Mmm hmm.
Your argument is very clever, and nobody could figure out what it means that you’re claiming that Jews cause anti-Semitism by simply existing. Nope. Nor can anybody use that ol’ thang that geeks call ‘logic’ to understand what “solutions” such a view necessitates. Nope, your argument is just that clever.
Mmm hmm.
I don’t know so much about Britain, but the United States certainly has people who define themselves by their ethnic identity. You run into all sorts of people who are proudly Irish-American or Italian-American, or Polish-American. Is that equally clannish?
And the thing is, Jews as a group, and especially subgroups of Jews…Eastern European Jews, Spanish Jews, etc, do have a common history. There is a kind of shared Jewish experience, and it’s not just a religious experience. This is especially true in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as people got more secular, and especially true after the Holocaust, which went after Jews indiscriminately, religious or secular, and even converts to other faiths.
I’ve been getting from your post that you seem to think Jews focus too much on the Holocaust, but you have to understand what a watershed moment that was in Jewish identity; and what a shared trauma. About a third of all the Jews in the world died in the Holocaust. The Jewish population in 1939 was almost 17 million, and in 1945, was 11 million. The Jewish population is still smaller than it was before the Holocaust started. Jewish communities and towns that had existed for a thousand years were destroyed utterly.
In what’s now Belarus, the town of Pinsk had 30,000 people, of which 90% were Jewish. That’s 27,000 people. By the end of the war, they were all dead. Ten thousand were killed in one day.
Vilnius, which is now the capital of Lithuania, was a little bit over 40% Jewish, about 265,000 people. It had been, for 500 years, the center of Eastern European thought and culture. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the methods of the yeshivot in Vilnius became the standard in Eastern Europe. Elijah Zalman, the 18th century Gaon of Vilnius, is still considered by religious Jews, especially non-Hasidic ones, to be one of the greatest religious thinkers in the 18th century, or even in the post-medieval world. Vilnius, by the turn of the 20th century, had a thriving theater scene, a thriving art scene, a scientific community, and was the place that the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, was founded.
The Nazis killed all of them. The entire Jewish population of the city. All dead. I could go on and on. There were hundreds, thousands of places like that. What on earth is wrong with wanting to remember that? To remember them?
Get back to me if they are still identifying that way in 2000 years.
Believe me, I get that the Holocaust was a horribly traumatic collective event for Jews. I get the urge to memorialize it. What is wrong from my perspective is wrangling the government into doing it. That should not be a function of the State of Ohio.
You want to memorialize the Holocaust, I get that. So buy a piece of land and build a monument.
You mean like the Gypsies? The Kurds? I mean, what exactly is your argument? That because there wasn’t a Jewish state for a long time, self identifying as a Jew is somehow illegitimate?
The State of Ohio isn’t doing it. It’s providing the land, but the costs of the memorial are being for with private donations.
Ah, so you can show us all the, doubtlessly many, posts you’ve made calling the Chinese “clannish”, what with their millennia old culture, and all. The Egyptians? The Turks? Anglo-Saxons? The Irish? The Scottish? The Swedes, Danes, Finns… Anybody at all?
You do have many such posts since this is a true passionate belief of yours, and not simply a rationalization for antipathy towards Jews. What am I saying, of course you haven’t only expressed such views about the Jews and only about the Jews out of all the cultures on the planet with centuries old, if not millennia old, cohesive histories and identities! Of course this isn’t only about your view of Jews. And you will prove that, immediately, by showing us one single post in all your years here, where you said something even roughly comparable to your views about Jews. Right?
No?
Funny, that.
Getting back to the actual topic of this thread, which is whether or not this particular memorial design is in conflict with the Establishment Clause, I again post this:
Does the proposed memorial pass the Lemon test?
Yes, Gypsies and Kurds are better analogs. You want to emulate the experiences of those peoples?
“Illegitimate,” no. Particularly since, for most of that time, it was a religious identification. But a “tribal” identification that spans national borders? What’s the point of that, exactly?
I still wouldn’t call it “illegitimate.” “Stubbornly divisive” would be a better descriptor. “Self-defeating” might be another. If you set yourselves up as an “Other” it shouldn’t be surprising if some folks perceive you exactly that way.
The State of Ohio is doing it, though, if it’s being put on statehouse grounds, regardless of who’s paying for the monument itself. And why insist that the monument be put on statehouse grounds? What does the State of Ohio have to do with the Holocaust?
Yep.
Pretty solid grounds for Lemon to say this project is fine.
