Well, since the the holiday celebrates the triumph over the Selucids, stating that it celebrates “… the triumph of fundamentalism, using terror tactics against the citizenry, over secularism” certainly implies that the Selucids represented “secularism”.
Better way to put it is that the Maccabbees were no saints and used terror tactics that would be unacceptable today, whatever the justice of their cause … but of course one would be hard-pressed to find any military leaders of the Hellenistic era who would really pass muster by today’s standards.
As a member of that “certain segment”, all across this country is probably stretching it a bit. I would say Kwanzaa is predominately an East Coast thing, and maybe West Coast. It certainly didn’t seem like a big deal in Cleveland (where I grew up), Chicago (University), the Twin Cities, or Detroit. There are adherents, of course, but it’s hardly a pervasive part of the culture.
I would say this is fair- It isn’t a pervasive part of the culture, and as such, I am not surprised that Blackberry didn’t know what Umoja was, even though it is one of the main ideas of the celebration of Kwanzaa- but a certain segment of the population, including the african-american community at my daughter’s Oakland school, did, in fact, celebrate it, and the school’s afterschool program was Umoja Village, after the idea of unity so celebrated.
I agree that Kwanzaa being “made up” doesn’t invalidate it as a holiday, but seriously, nobody celebrates Kwanzaa. I know one person who does, and that’s it.
As the partner of an Indian woman who really loves her cultural Indian stuff, but doesn’t share/push her beliefs, I really dig seeing Diwali noted by others…
Although you should really celebrate Holi- it allows you to drink the bhang-lassi as part of the celebration! I don’t even like pot, but a bit of bhang-lassi once a year is cool…
it’s a relatively new holiday promoted as a way to celebrate certain values that really sort of embrace a moment in time for a social movement. Only a small percentage of people wo really embrace these social movements are likely to observe them at home. It’s been more widely embraced by by social institutions like churches, schools, community centers, universities, etc.
BS. It celebrates the triumph of Judaism over the Greek Gods that were being pushed on the Jews. Not “secularism.” They were trying to force the Jews to worship Zeus. They also sacrificed pigs on the Jewish altars and forced the Jews to eat pork. It’s so absurd to describe the Greek rule as “secularism” and try to make the Maccabees out to be the bad guys. There was no such thing as secularism back then. No such thing whatsoever. Religion was a part of everything. In this case, one group of people was bullying the other into accepting their religion.
The Jews didn’t try to force the Greeks to be Jewish. Jews didn’t push their religion on other groups. They just wanted to be left the fuck alone.
Add one more to your dig tally, then. Every year, the Indian Student Association throws a Diwali festival, and I always make sure to go. It’s one of only a handful of times a year you can find good Indian food in this town. I’m not exactly sure what it’s supposed to be commemorating (there seem to be many different myths associated with the festival), or what the traditional celebration is supposed to be, but it (like most holidays) is a good excuse for a party.
Judah Macabee himself started it. It hasn’t stopped.
It’s not sticking.
I know. It’s the holiday where we are commanded to get drunk!
iirc, from my old atheist rabbi: Hanukkah used to be a major capital F Festival. It’s even alluded to in the Christian Bible.
Then it was downplayed a little in the Talmudic era to note a ‘miracle’ of lights but not a major festival because at this point, no one wanted to idolize the priestly class and no one wanted to incite more failed revolts.
Couple thousand years later, it’s in competition with Christmas.
No, it would be like if a group of exPats made Veteran’s day or Dec 7th a major holiday overseas. We already have an “Arbor Day”. It’s called Tu Bishvat. We also have a romance holiday, a drinking/costume holiday, commemoration days for vets, wars, death, thanksgiving, new year, a spring feast…comparing Hanukkah with Kwanzaa is just wrong. No one said, “Let’s get all the Semitic looking people together and contrive a holiday to express Semitic Power.” Our holidays are natural occurrences because of our ethnic nature and history.
