Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa – culture coincidence or cultural appropriation?

by Ezequiel Doiny
552 views

In December every year public spaces in America like streets, libraries, shopping centers and schools are decorated with Christmas trees and Menorahs. It was traditionally understood that Christmas trees represent Christmas and the Menorahs represent the Jewish holiday of Chanukah which usually fall around the same time. But now this is changing, Critical Race Theorists claim the Menorah represents Kwanzaa. Until recently school children would point to the Menorah and say “Chanukah!”, today they would say “Kwanzaa!”. The Menorah won’t stop being used by Jews but most non-Jews (especially children) are being told it represent Kwanzaa not Chanukah, so in the future when they see a Menorah they won’t associate it with Chanukah but with Kwanzaa.

A candelabrum similar to the Menorah is being used as a symbol to represent Kwanzaa. 

Of three celebrations (Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa) from three distinct religions/cultures that fall on the same time of the year two (Chanukah and Kwanzaa) call to light candles for a week using a similar candelabrum.

Is this a coincidence or cultural appropriation?

To me the answer is obvious, especially since the celebration of Kwanzaa was invented recently. On December 25, 2018 Jeff Dunetz wrote in The Lid

Those who are around my age woke up one December and discovered that the “holiday season” of Christmas and New Year’s became a trio, with the addition of something called Kwanzaa.  Oh, sure there were rumblings of a new holiday. But strangely in this country where political correctness is on overload, a day invented in 1966 by a rapist who ran a Black separatist group is considered by some as a holiday on par with Christmas, or New Year’s. Kwanzaa is exclusively an American holiday and is not celebrated in any other part of the world (including Africa)… 

“The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga was convicted in 1971  of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded…Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent “crystals” of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.  

“Now I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on television, but this Karenga guy sounds like a paranoid psycho.  

“Somehow I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a sick violent man (but then again, Al Sharpton led two anti-Semitic pogroms and he is considered a civil rights leader). 

“Especially this year when sexual assault of women has been in the headlines almost consistently for months, why would anybody want to celebrate a holiday invented by a man who tortured women?  

“Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.  

“When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to  “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”  

“Arguably, this holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas has the totally opposite purpose. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide. Or as the then 16-year-old Rev. Al Sharpton explained the feast would perform the valuable service of “de-whitizing” Christmas.  

“Heck even the scam’s creator, Maulana Karenga admitted it was a fraud.  In 1978 he told the Washington Post’s Hollie West:  “I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!”

Kwanzaa’s call to light candles for a week just as Chanukah does (and during the same time of the year!) is not a coincidence, it is cultural appropriation. Kwanzaa’s use of a candelabrum similar to the Menorah to celebrate a holiday that falls at the same time of the year is not a coincidence, it is cultural appropriation.

Why do African Americans need to culturally appropriate a Jewish symbol? Don’t they have other symbols more representative of African culture? The fact they choose to culturally appropriate a Jewish symbol shows malicious intent. They could, of course, have chosen another symbol but they chose specifically the Menorah because the Menorah is problematic for their intersectionality ideology.  The public display of the Menorah is problematic for Intersectionality for different reasons:

1. According to intersectionality Jews are part of the “privileged oppressors” so Jews should not be celebrated and embraced by the display of the menorah in public spaces, Jewish symbols should be removed and shamed like the statues of historical figures were removed and shamed.

2. The menorah represents the holiday of Chanukah which celebrates the liberation of Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple from Greek occupation, this is something intersectionality does not want people to remember since it goes against their fake pro-Palestinian narrative that claims Jews are “colonizers” and “occupiers”.
On November 26, 2022 the Gateway Pundit reported “

A statue of Abraham Lincoln was vandalized in Chicago with red paint…The far-left vandals wrote messages like “colonizer” and “land back” along with the paint that was meant to look like blood…In 2020, police officers and protesters battled over a statue of Christopher Columbus, which was later removed,” the Tribune noted. “In August, a city commission recommended a series of new public memorials and the removal of several statues for honoring white supremacy…”


On June 20, 2020 the Willamette Week reported “

Portland was one of the first U.S. cities where protesters targeted statues of the founders. On June 14, a group of about 15 people used ropes and an ax to topple a statue of Thomas Jefferson that stood on the front steps of Jefferson High School in North Portland. Four nights later, several dozen people tore down a statue of George Washington along Northeast Sandy Boulevard. (Both statues have since been placed in storage.)”

