Separately, Hobby Lobby has been in the news for challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that the company provide birth control coverage to its employees.
Anti-Jew and Anti-female–spare us, Hobby Lobby.
(Concluding paragraphs of Jillian Scheinfeld’s hatchet job at Raising Kvell)
I’m sure it was purely coincidental that Hobby Lobby’s deep and abiding culture of anti-semitism was discovered only after it blasphemed against the sexual revolution.
Yair Rosenberg responds at Tablet Magazine:
There’s an old joke about a Hasidic merchant who ran a Manhattan store with a gentile partner. The shop specialized in providing trinkets for tourists, and during the holiday season, the owners would make a small fortune selling ornamental crosses for Christmas. Being somewhat uncomfortable with this merchandise, the Jew would leave this part of the business to his non-Jewish partner, who would deal with the supplier and the buyers. But one year, the gentile was out of the country before Christmas, and the Hasid realized that their inventory of crosses was depleted. So he steeled himself, dialed the supplier, and in a thick Yiddish accent nervously mumbled: “Hello sir. As you know, Christmas is coming, and it seems that we are short of crosses. Would you be able to rush us a shipment?” There was a brief pause, and then the response came from the other end of the line: “Mit Jesusluch oder ohn Jesusluch?” “With the little Jesuses, or without the little Jesuses?”
The joke is funny because we recognize the inherent absurdity of a religious Jew selling Christmas paraphernalia. And because we empathize with the discomfort of the awkward Jewish merchant who’d rather not be trafficking in Christian iconography. But based on the accusations being leveled at Hobby Lobby, a crafts store chain owned by devout Christians which doesn’t offer a Hanukkah or Passover selection, it is difficult for some Jews to similarly empathize with religious Christians who might feel the same way about Jewish merchandise.
Knowing what I know of Evangelicals like the owners of Hobby Lobby, I think it’s unlikely that they’re anti-semitic. It is much less unlikely (did I finesse that adequately?) that they don’t know that Hanukkah celebrates events before Christ’s incarnation, about which Christians should (and Orthodox Christians do) also rejoice. They don’t know those Biblical stories because their Bibles are incomplete, lacking, among other things, 1st and 2nd Maccabees.
Today’s Jewish Canon wasn’t fixed until centuries into the Christian era, and there were excisions as compared to the Septuagint — in use in Christ’s time, and seemingly used by Him and the Apostles (especially Paul). (There are longstanding Christian hypotheses about why Jews settled on the Masoretic text ultimately.)
Protestants joined the early-Christian-era Jews in adopting the Masoretic text, rejecting Christian history’s full Christian canon for their Old Testament. 1st and 2nd Maccabees are among the casualties.
And that’s how Protestant Evangelicals, famous for their putative Biblical literacy, became Biblically illiterate about some things (not to mention all the good parts of their own Bibles they haven’t underlined because they’d challenge an otherwise-tidy ideology).
You can thank Rod Dreher, by the way, for giving me fodder for today’s pedantry.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
