Is this anti-semitism?

JiC, you grew up around here, I think— I didn't even realize it until I was in 5th grade or so, all my friends started having to go to Hebrew School.

this was very much my experience as well living in Brookline, MA

Yeah, I was just, er, Joshing. I grew up in West Chester, PA, and honestly didn't feel the Jewish community there was any more robust than it is here. Which is to say, relatively modest compared to the burbs north of Chicago, or the New York/New Jersey area, or LA, etc. Or even Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, where my friends grew up (and attended the synagogue that was shot up).

In that Silverman thing she talks about casting actors as her (real life) mom in a play, and all the actors kept coming in with exaggerated New York-styled caricatures of Jews. And she's like, I grew up in New Hampshire, my mom is from Connecticut, she's nothing like a New Yorker. And yet for some reason that's where those actors went when asked to play a Jewish mother...

but isn't the offensive caricaturing of Jewish women the problem, rather than whether or not the actress doing the caricaturing is actually Jewish?

lizzy caplan should be getting all these roles imo

I wouldn’t use the word complain...

― Lavator Shemmelpennick, Thursday, September 30, 2021

"i guess you could say more of a kvetch, if i'm being honest..."

wtf

NEW: A school administrator in Southlake, Texas, advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also have a book with an "opposing" perspective.

Listen to the audio recording obtained by @NBCNews: https://t.co/vS0IjlROMu pic.twitter.com/yPtM1ncjgV

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 14, 2021

That's not a good sign.

"We need our children to hear the Nazis' side of the story before we rush to judgement here. Those Nuremburg trials were a travesty of justice, held by" (checks notes) "a government of the USA run by a Democrat."

That story and the whole hubbub surrounding Southlake, TX, is absolutely mindboggling and depressing.

So @jonstewart recently broke Hollywood's complete silence on @jk_rowling unapologetically maintaining antisemitic folklore through Harry Potter. pic.twitter.com/ezWrxpzryB

— raf (@rafaelshimunov) January 3, 2022

I saw that thread earlier and am embarrassed to admit I missed the STARS OF DAVID on the floor of the bank?!

(I mean I missed them when I saw that terrible movie; they are impossible to miss in that clip)

Tbf:

Newsweek et al, may eat my ass. pic.twitter.com/eRoYYeNRi1

— Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) January 5, 2022

huh. I rewatched the first clip after that and, I don't know exactly why he's backpedalling but, come on, he brings up the protocols! I mean yes they're all laughing but it's not just a "lighthearted conversation" what a crock

David Baddiel, who took Corbyn's pronunciation of convicted paedophile Epstein's surname in a tv interview as a coded anti-Semitic slur is being very generous and *nuanced* in his interpretation of JK's use of this PotEoZ imagery.

There's a surprise.

xxpost I *think* what the backpedalling is about is that, similar to what Sarah Silverman was saying, Jews (and others) are so used to these sorts of centuries-old stereotypes that they're almost invisible in their offensiveness. Like, these stereotypes are straight out of the Protocols and yet, even if no direct ill-will was intended toward Jews, apparently nobody stopped to note that. Like, they're innately anti-semitic even if those invoking them are not necessarily themselves anti-semites.

That makes sense and I can see being annoyed at the nuances being sanded off. Unfortunately I dipped a toe into the twitter discourse on this and the world's biggest assholes are all celebrating his defying of the cancel cartel

Meaning his point about the tropes being in fact dead obvious and undeniable is being jettisoned in favor of "they keep trying to come for Rowling but she's unimpeachably good"

Why *is* there a banking system in a world where you can magic shit out of thin air? What are the economics there?

— Tom Munday (@tommundaycs) January 5, 2022

Our statement on suggestions that JK Rowling's portrayal of the goblins in the Harry Potter series is antisemitic pic.twitter.com/v9twpzkxM4

— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) January 5, 2022

our bigoted friend is just simply just referencing the inherent AS in Western literature with plausible ignorance and gets a free pass, cos she slagged off that evil nazi Corbyn

Are they like that in the books or just the film? I haven't read or watched either

The 'plausible ignorance' thing w regard to antisemitism and other prejudices is interesting. Questions wd arise from its application

"I haven't read or watched either"

sounds like a plan. I've only seen pics from the movie or read brief summaries of her goblin banker characters.

they're like that in the books too but the films probably make it worse with just how explicit it is

it's true that goblins do have existing associations with anti-semitic tropes but rowling certainly went above & beyond other contemporary portrayals of goblins in just how much she leant into those tropes. lol at all the 'corbyn is a nazi' types rushing to defend her though, makes it very clear what's going on

I wouldn't have ever imagined goblins to have pointy noses, working in a bank with a big ol' Star of David on the floor!

Really didn't jump out at me (a Jew) while reading the books

goblins being greedy & having pointy noses aren't rowling inventions (though neither are they essential parts of goblin mythology) but making them bankers certainly was

I saw this earlier:

I can’t believe, in 2022, people are tweeting furiously about Harry Potter, but fwiw, here’s JK Rowling’s actual description of the goblins in the actual book. I dunno, man, but if you read this and think “Jew!”, maybe Rowling isn’t the one with the problem pic.twitter.com/8ToGgXa2OY

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) January 5, 2022

I'm not sure I'd immediately classify that as antisemitic, but were I JK's editor I would have queried "a swarthy, clever face" and been like "r u sure??"

(and in this context it's extremely lol to highlight that as definitive proof of non-antisemitism without even going into the fact that that is not the only appearance of the goblins)

it definitely didn't occur to me at all when I read the book, and definitely did when I saw the movie (even without noticing the six-pointed star on the ground, I take some issue with it being called a "Jewish star" since a Jewish star typically has the lines of the two interlocking triangles defined rather than being filled in like a sheriff star).

