Good-bye Kike, Hello Bagelman!

If language is the soundtrack of history, then anti-Semitic slurs are the spiny, discordant anthems of the world’s fight scenes. Lately there seems to be a recording mix-up: Serious slurs such as “kike” are tossed around casually at Jewish shindigs and “fun” slurs such as “Red Sea pedestrian” are being invented en masse by teenagers and comedy writers.

Confused? Times have changed since anti-Semitic slurs went “out of fashion” after the Holocaust. By the early 1950s, vicious slurs such as “kike,” shorthand for Christ-killer, and “heeb,” the truncated version of Hebrew, had almost completely bowed out of public discourse due to heightened sensitivities.

With some exceptions: Americans still injected “gyp” into casual conversation, says Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Minnesota, even though Gypsies, too, were prey to the Nazis. Gypsies were “acceptable” bait because, they, unlike Jews, were barely visible in post-war America, suggesting that the language evolution was born more from civility rather than genuine change of heart. Feinstein thinks that the demise of the family-owned store also played a role: Small markets and the busybody communities they bred had provided the perfect public but intimate forum for hate. With mega-markets colonizing the world, serious ethnic slurs inevitably got lost in the crowd.

Fast forward to the birth of the political correctness movement. This baby of the Left, popularized on college campuses in the early ’90s, took a rather Puritan stab at wiping hate from the English language. Noisy backlash soon followed. As historian Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust, puts it, “When you outlaw an entire way of life, people are sure to rebel.”

And so they did. The savagely funny heroes of ’90s late night television spent their 50-minute time slots reviving old ethnic slurs and inventing new ones. Mock-rednecks in a Conan O’Brien skit, for example, branded Jews as “bible shorteners,” “outside agitators” and “city folks.” And it’s not just Conan. “Matzoh Gobbler,” “Red Sea pedestrian,” “Goldberg” and “Jewy Hannukah Bagelman” are thrown about in such merrily stupid sitcoms and movie scenes that Americans know it is all in good irony, even when they don’t find the jokes funny. But for some, intention is not the real issue. “It’s okay to make fun of prejudice,” says Ken Jacobson, deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, “but we have to be extremely careful because it gives license to all kinds of terrible comments.” Steven Weitzman, a Jewish studies professor at Indiana University, takes a more relaxed approach. “Humor is an important survival strategy,” he says, insisting that people should not be afraid to use it just because others might take it the wrong way.

It would take an over-active imagination to find offense in recently-coined Jewish hybrid labels such as “Hebro” (a Jewish African American), “Hinjew” (a Jewish Indian) and the predictably self-conflicted “Jew-rab.” Rather than offend or restrict, Jewish hybrid labels relax the narrow racial concept of Jews as Caucasians. “These terms can be useful for biracial people who suffer identity issues,” says Oliver Leaman, a Jewish Studies professor at the University of Kentucky.

The anti-Semitic slur issue becomes thornier when Jews—like African Americans dotingly spitting out the “n” word—reclaim once-hostile terms for their own use. In the popular 1991 flick Barton Fink, a Jewish Hollywood studio chief boasts: “I am bigger, meaner and louder than any kike in this town!” And the 2001 debut of Heeb—a smirking lifestyle brand of a magazine—raised some conservative red flags high. “Some words can never be lightened,” says Paul Reitter, a professor of Jewish cultural studies at Ohio State University.

Reitter insists that we stop trying to salvage old words and instead make up new ones and, apparently, many Americans agree. Jews and non-Jews alike are hungrily logging on to online ethnic slur dictionaries such as racialslurdatabase.com and the cult favorite urbandictionary.com, a site where viewers can contribute their own self-invented slurs. “The allure of these sites may stem from an attraction to the forbidden but could also mask hate or self-hate,” says ADL’s Jacobson. And while some believe that writing, or rather typing, these words out is a form of reclaiming power, Jacobson is unconvinced. “These sites really just serve as a primer for prejudice.”

In November of last year, radio shock-jock Don Imus called the “Jewish management” of CBS radio “money grubbing bastards” after a disagreement over a musical act. His choice of words rated only a few small paragraphs in the Jewish daily Forward—a far cry from the media onslaught that erupted after Imus’s later “nappy-headed hos” comment. Perhaps the Jewish community has been laughing along with Jewish razzing for so long that the media, even the Jewish media, are simply confused about when they should stir up a fuss.
—Rachel Ament