Religious Studies 480- Judaism

Found on google images. This week during class we talked a lot about religious authority and how that plays a roll in the internet.  In all of my memes collected so far, the authority of the online jewish community has been heavily revolved around stereotyping in the meme community rather than supported. Thanks to the guest lecture that we had in class by Dr. Kristen Lucken
 from Brandeis University, we learned about different types of stereotypes within memes. In the memes I have selected are more based on the stereotypes that revolve around learned behaviors rather than other categories. The reason for this is that we are not born with the knowledge of stereotypes, they are learned throughout or lives from the people or community around us. In the memes above both are stick with the themes of stereotyping the Jewish culture and religious values. The meme at the top is a very known figure in the meme community and his image is supposed to represent a more sarcastic tone in thi

In these memes that are shown and along with other memes that I have posted about in the past, the common symbols that are focused on are money and the traditional rabbi look. Both of these symbols are used as a form of identity that other people use to identify the jewish community. These are highlighted as key markers in stereotyping Jewish culture even though these symbols should not be defining identity factors for this religion. These memes are highlighted because humor allows people to understand the religion and its stereotypes in a less formal way. The message given by these memes is one of humor towards these stereotypes. The memes categorize the entire Jewish community as hairy and stringent with their money. During lecture this week we touched on how religious identity in religious culture is important especially in digital culture because so much of religious practices and information is found online. My observations relate with our in class learnings  because now a days

When selecting memes for this study I have come up with a strategy. I first spend a lot of time reading through a large quantity of memes before I select the ones I want to use. The reason I do this is to make sure that I am selecting the best possible memes to provide in my study. Also, I try to make sure that when I am selecting memes that they are easy to understand rather than selecting the over complicated ones. I believe that these two strategies are effective in selecting good memes for this study. I gather my memes from google images and the reason for this is because google images is constantly being updated with more memes on a daily basis so it helps give me more of a growing base of memes.    In the two memes that are below, they both hit on the stereotype that Jewish people are greedy. In the first meme on the left, stereotypes Jewish people a whole. In the attempt to be funny it is also very educational in the sense that it alludes to Jewish people being very frugal wi

For my chosen case study, I have decided to look into memes on Judaism. I have a big interest in learning more about Judaism just because as a whole the religious culture is very stereotyped. A few of these memes include stereotypes include things like that everyone looks like a rabbi, that jewish people are greedy/ frugual with money, and the stereotype that people savagely poke fun at the Holocaust.   Through the use of memes specifically in media, the world is getting an education on these stereotypes through the use of humor. Two memes that I found that are example of a few of these stereotypes are the meme called the jewish piano which uses humor to show how money is a huge factor for the people in the Jewish culture. This points out the stereotype that Jewish people are considered greedy and that they are frugal with their money as you can see from the amount on the cash register. In this second meme it uses humor to show how people believe that Jewish person looks like a rab