IDK how much say Rowling had (if any) in the movie's depiction.

rowling was pretty heavily involved in the movies, to a very unusual degree for an author having their books adapted. highly unlikely that she personally demanded they look that bad but not at all free from responsibility there either

I ultimately don't care v much. I don't think she intended, even subconsciously, to attack Jews.

David Baddiel, who took Corbyn's pronunciation of convicted paedophile Epstein's surname in a tv interview as a coded anti-Semitic slur is being very generous and *nuanced* in his interpretation of JK's use of this PotEoZ imagery.

dystopian pic.twitter.com/vFYiBswZ8T

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) January 5, 2022

first time I saw the Harry Potter movie was in high school and the teacher immediately called that out

no one's really saying rowling is a committed antisemite or that it was a deliberate attack on jews, just that it leant into antisemitic tropes in a way deserving of criticism. people have been saying that for years, just it got a whole lot of attention now because someone fairly high profile brought it up. what's more striking is all the zionists/centrists/transphobes falling over themselves now to directly say "it's fine because we generally agree with her" when none of them are known for extending remotely the same charity to anyone left-wing.

it's not like it's the only instance of racism in the potter series either, the books are full of embarrassing racial stereotypes, but it's not like any of it is unforgivably bad in the way her transphobic activism is. the sort of thing that could probably be resolved with a simple apology if it'd blown up when she wasn't so embroiled in various culture wars - though i kinda doubt she ever would have been humble enough to say 'my bad'.

JK Rowling had an Asian character called Cho Chang, an Irish one called Seamus Finnigan and a Black one whose last name was Shacklebolt.
Also, consider her recent transphobic novel. When problematic tropes are regularly used by a writer it's not an accident it's what they think.

— Chardine Taylor Stone (@ChardineTaylor) January 5, 2022

she's been very dodgy at best, incredibly questionable at worst when it comes to depicting non-Brit/non-white characters it seems, but she's had a free pass on this for a long time because she's a Blair apologist and a transphobe, and like ufo says, on multiple culture war fronts and a tireless apologist for atrocities against Palestinians etc

Don’t know much about Rowling but I recently did a paper on the moral effect tropes can have (In the technical guise of Gadamer’s “wirkungsgeschichtliches“), basic thesis being “hey, Cain and Abel being interpreted as Jews killing Christ and God commanding Cain to be marked was used in Vichy France as Church justification for marking Jews with the yellow star and soooooooo violent tropes contain the potentiality of violent power no matter how long they remain dormant and should be maimed as they are identified.”

So I think it is a good thing people are noticing this particular furtherance of a violent trope. Regardless of how harmful/harmless it is in this particular instantiating, its the long game to me that is worrisome, especially with how high profile Harry Potter is. If you’re going to go this big, I think you have a moral responsibility to weed this stuff out before it hits the screen but aaaaayyyyyyy there ya go

Fuck Harry Potter and JK Rowling.. nothing more absolutely pathetic than adults who read and re-read these awful, terribly written books for children.

The Twitter discourse around this is really something. Corbyn Vs Rowling: choose who is the cunt that should be fucking demonised. Or perhaps goblinised in this case.

think Tolkien gets away a bit with the dwarves in the hobbit and lotr. haven't actually read the books - actually planning on it after this year, at 37 years old - but I understand they were based on jews, and they are into mining gold and gems and multiple characters go insane because they are obsessed with gold? the Jackson films making them all british or Irish probably has kept this out of the public eye?

The dwarves are fleshed out a bit more, they’re not portrayed as (largely) mercenary traitors, right? Whereas iirc the main goblin with a speaking role in HP sells them out.

the inherent cultural conservatism of JR Tokes or the abundance of dodgy misogyny/christian white supremacy from his pal CS Lewis' books are excused as a generational thing. Like they were born in the Victorian era, how would you expect these fucking pobby Oxford don types of that era to be more enlightened blah blah. I was a 13 yr old goy when I read LOTR and obv didn't think about AS tropes at that age but JKR - who admittedly I've never read! - seems much worse. It's some kind of thing that an author born in 1965 manages to be much more cavalier with them than even JR Tolkien born 80 years earlier in British South Africa was.

The idea that the dwarves are supposed to be Jews is something that never occurred to me at all when I was a (Jewish) kid reading those books, indeed, had never occurred to me until I just this week read something where Tolkein himself makes the connection in an interview -- all I can say is that he did a really terrible job making them seem anything like Jews! Maybe they resemble some kind of stereotypical Jew that exists only in the Anglo-Saxon imagination and which American Jews are entirely not aware of?

Kind of like the way I think I know what anti-semitic stereotypes about Jews are but reading early 20c British stuff I learn that we are supposed to have been, like, coated in a thin sheen of OIL -- really?

Probably for the best that we are deciding to ignore this whole Whoopi Goldberg kerfuffle.

It's really not very interesting to me and as you can see elsewhere in this thread I do like to discuss some anti-semitism

It seems I have posted 87 times in this thread, I may need a hobby

A thing I was thinking just now: do Jews in America tend to have a Plan? Like, keeping passports up to date, looking into what European nationality they might be entitled to, wondering how they would get by in Vancouver or Mexico City

In my circles (notably more secular than Mordy's but religiously involved / synagogue members etc.) I have never heard of such a thing in my life and anyone making such plans would be thought of as slightly kooky. On the other hand, I certainly know Israelis who are trying to figure out how workable it would be for them to move to the US.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, April 30, 2016 9:56 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

My remarks above are no longer operative and I miss April 2016