What if the data was inaccurate? Why would it be anti-Semitic?
Random question - What does “orthodox” mean? I know there are Greek and Russian Orthodox (Catholic) but also Orthodox Jew. Does “Orthodox” encapsulate all or just mean one of them?
Greek and Russian I’m sure. They are the ‘other Catholics’.
Data can’t be bigoted. It’s data. Now, if someone were to look at this graph and come up with a conclusion like “Teh Jooz control everything!!1!” then yeah, that’d be anti-Semitic. The most you could say is that it’s connecting dots that aren’t there. But even then, put the onus on the actual anti-Semites, not the numbers.
if the data was inaccurate, somebody would have created the graphic to make a point. Considering that one of the stereotypes about Jewish people is there relationship to money, the graphic would be at minimum unflattering and suggestive of greed rather than success.
Is that a common notion about Hindus? The chart seems disproportional because it shows all the religions with the same size bar. Jews and Hindus represent a small percentage of the US population, but even if you don’t realize that it shows Jews as being successful, it doesn’t say they control the banks and the media.
Also Serbian and Montenegrin (many of which who will seriously fight anybody comparing them in anyway to the predominately Catholic Croatians) , Macedonia, Armenia, Ethiopian, etc. I think the graph if correct is an interesting breakdown of data. One could also argue that it is anti-Hindu. They are at 43% after all.
Depends on the context. I didn’t vote, because that option wasn’t available.
If this were in a pamphlet called: How Jews control the Financial Industry, it would be anti-Semitic, but only in the sense that it was used in association with explicitly anti-Semitic material. The graph, by itself, is not.
Why would they necessarily have been trying to make a point? Maybe they were researching this as part of sociology project? IOW, collecting data without any preconceived idea of what the data was going to show?
"Technically, it’s anti-Jewish."
Methinks you would benefit from learning the definition of anti-Semitic.
Because that was the original question and because it lumps all form of “Jewish” together and doesn’t differentiate the way it does for the various Christian expressions? The same claim could be made for Hindu and Buddhist but I must admit that I don’t know either enough to offer an opinion.
I think she’s trying to make the point that merely mentioning that Jews have a high average income or net worth isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic on it’s face. Which is true when it doesn’t include any talk of a secret banking cabal that’s run by Jews, as is so often the case when these facts are at issue.
It divides Christianity into some pretty broad categories. Frankly, I think the data is useless, the disparity in the size of the group is vast, but you might as well call it anti-Christian because Christians don’t earn as much as Jews and Hindus on average.
I’m Jewish and I answer no. I don’t see it at all.
That said, here’s a couple of things to consider.
- The information came from the Pew Report, which I looked up. The first hit is a 2009 blog post http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/income-distribution-within-us-religious-groups/
Now THIS graph makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to see the difference between Jews and Hindus as compared to everyone else. Certainly more so than the infographic you linked.
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The blog took me to a PDF of the full report. As best I can tell, it’s a survey of around 35,000 Americans from around 2007. Good enough for statistical purposes, I guess, but still almost a decade old dataset at this point.
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If I were to question anything, it would be the author’s need to separate Christianity into so many sects. Particularly referring to one group as “mainline” and one group “black churches.”
Well, clearly, they had a certain number of slots they needed to fill in on the arc, so it wouldn’t look too spaced out.
No, but it’s interesting how cultural and historical perspective could make one think it is. You can imagine how someone else could take it to be proudly lauding the Orthodox Jews as the richest and therefore the best, while clearly promoting an anti-Buddhist agenda, since it reveals they’re the poorest, and ew, poor people.
What those other guys usually said!
Pretty much was my thought. They are arbitrarily parsing ‘Christian’ into a bunch of different categories to make it look more diffuse, while they don’t seem to do this with other categories…if you put even some of those categories together in the same way other religions are lumped together instead of parsed into sects then it would show how dominant they are. So…the info is pretty much useless as presented and says more about whoever did this than it does about anything else. I still went with ‘No, of course not’ as I don’t see a specific target of whatever this is.
Man, I suck. I’m technically Hindu and I’m certainly not part of the 43%. Thanks, Obama.
Oh well. Oh, and not anti-Semitic, what are you trying to pull?
I don’t think that’s arbitrary, nor to “make it look more diffuse.” I see it as a reasonable way to break down religious groupings in the U.S., where there are jillions more Christians than there are, say, Buddhists or Muslims. Lumping all varieties of Christians together would create a huge disparity in category size that would make the graph appear terribly lopsided.