Jayjg opines on Thekohser's hometown, it's about the Jews, of course Options

[thekohser]

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan. I lived there until I was 12, and I've returned to visit perhaps 15 times in the nearly three decades since.

Jackson is not a major hub of Judaism the way you might think of a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or North Miami Beach, Florida, or Rockville Centre, New York might be. Rather, most of the religious residents of Jackson are either Catholic or Lutheran (if you're white), or any of a set of other Protestant churches (if you're African-American).

But, Jayjg has swooped in to add what he apparently knows about to the Wikipedia article about Jackson:

==Religion==
Jackson is home to [[Temple Beth Israel (Jackson, Michigan)|Temple Beth Israel]], a [[Reform Judaism|Reform]] [[synagogue]] founded in 1862 by [[History of the Jews in Germany|German Jews]].

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to understand religion in Jackson, Michigan, Wikipedia will have you believing that it's pretty much a Jewish town, top to bottom.

Now, is this the way Wikipedia gets built? Is Jayjg doing the "proper thing" by adding this one fact, with the absence of any other facts about other religions in Jackson? Might I expect that other editors will be along shortly to describe the various other faith traditions that reside in Jackson?

(Point of fact... the Temple Beth Israel in Jackson is located on the SW corner of Michigan & West Avenues. My first piano lessons were conducted on the NW corner of the same intersection.)

This post has been edited by thekohser: Mon 30th March 2009, 3:56am

[The Adversary]

Well, I don´t think Jay did anything wrong here. It is just the way WP works; if you have read any of the history-sections in major older Israeli/Palestinian town, you will see the same all over. Take Lydda in the Crusader period: one Jewish dyer lived there! But nobody else, apparently, not according to WP (And about the 400 year long Ottoman period (ending 1918) we learn this: "During the early Ottoman period, there were no Jews in Lod, but a small Jewish community developed in the 19th century. The Jewish inhabitants were driven out in the 1921 Arab riots. In 1944, Lydda had a population of 17,000, one-fifth of them Christian Arabs." )

If you look at Hebron, Acre, Safad, Tiberias: apparently they were were all Jewish strongholds up through history, according to WP. Even if the actual population of Jews at times was .."one Jewish dyer". And now: Jackson, Michigan has been added to the fold.