Hey, small thing you can do to resist Christian supremacy/hegemony:
So, there was an image from the Jewish Women's Archive going around social media yesterday. The painting of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes, with "Like Judith, we have more power than we know."
So, there was an image from the Jewish Women's Archive going around social media yesterday. The painting of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes, with "Like Judith, we have more power than we know."
And so of course, there were a bunch of comments about "Ugh, the last thing this election needs is more religion," or "get your religion out of my politics."
But figures from the Tanakh--and the Tanakh/Bible itself--have a different role for Jews than Christians.
But figures from the Tanakh--and the Tanakh/Bible itself--have a different role for Jews than Christians.
Like, I know this isn't going to go over well, but Christianity's origins as a religion, rather than as a localized Jewish political movement, are straight-up appropriation. Christians took a people's cultural library and declared it their own religious text.
The Book of Judith, incidentally, ISN'T canonical in Judaism. It's not in the Tanakh/Bible. So it's not even really a "religious text." Classing Judith as a religious figure to Jews is sort of like classing Achilles as a religious hero to Greeks. She's a culture hero.
Which comes back to a fundamental point: Jewish culture can't be divided up into the spiritual and the secular. (Which is why you have Jewish atheists that keep kosher, etc.) That sort of modularization of religion and the rest of life is a Christian lens.
So maybe don't. Because telling people that they have to check their cultural/ethnic/peoplehood identity at the door if they're talking about politics is, well, gross.
