Is this anti-semitism?

my main takeaway is: good on the kids at the school this year for really bringing this to light and rejecting it.

Insane how long the school admin was asking themselves the question posed in the thread title

My wife had a a high school English teacher in Northern Virginia that would tell her, with some polite concern, that she was going to hell for being Jewish.

One of my Jewish high school friends moved to Dallas for her senior year of high school, where none of her new classmates had ever met a Jewish person before, but used certain phrases she found very antisemitic all the damn time.

I had pennies thrown at me in high school in the late 80s (not really Jewish but it's a long story).

That’s awful, but I get it: the arch-rival school to mine was in a WASPy town where real estate was traditionally covenanted to forbid Black or Jewish buyers moving there. My town was the Jewish suburb, and ice hockey games with the WASPy school inevitably featured some arsehole chucking bagels on the ice. After any kind of game with that school, their fans would drop $10 bills, beating up the kids who picked up the money (and saying disgusting antisemitic things).

Texas, according to the friend who left for Dallas, was even worse.

(Santa Rosa County Commissioner Sam) Parker replied: "The fact that I walked in and said 'Hey, I'm going to have to Jew it down' is not an ethnic slur. This has nothing to do—I'm not referring to the Jewish community. I used that term as an adjective, as a descriptive word of bargaining them down…That is not an ethnic slur."

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-IOS_GK0T-GK1C&mibextid=1YhcI9R&v=500510682289332

Silly Parker, you have to say "It's not an ethnic slur" THREE times to make it not an ethnic slur

Why is it so hard for people to say "Whoa, shit, I've been saying that all my life and I never really thought about it"?

A phrase I've never heard anyone utter in my life but then it seems to be an "American thing"?

it's not particularly common in the US either, as far as I know, can't think of ever hearing it either

You're lucky. Heard it all the time in high school (US).

Ugh.

I've had it said to me directly by someone who knew that my father is Jewish.

The above friend who moved to Dallas for her senior year did have to call out new classmates who used that phrase.

I would say (US, Jewish) I've never actually heard it used but I know it's a thing.

I think mh punched someone for saying it iirc

I would like to call time on non-jews saying I remind them of Woody Allen, as a school colleague did last weekend

Yikes

I had a “friend” here in LA say that about her experience with an appliance repair, in a group w my wife, whose dad survived the Holocaust. I think I went into one of those trances you see in movies, all the sound dropping out and a loud ringing sound in my ears.

people who have had experience with this, would you say it is straight up malicious or more semi-innocent ignorance?

I have a hard time understanding how someone could not know how using "Jew" as a verb is offensive. the Woody Allen thing, while o_O as fuck, I could see more being ignorance.

Well w that one she mildly apologized, saying something along the lines of “well you can take the girl out of the south but…”

it was crazy though because in my entire life I’d so rarely heard it.

I've never *heard* it said out loud, but seen it online a lot over the years. and one of my good friends said her mother used to say it and she'd tell her to stfu.

See also: gypped (which decades ago I did not know was an offensive term)

Yea same

Gypped is one where a lot of people who use it don't know where it comes from or why it is offensive. I find it harder to believe that the same is true with jewed but who knows.

I feel like it's only relatively recently that "gypsy" has been phased out as a commonly used term. "Jew" as a verb has never been commonly used the same way.

It’s also comparatively easy to reach adulthood in the US believing that “gypsy” is, like, a job, possibly an extinct or even fictional one, and not a derogatory term for an oppressed ethnic and cultural minority. Compared to thinking that “Jew” is not referring to and derogating actually existing people.

re: Gypsy, many Romani-Americans still identify with that word, so it's not necessarily "phased out".

Embarrassingly, I always pictured the word being spelled "jipped" and had no idea what it meant. Lesson taken and that I tell my kid is if you don't know what it means don't say it.

I think I used "welch" (as in "he totally welched on the deal") well into adulthood without knowing its source

re: Gypsy, many Romani-Americans still identify with that word, so it's not necessarily "phased out".

On June 15, 1995, a day before the release of HIStory, The New York Times reported that "They Don't Care About Us" contained racist and anti-Semitic content. The publication highlighted the lyrics, "Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me." Jackson responded directly to the publication, stating:

"The idea that these lyrics could be deemed objectionable is extremely hurtful to me, and misleading. The song in fact is about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone. I am the skinhead, I am the Jew, I am the black man, I am the white man. I am not the one who was attacking. It is about the injustices to young people and how the system can wrongfully accuse them. I am angry and outraged that I could be so misinterpreted."

— Michael Jackson,

he's a sinner he's a saint, he does not feel ashamed

Now that Jacko's gone, Gianni Infantino is the skinhead, the Jew, the black man, the white man.

