Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
What's the most offended you've ever been as a person of the Jewish persuasion?
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Good lord, what a question, Will!
Jeez, I dunno....
Getting checked for horns once, as a kid, was offensive, although more surprising than offensive. Having a delegation of church ladies tour my father's synagogue, and ask where we did the sacrificing, like it says in the Bible, was again, offensive, but more surprising than offensive. Having an anti-Semitic kid in fifth grade tell me that he didn't like Jews, and I should "get lost, kite!" (not knowing the word was actually "kike,") was offensive, but mostly pathetic.
But the first time I heard someone use the phrase "He jewed me out of fifty cents," and "He wanted five bucks for it, but I jewed him down," (both in the same five-minute conversation I overheard) was pretty offensive. I still remember the sick feeling it gave me, and how my face got hot, I was so angry.
When I got into it with Patrick Finn, in eighth grade, and he went from calling me "nerd boy," and so forth to calling me kike, Jew-boy, and telling me Hitler should've finished us all off, and it's too bad my grandma didn't end up someone's lampshade, I was more than offended. I got in one of the only fights I've ever been in, and Patrick ended up bloody and walking funny.
When I accidentally got a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier for a college roommate, I was pretty offended. Once I was moved to my own room, I mostly got over it. And once he proved to be a paranoid schizophrenic speed-head, I got over it the rest of the way.
The thing of it is, a lot of stuff like this tends to blend together, and even out. Whenever I hear the Holocaust denied, or Nazi sympathies echoed, or virulently anti-Israel rhetoric employing foul names and disgusting accusations, or so on, I am offended. A lot. At this point, it all offends me about the same, I don't know what would push something out as much more offensive. Anti-Semitism all sucks. Frankly, I guess what really offends me most is that I've lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Los Angeles, California; Santa Cruz, California; and Jerusalem; and I found at least some anti-Semitism in every one of those places. At every age I have been, in every year I have lived, there it is. It's not even seventy years after the Holocaust, and there is anti-Semitism still to be found, even in some of the most progressive, Jew-friendly places on earth. And then all of my left-liberal friends (given that I am politically left-liberal, but differ with them in a couple of issues) express surprise when I bring up anti-Semitism in our debates, and tell me they thought that all that was history, ended with the Holocaust....