Kwanzaa? You’ve Got to Be Joshing?

Jewdar is not normally one to criticize head Heeb honcho Josh Neuman. Some of this is due to the fact that we normally agree, the rest because when we don’t, he threatens to take away our coveted free beer privileges at editorial meetings. But when Jewdar is faced with something like the piece Our Beloved Leader recently e-wrote for Huffington Post on the disappearance of Kwanzaa, we must take courage from the words of Germany’s most beloved antisemite, Pastor Niemoller, and speak out.

To be sure, most of it is pretty inoffensive, and of course, it is rife with Josh’s customary bon vivance (can I keep my beer?). What Josh couldn’t have known is that Kwanzaa–like the misuse of "ironic," any use of "lol," and the very thought of Sex and the City–is one of those pet peeves that sends Jewdar into a trademark rant. Josh’s sin was the line about African Americans being "ready to embrace the de facto America civic religion, Christianity."

Uh, ready to embrace it? What do you think they’ve been doing for the last couple hundred years, lighting the Kwanzaa-menorah? For those not in the know, Kwanzaa was invented by a grad student in the 1960’s, and from personal experience, that is almost never a pedigree to inspire confidence. Neuman mentions multiculturalism, and Jewdar,as our loyal readers know, is postively Jesus-like in our love for all the children of the world, but Kwanzaa is about as African asThe Jeffersons. Now, some might argue that it’s not about being African, but being African-American, but even that is betrayed by the fact that Kwanzaa is an African mishmash (or, if you prefer, fufu), drawing its inspiration not from the West African regions from whence most African-Americans hail, but from anywhere on the continent that founder Ron Karenga saw a phrase or custom that he felt was marketable. If anything, the current–and unfortunate–popularity of Festivus celebrations is a more honest reflection of actual American cultural trends.

And that’s the thing–Kwanzaa was never really a significant holiday, and its ubiquity in the 90’s was really just a marketing ploy–be it on the part of greeting card companies or Afrocentrists. Josh shouldn’t "worry" about how Americans understand Kwanzaa’s disappearance, since most of them never really understood its appearance in the first place. If we are now left only with Hanukkah candles and Christmas tree lights, Jewdar will not consider December a darker month for the loss.

What do you think?