Critical Race Theorists are trying to rewrite American history and remove from the public space statues and symbols that they consider offensive. 

Intersectionality is a part of Critical Race Theory according to which Jews are also part of the “privileged class” responsible for “oppression” of others. 

On July 21, 2020 Paul Miller wrote in Newsweek “On a recent Sunday afternoon, #JewishPrivilege was trending on Twitter. What does this even mean?   To be a Jew in America apparently means you are privileged to be the most targeted ethnic and religious group in the country, according to the FBI. Jewish students on college campuses have had the privilege of being victimized in more than 175 incidents of anti-Semitism so far this year, notes the anti-Semitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative…Anti-Semitism is a “privilege” only in Orwellian doublespeak.   

“This latest form of Jew-hatred began just a few years ago. I recall flyers posted on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the spring of 2017 that read, “ENDING WHITE PRIVILEGE STARTS WITH ENDING JEWISH PRIVILEGE.” 

“The flyers depicted Jews at the peak of a pyramid of wealth, claiming that 44 percent of Jews were in the top one percent. The horror in this story is not the falsehood of the statistics, but that the goal of the flyers was to elicit hatred toward Jews.  

“The flyers reflected a disdain for Jews shared by anti-Israel organizations on campus and their leftist allies who preach “intersectionality,” proffered as a common bond of all putatively oppressed groups. This ideology links Muslim groups with radical feminists and progressive organizations whose goals might have nothing in common other than an abhorrence of Israel and Jews who don’t fall in line with their far-left ideology.  

 “If there is any silver lining in the anti-Jewish trend that is the “Jewish Privilege” Twitter hashtag, it’s that Jews from across the political spectrum took to social media and fought back. Jews reclaimed the hashtag by sharing their encounters as Jews, and the anti-Semitism they have experienced.  But the fact that in 2020, Jews had to take to modern media platforms to combat Jew-hatred, is disturbing.

 “#JewishPrivilege” was used by so many to express hatred for the Jewish people that it was publicized by Twitter as a trending hashtag. 

 #JewishPrivilege is the voice of the woke racist—the college-age, hip bigots who protest against police and vandalize statues of historical figures. Practitioners of intersectionality, they have bought into the age-old blame-the-Jews mentality. White privilege is bad, and Jewish privilege is even worse…”

The people promoting Kwanzaa are the same people pushing Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Woke antisemites who call for Israel’s destruction. On February 17, 2021 Samanta Mandeles reported in Legal Insurrection “Professor Marc Lamont Hill is an influential and high-profile leader of two movements: The Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-Israel movement. The “intersectional” hijacking and crossover of domestic movements in the anti-Israel cause is something we have covered for years.

“Lamont Hill just admitted what we all knew, but some people deny: one of the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement is the destruction of Israel. In a Zoom panel event on February 6, 2021, organized by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s “BDS and Palestine Solidarity National Working Group, National Political Education Committee, DSA Muslim Caucus, and the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus,” the panel featured Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill alongside fellow Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) supporters Omar Barghouti, Sumaya Awad, and Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt.

“Each of the panelists have a long history of anti-Israel organizing. Omar Barghouti has been a professional BDSer since the early 2000s (although he often ignores the BDS dictates he commands others to follow); Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt was an activist with Durham2Palestine—a local North Carolina network that invoked the “Deadly Exchange” (a conspiracy theory that blames Israel and American Jewish groups for police shootings of Blacks in the U.S.); and as a high-ranking official at Adalah Justice Project, Sumaya Awad has helped promote the organization’s bizarre claim that Zionism is “underpinned by anti-Blackness“.

