Jew slang

Back in '06 (ahh, the heady days), Borat was big. Isn't that strange? His hairy, thong-ed frollics attracted millions in revenue and millions more pre-pubescents repeating "iis naice!" in the playground in ridiculous middle-eastern-ish voices.

(Yes, I was one of these pre-pubescents. Damn me.)

Another thing that particularly irked our Kazakh comrade was, as you well know, Jews. Now, as Sacha Baron Cohen is himself a Jew, he was able to get away with saying things in a prime-time television show and a big-budget movie that would have got anyone else a slap on the wrist for inciting racial hatred - "Jew-claw", "throw the Jew down the well" etc. And, truly, it was funny, politically iffy shock-humour that, looking back on it, is pretty much what Sarah Silverman's doing now. Just with less booing and more value for money.

However, nowadays, it's not such a laughing matter. Jew-bashing seems to have seeped into popular culture as, for one, a new casual byword for "shit", as well as some rather more visceral connotations. People seem content to say "that's so Jew" at the drop of a hat now, in a similar vein to "that's so gay" or "that's so lame". All of these expressions are, when you think about them, wrong and offensive. In all three cases, any person who happened to come under one (or more) of the above titles most likely wouldn't have come to be there by choice. It is very mild when compared, and perhaps I shouldn't be making the comparison, but it's the sort of thing that kickstarts fascist regimes. Hitler executed millions of people under the "charge" that they were gay, lame, or Jewish. "Gay" and "lame" have slipped into casual usage so far now that popstarlets can release worldwide hits entitled thus, used in their more innocent, playground sense without one eyelid batted by the consumer. Sure, but it's just a pop song, you might say. That much is true, but so is this. It doesn't take many steps to get from a to b in the mind of an impressionable adolescent.

The second, and perhaps more worrying, point is the brazen use of Jew as a direct insult. Coming from a south-west London grammar school with a high mix of various cultures (around 50% of the pupils are white, very low for the area, with a high proportion of Koreans and south-Asians from nearby New Malden and Hounslow and with many other background represented), one would imagine a degree of tolerance would have spread through the community to allow a large amount of integration. While this is generally the case, Jews, most certainly the major world religion in the school with the smallest representation, can feel a little cut off. In a Patrick Wolf related moment of hormonal madness, I scribbled "hunt for that jewel" in a toilet cubicle - you know, just to add a little variation to the "tik if uve fuked a teachr in here" proclamations and pictured of cocks. A couple of days later I use the same cubicle, and someone has turned it into "hunt for that jew!". It made me angry, particularly as I know that some people actually genuinely, for whatever reason, dislike Jews in my school. Last year, someone was suspended for shouting out "filthy Jew" when we were watching The Pianist in history. In fact, the anti-semitism in my school has reached such a level that when I hear someone say "Jew" in the corridor, I instantly assume it's being used as an insult. For once, though, I think it extends beyond the boundaries of my cosy closeted grammar school hole, and it's not cool.

It's Pesach on thursday. I am most likely one of the least devout Jews in the world - I've never been to synagogue and the Pesach, along with a bit of dradle spinning in December, is pretty much the only time of year when I can actually call myself Jewish and not feel like I'm being hyper-hypocritical (and feel guilty as I eat a bacon sandwich). To be quite honest, I think the new apathy and insensitive nature developing in modern culture is disgusting, vile and outdated, and if it continues then people of my generation are going to grow up, actively or passively, bigotted, contrived and shameful. I'm not being a stick in the mud, but just think about the things you say, there's only a pitifully short amount of time in life to say all the words you can, and these, in these contexts, shouldn't be in your vocabulary.

Peace out yo,

xxX