'Tis the season to unpack some stuff about Christmas from a minority perspective:
Christmas is a Christian holiday. The fact that many celebrate it in an irreligious way (which is valid!) does not change its origins, connotations, symbolism, nor what it has historically meant for religious minorities.
The idea that Christmas is "secular" (read: neutral) is a product of Christian hegemony and the blindness of many in Christian countries to the permeation of Christianity as "default" culture.
When someone says they don't celebrate Christmas since it's a Christian holiday, it is not actually reassuring or helpful to say something along the lines of "oh well it's just a secular day of family & presents for everyone! So you can celebrate it too!"
Though the above statement is usually well-intentioned, it is often distressing to hear because it is untrue and is erasing our lived experiences. The reflexive effort to make Christmas universal is a cultural reverberation of the millennia-old evangelizing effort to make Christianity universal, and as such, can be very uncomfortable for religious minorities.
Excerpt from Jesus Wasn't Killed by the Jews, edited by Jon M. Sweeney, 2020
I was talking with a religion professor at a large university in the [US]American South the other day. He's a friend of mine. He's a Christian. He teaches world religions to undergraduates. He said: “Most of my students, when they first enter my classroom, believe that the faith and practices of Jews today are what they have read about in the Old Testament in Sunday School.” ...
“Don't they wonder where the priests are, and the animal sacrifice?” ...
“They assume animal sacrifices are still going on,” he said. He was serious. “That's part of why they think Jews and synagogues are scary.”
I'm scared at how little we seem to know about each other in the twenty-first century.
The most fundamental misunderstanding of Christians toward Jews today throughout the world is the view held, unfortunately, by a majority of us in the pews who think that Judaism equals what we read in the Old Testament. This misunderstanding is both pervasive and dangerous. The truth is, what we know as Judaism is only about as old as the Christian church. Judaism and Christianity are siblings. They both began about two thousand years ago.
What we read about in the Old Testament—which we should, instead, refer to as the “Hebrew Bible,” to avoid marking it as the “out-of-date” kind of “old”—describes the beginnings and activities and teachings of ancient Israel, a people.
Those people went into exile (forced to leave what we call the Holy Land) during what is called the Babylonian Captivity about six centuries before Christ. Nearly five centuries after they came back from this captivity, the Roman Empire came to rule Israel, and in the context of the Roman Empire both Judaism and Christianity were born.
...There is much to read, much to know. You will find...when Jesus argues with the Pharisees, for instance, it isn't a case of two faiths debating but two rabbis debating. Think about it that way the next time you read in the Gospels where Jesus is correcting a Pharisee. Jesus was colleague and cousin with Pharisees; they were his fellow Jews and fellow teachers of Torah.
One of the reason that Christian alternatives to supersessionism tend to result in an incoherent theology is that Judaism and Christianity are addressing different audiences and different problems.
Judaism is ultimately only addressing Jews. We have some universalist passages in our scripture and we're not unconcerned with humanity as a whole, but gentiles don't need Judaism.
Christianity addresses all humanity and everyone needs it.
Similarly, the main point of Christianity for the Christian is salvation from sin (and Hell and death). It's highly individualistic on one hand (it is the individual, not humanity as a whole, that is saved), but at the same time it's addressing a universal problem.
The main point of Judaism for the Jew is... and we already have a problem. Judaism isn't for individual Jews; it's for the Jewish people. Its promise of redemption from exile (literal and metaphorical) is particularist on one hand (it's only relevant to Jews), but on the other it's not individualistic (the Jewish people as a whole will be redeemed from exile*).
*It actually gets a bit more complicated when we start talking about resurrection and the world-to-come, which sometimes is framed in more individualistic terms.
So if you try to do dual-covenant theology (for example), you're faced with a problem. The Jewish people's covenant with God isn't primarily about sin and the salvation it promises isn't primarily for the individual. Judaism does not promise the individual Jew that she will not be subjected to oblivion or eternal conscious torment because that isn't what the covenant is about.
Paul didn't have this problem because (imo) Paul didn't conceive of Christianity primarily in individualistic terms. Paul saw Christianity as grafting gentiles onto the olive tree of the Jewish people; gentiles now share in the collective redemption of the Jewish people.
But that isn't how Christianity came to understand Paul or develop their theology. They came to understand Paul as being individualistic in his understanding of salvation and built an entire theological edifice on a primarily individualistic soteriology. And that kind of soteriology requires supersessionism if it's going to acknowledge Judaism at all because otherwise Judaism is just some weird project God got involved with as a hobby before he started the real work of (individual) salvation from sin.
I always lose followers when I talk about supersessionism. not anything else, terror attacks, war, hate crimes, but supersessionism drives people away. it's something a lot of non-Jews need to deal with, but they don't want to. it makes them too uncomfortable to talk about it, but it HAS to be unpacked or none of them can ever fully understand how antisemitism works. it's disheartening that they'll listen to everything else, but not about supersessionism, which is the root cause that has made everyone want to expel us or kill us or convert us in the first place. it's not meant as an attack on their beliefs, but can they be full allies if that's the thing they won't examine?