Why do I feel like more people celebrate Earth Day than Kwanzaa? And seriously, Earth Day wasn’t created to promote a racial identity or strengthen ethnic values or anything. It’s a pretty universal theme, and one that will probably ‘catch on’ at a faster rate than Kwanzaa.
Giver her the Hammer.
for the record, I have zero objection to Kwanzaa. I just don’t think it’s doing my child any good the way it’s being taught. He came home with a paper book today about “Winter Holidays”. The Chinese New Year was also included. I chuckled, since his class doesn’t talk about other world holidays for the other 3 seasons.
Well, Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa, and it’s been celebrated ever since. I think it’s a bit too early to decide if it’s stuck or not. Cultural memes can have strange lives, hiding out for decades or even centuries and then popping up again when they are useful. Look at your own analysis of how Hanukkah reputedly went from a major festival to a side note and back again. Kwanzaa itself has already evolved to make itself more adaptable- it started out pretty vehemently anti-Christian (the founder said Jesus was “psychotic”), which is a pretty limiting stance for an African-American holiday to take, and it’s since evolved into something black churches can find acceptable. I’m not sure what African American culture or Kwanzaa will look like a thousand years ago. Who knows! Could a Jewish person in 1,000 have predicted what the Jewish world would look like today? History is crazy. Anything can happen.
I guess I’m just not sure where all the ":/"s are coming from. Yeah, Kwanzaa has a pretty limited audience of people who are interested in black consciousness movements. I don’t think it ever advertised itself as much more than that.
As for why learn about holidays now…well, it’s the holiday season. It’s probably not a coincident that a lot of cultures just happen to have major holidays right around the darkest, gloomiest time of the year. Learning about other cultures is generally considered to be a useful thing for kids to do, and festivals are generally pretty accessible ways to start learning about other cultures, so it makes a lot of sense to build a unit around it at a time when a whole heck of a lot of people are celebrating this or that.
We’re celebrating a weird version of expat pan-Africanism (I can’t think of how else to say this) not an actual tradition that takes place in any significant number. It’s just being taught all wrong.
But it’s been 40 years and a dud. Why do you insist on teaching it? Celebrating it? Making it more than what it is? You don’t just “make” a holiday. People have to respond. People aren’t responding.
Hanukkah has never been a side note. No holidays in Jewish life are a ‘side note’. They are ingrained into the calendar and lifecycle. Jews didn’t have to advocate for the local Catholic schools to teach about Hanukkah in the 1500s to keep the spirit alive or anything.
The “:/” is “Why is this being lumped in with winter holiday celebrations?” It’s a political holiday.
According to Wikipedia, the same number of people celebrate Kwanzaa as there are Jews in America. While it’s not be an intergal part of all African-American communities, it’s hard to look at those numbers and say that nobody is responding. I agree that it is more of an institutional holiday, like Earth day or Veteren’s Day, than a family holiday. But there is room in this world for a bit of public ritual. I don’t think much of anyone in America goes home and does an MLK day ritual with the fam, but the holiday inspires lectures, sermons, speeches, public events, articles and reflections that are pretty meaningful.
Pretty much all holidays are political holidays. For goodness sake, many Jewish holidays focus on Jewish identity, Jewish nationality, political events in Jewish history, the Jewish people, etc. I mean, the Passover Seder is full of history, cultural memory, identity, and differentiating a group from others. That is politics. Every group of people does it- building group unity and differentiating yourself from those heathens over there (or, alternatively, making your group more appealing to those heathens over there) is one of the main purposes that holidays serve in cultures.
Anyway, I’m not a huge Kwanzaa activist or anything. But the whole attitude of “My rituals are real and meaningful and those guy’s over there are fake BS that doesn’t matter” irks me, as does the idea that is my neighbor wants to celebrate Kwanzaa with her kids D’Angelo and Shinnea, she is “making stuff up,” being silly, making a dumb attempt to imitate African culture, ruining her kid’s lives, ignorant, trying to hard, and otherwise worth scorning. But if I take Neveah and Cooper to go celebrate Earth Day, well, that’s totally normal.