A week later he said this -

"My sole intention was to use language to demonstrate the ugliness of racism, antisemitism and stereotyping. I had hoped that my lyrics would target the bigots, not the victims of bigotry. I acknowledge that I seriously offended some people, which was never my intention. I have come to understand over the past days that these words are considered antisemitic. I now realize that all words have power especially when they are chosen to make a statement. I sincerely hope that anyone offended by my words will forgive me for not recognizing this sooner.

and went into the studio and re-recorded those lines for all future versions of the album and single

wasn't it supposed to be Steven Spielberg who convinced him to change it?

Well, he did make "Schindler's List."

I used to work at a place that had a lot of freight elevators and the company that serviced them was called Schindler Elevators. In my head I thought of this business as Schindler's Lifts.

Before that job, I had worked at a place with this real asshole named Ian. He was a bratty know-it-all, real condescending. I hadn't been at the job that long when an opening came up at the museum where my wife worked. I felt obligated to stay at the current job a little longer since the bosses had been really accommodating and had done me a few solid favors. Ian had applied for the museum job and I knew he had a good shot at it and he was very hopeful and upbeat regarding this.

We were working on installing some art at a gallery and Ian is complaining about how the gallery director was cheap and said he was "too much of a jew" to spend some money on improvements. My wife is Jewish and I immediately decided to apply for the job, to fuck Ian over and to keep my wife from having to work with the little shit. I got the job and I broke the news to Ian that they had hired me. His eyes got wet and he went home early. It felt delicious.

Yeah, fuck Ian.

A think I've been thinking about lately is how on sites like reddit, in subs like "r/mildlyinfuriating" or "r/terriblefacebookmemes" people will just post blatant antisemtic propaganda of the vilest sort under the guise of "OMG, isn't this bad?" And I can't help but think that's either the intention of the original disseminator or even the poster, because that just gets it more attention, and if even a small % of the people who see it are influenced by the propaganda, it's a win for the propagandist.

I wish Reddit would just not allow that sort of thing.

xpost Sounds like Ian was guilty of being white

haha

I grew up waaaay in the country in east Texas and until I was in grad school I had no concept of what a Jewish person was apart from knowing about the holocaust. I had heard "jew" used as a synonym for "cheap" but never thought about it. My wife was the first person I met that I knew who was Jewish, because at some point she told me.

"You're Jewish?"

"My last name is Levy."

*befuddled look*

Thinking back, there are two people that were probably Jewish that I didn't recognize as such because I had no clue what to look for. It was not on my radar at all, and I assume this is the case for a lot of people that grew up in rural areas before the internet. Or maybe I was just extra ignorant?

I was really into drawing pentagrams in Elementary school because I liked scary movies a lot and the Satanic Panic was in full swing. In our library there was a poster of religious symbols and I saw the Star of David and thought "oh, that's a cool looking star!" without reading anything about it. So I started drawing that along with pentagrams, thinking they're both cool looking wicked stars and whatnot. At some point a teacher or librarian saw me drawing the Star of David in a circle and asked what I was up to, and I said "THIS IS THE SIGN OF THE DEVIL!" and she became upset and tried to correct me but I didn't understand what was going on. I knew enough to stop using it that way because for some reason it was bad. Thinking back, she probably thought that I was saying Jewish people were evil, but I had no fucking clue about anything. Just a dumb redneck kid.

Now we're in the middle of planning our daughter's bat mitzvah. Sometimes in temple I still get a strong feeling of "How did I get here?"

Told this story before, but one summer in college we had a subletter from middle of nowhere West Virginia. He was a nice guy, and smart, literally a rocket scientist, but pretty sheltered, because ... West Virginia. One day he came up to me. Here is the more or less verbatim exchange:

Him: So, you're Jewish?
Me: Yep.
Him: That's cool. I don't think there are any Jews where I am from, but my parents saw "Schindler's List."

Exactly!

We also watched A Stranger Among Us which my mom and I liked quite a bit. I can't imagine how that holds up now.

I had no concept of what a Jewish person was apart from knowing about the holocaust.

xp I don't know if this is typical, or if I was also just extra ignorant, but I grew up in the UK in the 90s and my knowledge/understanding of Jewish people as a kid was also purely as the group of people who were victims of the holocaust, I specifically remember being surprised to find out (aged about 10, maybe?) that there still Jewish people around today, and living in the UK and the USA.

on that topic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/holocaust-student-education-jewish-anti-semitism/673488/

Interesting, I look forward to reading that. I remember many years ago reading a pretty compelling hand-wringy piece warning of the rhetorical dangers of teaching anti-Semitism so thoroughly through the Holocaust, at the risk of underemphasizing centuries of anti-Semitism beforehand (and at this point close to a century afterwards). It risks linking Judaism with victimhood, and also misleadingly implies said victimhood was acute and not both broader and ongoing. It invites the ignorant (innocent or no) to think/believe "yeah, but that was so long ago ... ", which is not that different from what like-mindedly wrongheaded people often say about other minorities and their persecution. "Yeah, but slavery was hundreds of years ago" or "we've come a long way from the '60s" or "the Japanese internment camps were just a one-time thing, and it's not like the US government was killing them." And so on.