I’ve worked with nonprofits for 30 years as a volunteer and board member. It’s incredibly hard to get groups together to unite in a common effort–each group has its own mission and its own set of constituents. What might fly with one group wouldn’t fly with the other. Efforts to get rid of hate/bigotry/racism/antisemitism don’t need to be coordinated. If you wait for the perfect set of circumstances nothing will happen. IMO hatred toward various groups is tearing our country apart and it needs to stop.
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Kanye’s abhorrent inflammatory statement was at a minimum offensive and moreso very dangerous. Any one or any organization that shut him and those statements down should be lauded.
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Based on the numbers at Community Relations Service | 2020 FBI Hate Crimes Statistics for 2020, it was 55% of hate crimes targeting religion (683 out of 1244).
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“ According to the FBI’s annual data on hate crimes, defined as criminal offenses which are motivated by bias, crimes targeting the Jewish community consistently constitute over half of all religion-based crimes. The number of hate crimes against Jews has ranged between 600 and 1,200 each year since the FBI began collecting data in the 1990s. There were 683 hate crimes against Jews in 2020, 963 in 2019 and 847 in 2018.
The FBI’s data is based on voluntary reporting by local law enforcement. For a variety of reasons, dozens of large cities either underreport or do not report hate crime data at all.”
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Something I have noticed for years: Why, when I read about a famous person on Wikipedia and they’re Jewish, does Wikipedia tell me that? It doesn’t tell me if someone is Methodist or Presbyterian, or even Christian.
And in terms of the blue square campaign, I think it’s designed to educate people who are completely ignorant – oblivious! – about antiSemitism.
It may depend on what kind of famous person. Pages on politicians often note their religion, since it often becomes a matter of interest in political campaigns and therefore known. Pages on business people appear less likely to say anything about their religion, or only note their childhood family religion, perhaps because business people are more likely to want to avoid publicly talking about something that can be a hot button (where saying anything can be bad for business).
Wikipedia is crowd sourced. Apparently, someone out there felt that it was worth noting, for whatever reason they chose to do so.
I checked 10 random celebrities from all walks of life, male and female, and that I suspected are not Jewish. Eight explicitly address religion, one is implied (Murray went to Catholic school), and one doesn’t mention religion (Deen).
Paris Hilton
Taylor Swift
Tom Brady
Patty Murray
Keanu Reeves
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Sully Sullenberger
Carly Fiorina
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Paula Deen
Most Wikipedia pages state the individual’s ethnic background. An individual born to Jewish parents is ethnically Jewish. Judaism is an ethno-religion and a civilization, like indigenous peoples.
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Back to the selection of the blue square- many “causes” use a ribbon lapel pin (seems like the rubber bracelets are gone.) The square obviously matches the graphic on the screen of the % of Jews in the US population, so it makes some sense. Most of us know a pink ribbon is for breast cancer, but If I wore a purple ribbon , would you know it’s for Alzheimer’s? Or ADHD, or Cystic fibrosis? They all use purple.
So the blue square is subtle, different from the “ribbon”, and is coordinated with the campaign. Makes sense. As for combining hate group organizations, I agree with whoever above said it’s not a good idea. While there is a national cancer society, most every type of cancer has its own fundraising organization.
When everyone has their own campaign, the, “I’m a victim” messages from multiple campaigns get so overwhelming, confusing and tiresome that people start tuning them out. At least that’s how I respond, and I don’t think I’m all that different from others.
There’s no reason various groups can’t get together and coordinate an organized campaign against hate. If they can’t, that tells me that they want to push their own victimhood over other victimized groups.
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@Bromfield2 addressed this eloquently above. And many don’t consider themselves “victims”. Like abuse survivors, that is a more appropriate term.
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Can we change the title of this thread to “campaign against antisemitism” instead of “antisemitism campaign”?
It bugs me every time I see it.
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It’s long been my observation that when people start arguing about word or phrase definitions, it’s because they’ve run out of substantive arguments.
Of course abuse survivors consider themselves as victims. They are victims of abuse.
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done
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That’s not how most identify. If they participate in support groups, therapy, etc, they learn that to empower themselves they reframe the verbiage. It is not about “running out of arguments” and being dismissive. Its about self identifying and healing. They are not “victims” of abuse, they are survivors of abuse. You may not see or understand the difference, but it is an important distinction.
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I for one would prefer to read on Wikipedia that someone’s heritage is Russian, or Polish, or German. But even 23andme groups all Jews together and doesn’t differentiate by location.
It’s…complicated. While my ancestors hail from a variety of places in Eastern Europe…the borders have changed, or they had no official citizenship (as Jews)…or things got bad in one place so they left for another. Simply describing my heritage as Russian or Hungarian or Belarusian just isn’t accurate.
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Thank you, D. My family is FROM Germany, but since Hitler (and tens of thousands of his enablers, enforcers, and genocidal followers) did NOT consider them “GERMANS”, the locations of where various family members ended up isn’t relevant or helpful. Those who didn’t end up in a concentration camp, went wherever they could. It doesn’t make someone Belgian if they fled Berlin for Antwerp as a refugee…
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Right, I’m Polish (in part), but now that city is in Ukraine.