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First of all, I do think the couple overreacted and I hardly think such an event needs to be brought to the news and attention of the public when the matter could have been settled by simply going to the manager.
However...and I'm trying to find some other word that relates to this...the term "Jew" is slightly offensive when used in this manner.
Perhaps it wasn't meant this way by the person who wrote it, and there is nothing to indicate that she meant it as anything but a way to describe the couple at the table. But for some reason, when people are speaking about Jewish people in a respectable, inoffensive manner, they tend to say "JewISH" or "A Jew". ...."He was a Jew"..."They were Jewish"...wheareas, when speaking about Jews in a more...vulgar manner, people skip the "A's" and "ISH's" and say "Jew Couple" "Jew Bastard" "Dirty Jew" etc etc. I don't know why this is the case....but I guess because of this use, the word "Jew" alone, coupled with another descriptive word has come to be percieved as offensive to a lot of Jewish people.
Not that the word itself is bad.
It just has to do with the way it's used.
Like...I guess you could relate it to how someone might describe black people. It's fine to say "So there were two black people sitting at the table" but if you heard a white person say "So there were two blacks sitting there...", wouldn't you cringe just a little bit? Doesn't it seem a bit worse?
*shrug*
I don't really know how to describe it, so maybe I'm not making any sense.
Either way, yeah, it's not all that bad. She didn't say anythig all that bad, and yeah, she may have just been bad at English or unaware that this was not the proper way to describe a Jewish person....but I would have been offended/annoyed if someone described me in that way. Not enough to make a huge deal. But perhaps enough to go someplace else next time I wanted dinner.
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