Does this make it non-government land?
When was that, exactly?
The point is that outsiders continue to persecute them even when they are attempting to assimilate. Therew were numerous Jewish groups in Mesopotamia and Europe who were quite willing to simply be one with the people among whom they lived and were singled out for persecution, anyway. If I was going to be persecuted regardless whether I did anything for which to be persecuted, I would tend to want to recognize those people to whom I could turn for aid when the pogroms started.
We see similar arguments about why blacks in the U.S. tend to cluster together, as if they really had much of a choice over the last few hundred years.
Nope, but since the museum is not religious, the land is not being used for a religious purpose.
The project still passes the Lemon test.
I will also note that the mere presence of a religious icon does not automatically violate the Lemon test.
Two examples from nearby communities in the last few years.
The first city re-worked its City Seal to place an open bible in one quadrant. When the seal was adopted, the council made a big deal about how they were celebrating the “Christian” settlement of the community.
They were taken to court and lost, with the court telling them that their bible image was a violation.
The next village created a seal for its fire department that displayed an image of the first church in the settlement, complete with a cross on the steeple. When that image was challenged, the council noted that the image was a close likeness to the church that had been used as the first meeting house for all community functions in the early 19th century and that the cross just happened to be a part of the building as seen in early tintypes. The other four quadrants were also of historic images from the early years of settlement. The courts said that badge was fine.
Intent matters.
Why, I mean why must it be put up in state land, very visible to citizens? What’s the significance to the state? I would put a war memorial instead. Were there no veterans of the Pacific campaign? What about wars since 1945?
The Holocaust Memorial doesn’t represent the only dastardly intrusion of foreign events onto Ohio soil.
Since the late 19th century, the state has been honoring some Italian woman.
Lawmakers must have felt they were commemorating principles that transcended national boundaries. Or else it was the work of the Italian Lobby. 
I’ll support it if they raze the 88 county flagpoles to build it. (They’re 88 of the ugliest flags ever. I think they were all designed by committees, children, or committees of children.)
Dude. Almost everybody in the world has SOME sort of identity that they hold - usually, MORE than one.
What varies is the amount of emphasis that they put on each, and that varies by circumstance - a process known to anthropologists as “situational ethnicity”, though obviously it is about more than simply ethnicity.
For example, I am a Canadian, straight male, White, upper middle class, atheist Jewsh Lawyer who is half Anglo on my father’s side; I went to the University of Toronto and work at a downtown law firm in that city.
What aspects of that identity are important? That depends entirely on the situation, and it tends to be oppositional. For example, the sigificant factor if I’m talking to an American may well be that I’m Canadian, if we are discussing national issues. If I’m talking about sexual issues, the fact that I’m a straight male is most important. If I’m talking about “racial” oppression, the fact that I’m White. If I’m talking about poverty, that I’m upper middle class lawyer.
This multiplicity of identities is no different from anyone else; everyone has a bunch of different things that they self-identify with, that they find important - whether they realize it or not.
In short, the fact that I’m Jewish, while it is a part of my identity, isn’t the only part, or even the most important part under all circumstances - unless someone makes it so, for example, by wanting to persecute Jews for being Jewish.
The notion that Jews are “clannish” merely for having their own identity carries with it the implication that, to Jews, being Jewish is the most important part of their identity and over-rides all others. While to some Jews being Jewish is really, realy important (as is being Irish to some Irish people, or being Catholic to some Catholics, or being Black to some Blacks), it isn’t moreso for Jews - the actual facts demonstrate that, when Jews aren’t being actively made to feel their difference, they tend to assimilate readily into the general population -as in North America, where Jews have a higher rate of intermarriage than almost any other minority group.
So much for “clannish”.
What you are mistaking is the term “tribe”. This is a descriptive term, not used in ist perjorative sense of “tribal” meaning primitive, but rather because it is simply a more accurate, in an anthropological sense, description of what it means to be Jewish than “religion” or “ethnicity”. How “tribe” differs from “religion” is that you don’t have to believe in Judaism-the-religion to be a member; how “tribe” differs from “race” or “ethnicity” is that, unlike a “race” or “ethnicity”, a Jew can be ‘adopted’ into Judaism by conversion (you can’t, for example, simply decide to be Black or Irish- you have to be born that way).
I realize this is probably wasted effort, but what the hell.
I guess that settles that, then.
Allegedly, it is intended as a war memorial, in part to honour the specific Ohio vets who liberated the camps.
That’s just what The Jews want you to think Malthus, you sheeple!