“Panel frontrunner Marc Lamont Hill is just as virulent an anti-Israel polemicist as his co-speakers. He is perhaps best known in pro-Israel circles for his repetition of the popular Hamas slogan (“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”) during a speech at the United Nations in 2018.

“…Meanwhile, since its birth in 2013, Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement founders and prominent leaders have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the international anti-Israel movement; indeed, anti-Israel agitators played an active role in stoking the 2014 violence in Ferguson, and have continued to hijack progressive causes by blaming racial tensions on Israel—even till today.

“Marc Lamont Hill—as a BLM icon—has long embraced the ‘intersectional’ view that Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” has been engineered and perpetuated by the same “white supremacist” cabal that oppresses Blacks in the United States. In 2015, Hill traveled to “Palestine” on a “solidarity” mission with other BLM leaders who share this perspective. We documented the trip, which was organized by the self-described “socialist” group Dream Defenders—and included BLM co-founder and self-proclaimed “Marxist” Patrisse Cullors.

“…So it’s no surprise that Hill wasted little time during the DSA Zoom panel in repeating these themes; on a “conceptual level”, he insisted,

“We understand that we can’t dismantle white supremacy or imperialism section by section…There’s no way to stop a settler-colonial movement in Palestine and not be mindful of its relationship to, you know, a settler colonial project in New Zealand or Australia or the United States…[it’s] a global system that we have to dismantle…[Black Lives Matter has] imagined…a world [that is] anti-imperialist. They don’t want to just nation-build, but they want to world-make, and so Black Lives Matter, very explicitly is talking about the dismantling of the Zionist project, dismantling of the settler-colonialist project, and very explicitly embracing BDS on those grounds.

“Naturally, Hill presented no evidence of the supposed interconnectedness of centuries-old European colonization of the New World with Zionism—the modern Jewish liberation movement centered around the ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem (or, as it was called as early as the biblical book of Samuel, Zion)—because no such evidence exists.

“But when it comes to Israel, hard facts clearly matter little to Hill, his DSA “comrades” (his words), or BLM leadership; after all, why complicate a compelling narrative and successful recruitment tool with a scrupulous examination of history?

“For anti-Israel activists, building a “broad” movement requires social justice idealists from multiple and diverse backgrounds. And how better to collect them all than to draw vague analogies between disparate eras, moralize relentlessly, and deliberately muddy conversation about Jews and Israel with “conceptual” bluster posing as practical and just “political solution[s]”?

“Ah, ‘intersectional’ ignorance must be bliss.”

The video below by Israel Unwired shows Intersectionality activist and Black Lives Matter co-founder calling for Israel’s destruction.

The same way intersectionality activists target statues of historical figures they are now targeting the Jewish Menorah by culturally appropriating it for Kwanzaa.
According to Intersectionality doctrine Woke Racists deplore what they call “Jewish Privilege” and that is why they are now targeting the Jewish Menorah 

the same way they are destroying statues of historical figures they consider offensive. Since they can’t outlaw the public display of the Menorah or destroy it (as they destroyed the statues) without being called anti-semites they decided to change its meaning, to culturally appropriate it for Kwanzaa.

Critical Race Theorists are trying to rewrite American history and remove from the public space statues and symbols that they consider offensive. The cultural appropriation of the Menorah is an attempt to erase Jewish presence from public spaces in America.

Critical Race Theorists are bothered by so many Jewish symbols in public display during the month of December the same way they are bothered by statues of historical figures they consider racist. According to intersectionality Jews are “privileged oppressors”, so the public embrace of the Menorah is offensive to them. Since they can’t outlaw the menorah or destroy it they decided to steal it. In an act of cultural appropriation they are trying to miseducate people about the meaning of the Menorah by claiming it represents Kwanzaa.

Please see the kwanzaa stamp that the US Postal Service created, it has a menorah in it! Cultural appropriation for a celebration invented recently. 


Leave a Comment

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More