It's that fucking time of year again.

[attackfish]

There are billboards up everywhere advertizing a Christian Seder being held at the Von Braun Center.  Yes, let's just appropriate Jewish religion and culture and the act out the deeply sacred traditions of a religious group that has faced thousands of years of persecution at the hands of Christians, and let's do it in a building named after a Nazi!  I think profanity is an entirely appropriate response, no?

Comments

[elrhiarhodan]

Jaw hits floor.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Sickening, isn't it? I need to get out of the South.

[elrhiarhodan]

Yeah, you do. Seriously.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Captain Sisko says it all.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The worst thing is I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder if crap like this is really offensive, or if I am just being oversensitive, and overly possessive like the Christians around me seem to think. It feels a little like gaslighting, this constant idea that the privileged are supposed to dictate to the people they ave privilege over what they should and should not find offensive.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

I think one way to distinguish gaslighting from healthy self-doubt is to see if your position was heard and validly challenged, or if your views and experiences were simply dismissed because shut up that's why. In the former case you could be having a reasonable intellectual course correction such as we all need in order to learn new things. In the latter case it's much likelier to be social pressure building up to turn you against yourself in a form of (probably unconscious) societal abuse. I suspect your hunch is correct and the latter is true in this case.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I also look at who's doing the brush off. When I talk to other Jewish people, they're as pissed as I am. This is apparently the sixth year that this Christian Seder has been held there, and it has garnered bitter protests from the Jewish community every time (something I didn't find out until after I posted this entry) and the Christians who organize it just tell us to sit down, shut up, and stop ruining their fun. There's also this underlying current of anger at the Von Braun Center's name and the fact that it's the town's main event center.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I also look at who's doing the brush off. When I talk to other Jewish people, they're as pissed as I am. This is apparently the sixth year that this Christian Seder has been held there, and it has garnered bitter protests from the Jewish community every time (something I didn't find out until after I posted this entry) and the Christians who organize it just tell us to sit down, shut up, and stop ruining their fun. There's also this underlying current of anger at the Von Braun Center's name and the fact that it's the town's main event center.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. It's offensive. It's evil. It's wrong. If they don't understand that Jews were murdered en masse for blood libels on this holiday, they don't get it.

I am working with a pastor who wants to do it appropriately with appropriating and we're designing a poverty seder, where they learn about Jewish traditions in a fun lecture, and then raise money for a social justice cause, such as human trafficking, poverty relief and the dignity of every person. There will be some readings from the Hagaddah but the idea of it is using it as a gathering to represent the spirit of the holiday in a universal sense.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The Christians who do things like this don't understand the difference between appropriating a culture not their own, and engaging with it on an equal footing. Pastors like the one you're working with are sadly few and far between in the world of Christians who want a Christian Seder. And holding it in a building named after a man who gleefully used Jewish slave labor, and hand picked his slaves from Buchenwald is frankly enough to turn my stomach.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

I know, and it breaks my heart. That's why the pastor and I want to actually publish a "how to" guide, free (with a donate box to a charity, we're considering human trafficking or poverty relief ones) on our seder plans, with the liturgy an abbreviated Hagaddah service, with more readings from Christian philosophers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Walter Rauschenbusch, discussion of the Sermon of the Mount and an examination of the values of the seder through history.

That way, Jews can just send it to churches and say "We've shown you how to do it inoffensively."

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

That way, Jews can just send it to churches and say "We've shown you how to do it inoffensively."

You now have no excuse?

[lokifan]

The VON BRAUN Center? For REAL? What the shit.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I was caught between going to complain, and just turning right around and driving west until I hit the Rocky Mountains. I need to get the fuck out of this state. My siblings keep telling me this is Huntsville, it's not like the rest of Alabama, none of that ignorant racist stuff here, no siree. Excuse me while I express my disagreement through vomiting.