I don’t know if it’s my dark, curly hair or the many Michael Chabon books I’ve read, but despite my feelings about the U.S.’s totally wack Israeli foreign policy, I sometimes feel a weird kinship to the Jews.
Which is why, last night, when I heard a Hispanic dude on the corner of 42nd and Lexington saying, “She kept trying to jew me into coming to that party!”, I wanted to turn and say, “Listen, you spic, my people have been enduring stereotyping and ridicule from a-holes like you for thousands of years now, and it ends right here, right now.”
But then I remembered that I’m a regular, old white girl from Ohio. Minorities get to have all the fun.
7 Comments
Someone at my work used to say that all the time, and it pissed me off, too. I had actually never heard the term before I came here and was appalled. I’ve also heard the “n” word and had to refrain from chewing the speaker’s head off.
He didn’t even use the slur correctly – What a goniff!
i love the jews. and i want to be one. every day. it’s certainly not enough that part of me is jewish (since it’s not the part that came from my mother).
I would have been soooo torn. I have a similar whitegirl fantasy about being secretly ethnic. For a long time, my ethnicity of choice was the jews (I love latkes and the best weddings I’ve ever attended have been the jewish ones), but once I learned spanish and spent some time in Mexico, I thought maybe I was secretly Mexican.
Also: The racial relations in the south are fascinating. When I informed a girl here recently that the town I moved from has less than a 2% black population, her reply was, “So they’re probably not all crazy like they are here then, huh?”
How do you even respond to that?
When I was a freshman in college, a girl from Marion, Ohio was telling a group of us about how her dad was good at “jewing people down” when her family went shopping while on cruises.
She was pretty adamant that the phrase has nothing to do with Jewish people. We had to show her, in a dictionary, that the phrase has everything to do with Jews, and even then she still insisted that it isn’t derogatory. I wasn’t offended at all, but I was embarrassed for her.
She was also a good Christian girl who was opposed to premarital sex, until she met a guy she could imagine herself marrying, had sex, and then became a nymphomaniac.
Listen, the way I see it, eventually middle class white people will be a minority. or at minimum an equal sized slice of the pie. Which is awesome, because my kids will be able to apply for a racial scholarship.
Scholarships based on race piss me off like none-other. Economic circumstance? sure, ability? absolutely. Your ancester’s came from a different country? who’s fucking didn’t?!
I always imagined I would marry a Jewish man. I have no idea why, given that I am Catholic and I live in the Deep South, where Jewish boys are not exactly a dime a dozen.