by The dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable or, worse, comfortably righteous. That’s a sentiment that university presidents or their screenwriters might have hoped to invoke. The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval – “genocide” and “patriotism,” “anti-Semitism” and “democracy” – convey great scale and importance, but sometimes avoid the high cost of paying real attention. The more important the word, the more its meaning can be a matter of degree, from a little to a lot. Achieving meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work. The language is haunted.
Here are some Jewish examples: fragments of meaning not to condemn but to acknowledge:
The word “anti-Semitism” in the spelling I just used, without a hyphen, is considered preferable because “anti-Semitism” or, worse, “antisemitism” implies the legitimacy of a set of discredited racialist ideas, an old quasi-academic notion of Semiticism. with a capital S from the same swamp as “Aryan”. Even the script, that minimal point of punctuation, transmits its small load of ghosts and historical violations to the present.
I no longer see the phrase “Jews and minorities.” Goodbye to those well-meaning words that used to be given to me, along with others in the approximately 2.4 percent of the American adult population who are Jewish (0.2 percent of the world), a crooked laugh. Even the legitimate and standard phrase “people of color” generates its small impact. Possibly some people who use it don’t realize that Jews were not white in our country until recently; therefore, at some point, neither white nor colored.
There have certainly been times and places when we were not white, recent and close. Around 1970, when I lived in the town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, as a college professor, my family and I occupied faculty housing. Thanks to that added benefit, we didn’t have to worry that at least some of Wellesley’s residential neighborhoods were restricted by a real estate ordinance that prohibited selling a home to Jews. That kind of covert agreement was called a covenant, a biblical-sounding term that asserted a strangely powerful and absurd authority. Even the expression a black, brown, or Asian person might use about positions of authority (“I’d like to see someone in that office who looks like me”) can provoke a pang of discomfort at the word “appearance.” The stereotypes of “looking Jewish” are repellent, typical of Nazi propaganda. And please don’t tell us that we are smarter than other people. (I’m always tempted to respond with, “You’ve never met my cousin Barney.”)
One of the first academic emails I received as a young professor informed me that the trustees had changed the bylaws of Wellesley College so that faculty members were no longer required to be Christian men and women. “Phew,” I could joke to myself, “just in time.”