Behold: the dumbest takes on Earth, as seen on r/thelema! That's the weird Aleister Crowley religion!
"I just feel soooo uncomfy using our culturally appropriated Jewish symbols because anything Jewish makes me think of Israel 😭"
"The Jews stole Magen David from occultists"
In which: someone suggests their tutorial on appropriating closed Jewish practices in a Palestine-friendly way, with a bonus dose of historical revisionism!
"Passover is a celebration of genocide"
This is amidst all the posts about "Qabala" and "what is the gematria meaning of snjsidjwk"
ok. Yall really gonna treat Jewish mysticism as an all-you-can-eat buffet and then you're gonna be... like this about actual Jewish people...
Nazi bitches bitching about how the shit they stole from Judaism is still Jewish and instead getting rid of them they either get supersessionist and imply they’re going to make it the jews problem
intersting rare take of “all Judiasm is genocidal Zionist, deconvert or die bitch”. Haven’t seen that among new agers ever only anti theists
“I invoked jewish angels in a cry to genocide jews”, “I proved the magen David is ours now” Yes yes very good Sweetie your Hitler loving founder Aleister Crowley would be so proud. Just ask his ghost!
From the blog of Ivan Bassov at The Times of Israel
by Ivan Bassov
Christian and Muslim theology have long engaged in spiritual supersession—claiming that Jews were once chosen but are now obsolete. According to replacement theology, Jews broke their covenant and were replaced by the Church or the Ummah.
This theological narrative led to efforts not just to reject Judaism, but to possess it—while erasing those who live it. From medieval sermons to modern propaganda, energy has been spent proving that Christianity or Islam is superior because Judaism is supposedly obsolete, wrong or corrupted.
This appropriation is the metaphysical root of antisemitism: resentment toward those whose identity you’ve claimed, yet who stubbornly persist.
And when Jews regained sovereignty in 1948, that resentment deepened. For centuries, Jews were tolerated—when they were tolerated at all—as a reminder of divine punishment. That so-called ‘tolerance’ often took the form of second-class status, ghettoization, expulsions, pogroms, inquisitions, and ultimately, the Holocaust. But Jews who build, defend, and thrive? That challenges foundational theological and ideological assumptions.
Religious Appropriation and the Roots of Ziophobia
Just as antisemitism is rooted in the theological appropriation of Jewish identity, so too is Ziophobia fueled by the appropriation—and rejection—of Jewish peoplehood. Both Christianity and Islam have historically claimed to inherit the legacy of Israel. The Church called itself the “New Israel”; the Ummah positioned itself as the rightful spiritual heir to the Holy Land. These replacement narratives not only dismissed Jewish continuity—they sought to overwrite it.
But the existence of the modern state of Israel disrupts those narratives. It forces an uncomfortable confrontation: the Jews were not erased. They returned. They rebuilt. They survived both exile and extermination—and they did so in the very land that others claimed had passed to them. That reality is not just political—it is metaphysical. It creates existential dissonance for those whose doctrines, explicit or implicit, assumed Jewish disappearance.
Ziophobia, then, is not merely policy critique. It’s an allergic reaction to Jewish persistence and sovereignty. And just as theological antisemitism found ways to marginalize Jews in diaspora, modern Ziophobia finds ways to delegitimize Jews in their homeland.
Even Atheist Antisemitism and Ziophobia Have Theological Inertia
Some might ask: what about secular antisemites—say, Soviet-educated Russians or radicalized university students in the West who are hardly devout?
The answer is simple: prejudice has cultural memory. Just as atheists may still knock on wood or avoid black cats, secular societies often inherit religious biases long after they’ve lost belief. The USSR may have buried religion, but it kept the antisemitism. In the West, decades of Christian theological contempt simply morphed into secularized forms of anti-Israel ideology—Ziophobia by another name.
The forms change; the root persists. Even stripped of theology, the supersessionist impulse remains: Jews must not lead, must not thrive, must not return—and, to some, must not even exist. Whether in scripture or on campus, antisemitism and Ziophobia flow from the same ancient current: resentment toward Jewish continuity.
The Metaphysical Function of UNRWA
This same pattern of spiritual appropriation and attempted erasure lives on today—not only in rhetoric, but in institutions like UNRWA, where metaphysical war is waged under the guise of humanitarian concern.
Ziophobia isn’t just ideological—it has been institutionalized. Nowhere is this more evident than in the continued existence and function of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Unlike any other refugee agency in the world, UNRWA perpetuates—not resolves—refugee status. Its mandate applies uniquely to Arabs from the former British Mandate territory, who can pass their “refugee” identity down through generations, regardless of actual displacement.
This isn’t humanitarianism. It’s narrative warfare.
