I was in my third or fourth month at the David Project, an organization founded in 2002 to counter anti-Zionism on college campuses, when one of my co-workers at the desk next to me told me the news. It was a mid-morning in early 2005 and I had just gotten off a long phone conversation with another Christian defender of Israel.
“Dexter, it’s OK,” she said. “You can say it.”
“Say what?”
“Jew.”
“Huh?”
“You can say ‘Jew.’”
“What are you talking about?” I said with a fake smile on my taut face and a pounding heart in my chest. I did not want to have this conversation.
“I’ve been listening to you talk to people on the phone,” she said. “You don’t say ‘Jew.’ You do everything you can to avoid saying it.
“Nah, that’s not true,” I said.
“Listen to yourself,” she said, telling me that her Black friends in Boston had told her the same thing about the word “Black” a few years before.
She was right. I listened to myself talk and discovered that every time I came to a point in the sentence where the next logical word was “Jew,” I would pause and stammer awkwardly, rummage through my mind for a formulation that allowed me to avoid saying the offending J-word, and if necessary, reformulate the sentence altogether. “He’s a . . . Jewish gentlemen”, “He’s . . . of the . . . Jewish faith”, or worst of all, “He’s of the Jewish persuasion.” (Persuasion? Yikes!)
The irony was palpable. Here I was defending the Jewish state, and by extension, the Jewish people, from their detractors, and my co-worker had revealed that I was afflicted with the notion that accurately calling someone a Jew was a bad thing. I remember hearing my boss at the David Project refer to Israel as the Jewish state and wondering to myself, “Do you really wanted to say that? Why not just call it Israel and be done with it. People will know what you’re talking about.”
Inside the 128 Beltway, the rule was that if you wanted to piss someone off, one way to do it was to call them a Jew, and if you were feeling particularly rambunctious, you could put a nasty epithet such as “dirty,” “damn,” or “cheap” before it. It was not something people did very often, but the option was there if you needed it.
In light of all this, there was no telling how the word would sound when it came out of your mouth so the best thing to do was to avoid using the three-letter word altogether. Jewish was a much safer word to use. Years later, a friend of mine would show me a clip from “The Hard J” episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and I nodded with knowing laughter. I was glad to learn the problem wasn’t limited to eastern Massachusetts.
After listening to myself stutter my way around the word Jew, I realized I was a victim of the Jew Taboo and needed to engage in some Jew-Jitsu to overcome it.
The next morning, I looked in the mirror and said, “Jew” with all the confidence and normalcy I could muster. “Jew. Jew. Jew. Jew.” Then I got a bit carried away and said it a dozen or so times in a row in quick succession with no pause in between. “Jewjewjewjewjew…” I laughed at the anxiety I felt at merely saying the word.
Eventually, the anxiety went away and, in the weeks afterwards, I would look for opportunities to say the simple phrase, “He’s a Jew.” I felt like I was pulling a gun from my holster in a shootout at high noon in an old-timey Western. Give me a cowboy hat and a sheriff’s badge and I was all set.
“I can win an argument with you because I can say Jew faster than you,” became my internal motto.
Of course, I began to abuse my newfound power. I was tabling for a now-defunct organization charged with blocking the passage of anti-Israel resolutions at the national gathering of liberal Protestant churches when a woman who supported the passage of such resolutions told me that the word “antisemitism” shouldn’t be allowed in discussions about Israel.
“I agree,” I said. “It’s too scientific, too polite a word to describe what really motivates people who hate Israel. I think we should ban it’s use altogether and insist people use the phrase ‘Jew-hatred’ instead. But that would make life tough for you, because well, you can’t even say the word Jew without wincing. What’s that about?” She looked at me in disbelief and walked away. High noon came early that day.
Once I broke through the Jew taboo, it was liberating. Maybe too liberating. Every time I heard the word “blue” or “you” in a rock song, I’d change it to the J-word with sometimes wildly inappropriate results. Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue” was kind of dicey, but others weren’t so bad. Recently, on a ride back from eating pizza on a Friday night, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” came on. Feeling particularly inspired, I sang along in a perfect falsetto: “Some will win/Some will lose/Some are going to … blame the Jews!”
My friends laughed uproariously. I simply nailed it.
“I’m here all week,” I said.