{"id":19403,"date":"2015-05-29T09:01:52","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T14:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=19403"},"modified":"2015-05-07T19:57:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T00:57:48","slug":"connecting-guilt-to-ethnicity-a-jewish-birthday-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/05\/29\/connecting-guilt-to-ethnicity-a-jewish-birthday-card\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting Guilt to Ethnicity: A Jewish Birthday Card"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently came upon the Jewish greeting card section at Target, way down on the bottom row. I could tell it was the Jewish section because all of the dividers that tell you what kind of card is in that slot (birthday, anniversary, etc.) had a Star of David on them.<\/p>\n

I was interested in what a specifically Jewish birthday card might look like, so I picked this one up. It draws on\u00a0the idea that Jewish people are particularly prone to feeling guilty.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The inside said:<\/p>\n

…but is cake and ice cream mentioned anywhere? I think NOT! It’s your day! Enjoy! Enjoy!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mary Waters\u00a0found that people often believe that ethnicity explains all types of behaviors that are in\u00a0fact very widespread. She interviewed\u00a0White ethnics\u00a0in the U.S.; they often attributed their families’ characteristics to their ethnicity. Take the\u00a0idea of the\u00a0loud, boisterous family, often including a mother who is constantly trying to get the kids to eat more of her homecooked meals and worrying\u00a0if they aren’t married. Many individuals described\u00a0their family\u00a0this way\u00a0and claimed that their ethnicity\u00a0was the reason.<\/p>\n

People who identified their background as Italian, Greek, Jewish, Polish, and others all believed that the way their family interacted was a unique custom of their ethnic group.\u00a0Yet they all described pretty much the same characteristics. The cardmakers’\u00a0(and others’) allusion to guilt to signify Jewishness seems to me to fall into this category: take out the Stars of David and I bet a range of religious\/ethnic groups would think it was tailored to them specifically.<\/p>\n

So you take a card, say guilt in it, add a Star of David, and\u00a0you’ve got a Jewish card. Take out the Star of David, maybe it’s a Catholic card, especially if you added a cross, since they’re often portrayed as feeling a lot of guilt. I’ve had friends who grew up Southern Baptist or Pentecostal joke about having felt guilty about everything, so you could market the card to them, too! I think it’s a good example of how we often treat characteristics or behaviors as somehow meaningfully\u00a0connected to a specific\u00a0ethnic background rather than being a pretty common way that people in general, across ethnic lines, behave.<\/p>\n

Originally published in 2010.<\/em><\/p>\nGwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. I recently came upon the Jewish greeting card section at Target, way down on the bottom row. I could tell it was the Jewish section because all of the dividers that tell you what kind of card is in that slot (birthday, anniversary, etc.) had a Star of David on them. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":66935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[329,254,285,3875,1757,42,293],"class_list":["post-19403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-emotion","tag-holidays","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-jews","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-religion","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2010\/01\/2-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19403"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66936,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19403\/revisions\/66936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}