Well, I never said anyone’s fake rituals were BS or whatever it is you said. I just said that making it sound like an African American staple on the calendar is just wrong.
The number of people that celebrate Hanukkah in America is slightly larger than those who celebrate Kwanzaa, but the most telling is that a STRONG MAJORITY of Jews celebrate Hanukkah, whilst a tiny per cent of blacks celebrate Kwanzaa. That’s the point.
I don’t like the ‘let’s do this big multicultural holiday thing’ in the wintertime. Also, my son learning about a small group of mostly political African Americans celebrating a holiday isn’t exposing him to greater black culture. And it’s perpetuating a stereotype/misinformation. Hatin’ on Kwanzaa
The holiday hasn’t been around that long, for goodness sake. I’m not an anthropologist, but I’d wager that a holiday has to at least be around for two or three generations (a grandparent being as excited about it as the grandchild) for it to become a family thing. We are starting to see this in my family, but only between my parents and nieces/nephew (the other sets of parents are either immigrants or politically conservative).
And then beyond that, it has to have to spread around the community. There are still misconceptions about the holiday that have to be overcome. Like that it is a religious thing or that those who celebrate are dredlocked militants.
I find it hilarious, this holiday snobbery. And YES, you are coming across as a holiday snob. “It’s being taught all wrong!” Unless the teacher is saying that all black people celebrate Kwanzaa, it isn’t being taught wrong.
Growing up, I was led to believe that Hanukkah was the Biggest Thing Evah. We didn’t learn about Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur or even Passover. But Hanukkah? I still sing the little Hanukkah song I learned as a little kid (not the dreidel song). We sang Hanukkah songs during our holiday festivals even though there were only a couple of Jewish kids in our classes (Kwanzaa songs hadn’t been invented yet when I was a kid).
Was the holiday taught “wrong” to me? Should my teachers have sat us down and said, “You know, Hanukkah isn’t the big hoopla ya’ll are making it out to be.”
And if I had learned this, I wouldn’t have come crushed. My mother would have laughed her ass off if I had come home “crushed” over something like this.
[quote[But it’s been 40 years and a dud. Why do you insist on teaching it? Celebrating it? Making it more than what it is? You don’t just “make” a holiday. People have to respond. People aren’t responding.[/quote]
People are responding, just not in your field of view. And as you said, it’s only been 40 years. My older sister is 40 years old. Do you REALLY think that’s long enough time for something to become popular? Do you think any major holiday took that long to become a “thing” that everyone did ritualistically?
Someone advocates for it. Why else would you find schoolchildren all across the country singing about Hanukkah when they don’t even know any Jewish people?
Jews make up a tiny fraction of this country and the world. Your religion is not even in the top four world’s religions, as far as numbers go. So please don’t overestimate the importance of your holidays to non-Jews.
I’m also confused by the complaint. Not hard to explain “It’s a young holiday, created in part to preserve the cultural heritage of persons of African descent. It’s convenient to celebrate it around the same time as our other winter holidays, but much like Christmas and Hanukkah, some people make a big deal of it, some don’t.”
I feel comfortable saying nobody is responding if less than 2% of the country celebrates it. I don’t have this pejorative dismissiveness toward Kwanzaa that many do because it’s “made up,” “weird,” or “expat Pan-Africanism” as I don’t see how that’s an issue, but I also am not going to pretend like Kwanzaa is a big deal around here, because it isn’t. It’s possible that its not popular because it is a new holiday, and I don’t know if it’ll ever take off or not. If it does, I agree with monstro that it will likely take at least three generations for it to gain some steam, but I say right now, nobody cares.
What is with your bizarre interest pretending that Kwanzaa is widely celebrated?
