I would have posted it in that thread if anyone had responded in that thread. They didn’t. Instead, I decided it was prudent not to disrupt it further by apologizing there, and did so instead in the ATMB thread about the topic. I’ll repost it here.
My parents and grandparents are Jewish. I was learning for a Bar Mitzvah before my 10-year-old self got impudent and decided I couldn’t be bothered to learn the language. This was obviously a stupid joke rather than any attempt at actual racism - I even made it clear that that was the case, and then wrote an actual pest. I don’t know why it’s getting this response. I don’t even think it was the first joke of that type in that thread; you definitely get jokes like this in a lot of such threads (someone else wrote “Politicians” too). It didn’t even disrupt the thread - if it had, I would have pointed out that it was a bad joke and apologized. Hell, I’ll do that anyways - I’m sorry I made a dumb, antisemitic joke. I do think this response is somewhat overblown.
And then again:
Again, I’m sorry. It was a tasteless joke. I read the thread title and and thought “man, this is just begging for a throwaway one-liner gag”. I figured that I wasn’t the only one who thought that. I probably should have known better, but this is the kind of throwaway gag my friends here in Munich (my friends who are not racist, anti-Semitic or the like) are liable to throw out there when we’re sitting around shooting the shit. Anti-Semitic humor is actually rather common here in casual settings - not because Germans hate Jews, but because it’s so clear that any real anti-Semitism will lead to society telling you “go fuck yourself, we don’t want your kind” in no uncertain terms that nobody feels particularly bad about it. It’s like joking about gay stereotypes in your local GSA meeting. Which I think is a healthy attitude. There’s nothing wrong with some throwaway racist jokes so long as the actual racism doesn’t rear its ugly head and everyone understands that it’s, well, a throwaway racist joke.
I apologize for offending some sensibilities, and I realize that the language of that particular joke pushed it a little further into “malicious” territory than is generally welcome on this board.
Now, I’m definitely an abrasive asshole for a variety of reasons (see also: my typical response to incredibly stupid posts - the reason why I’m on such thin ice with the moderators) but racism and anti-semitism are not among them. I made a stupid joke. I’m sorry.