We wish you merry christmas and happy new year.

To culturally appropriate sjw slang - the one is the lingo of inclusion, the other of erasure. Holidays shouldn't be thought of as replacement for christmas, but as a complementary catch all.

It doesn't start until after world war 2: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22happy+holidays%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

I did a little digging on NGram, and found some interesting things. First, look at this graph. I for one, have never heard someone wish me a "Prosperous New Year", and yet looking through this has a sudden uptick in popularity during the early 1900's and then seems to drop off entirely.

While "Happy Holidays" certainly becomes popular after WWII, there are pre-WWII instances like this one from 1937 which has a "Happy Holidays and Prosperous New Year." A quite early one is this one from 1921, although this one seems to support a Jewish origin for the term - since Liberman is a common Ashkenazi surname.

However, I have also found entries like this one from a 1904 Christian periodical.

I'm inclined towards a hypothesis that "happy holidays" has been an existent but uncommon greeting since at least 1904, it likely caught on in the Jewish community pre-WWII, and then was popularly adopted from the Jewish community's usage after WWII, based on this investigation. So while a Christian origin for the phrase isn't unlikely, a Jewish origin for its popularization is fairly likely.

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