Seriously, how come I’ve never seen this mentioned anywhere? Not once in my life.
They’ve got big noses, big ears, shifty eyes, bad teeth, their obsessed with money, can’t be trusted for an instant, cowardly, compulsive hagglers, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve always been amused by the fact that no one else seems to notice this, but back when George Lucas made a little thing called Episode I, I remember people being upset about Jar-Jar and the other Gungans talking like Jamaicans, and the Trade Federation guys talking like some bad 1940’s-era Japanese impersonation. Boondocks even did cartoons about Jar-Jar!
But that was it, the way they talked, nothing else, really. And frankly, the other Gungans (besides Jar-Jar and the tubby leader) were kinda neat, I thought, but I digress. The Ferengi are walking, talking stereotypes by comparison.
Just wondering if anyone else sees this, or is it just me?
PS. Sorry if I’ve contributed to anyone’s disillusionment about Star Trek, it’s not my intention.
Oh, and I should note, I’m not saying that they were intended as a slur or that Rodenberry et al are racist, or anything like that; just chuckling at how directly they seem to be based on the charicature.
Wikipedia has it’s own thoughts on their origins as a spoof of studio executive types. It seems to have some merit in explaining some aspects, but certain others still seem odd to me.
Are the Ferengi stereotypically Jewish? Yup. Which is probably at least partially related to the fact that Wallace Shawn, Armin Shimerman, Max Grodenchik and Aron Eisenberg are all Jewish. I’d imagine they incorporated some of the Jewish stereotypes into their characterizations.
I’m not sure about Jeffrey Combs, who played Brunt (and about 25 other characters.)
Pretty much all Star Trek characters are just caricatures of humans with some mental imbalance, monomania, vice or cultural quirk. There really aren’t many that are truly alien.
Anyway, the Ferengi are consciously & implicitly a little bit Jewish, written & played by Jews as a joke. I suspect it’s not anti-Semitic so much as a caricature of manners & stereotypes.
Yeah, I noticed it, but considering that they’re written and played by Jews, well, I saw it more as an inside joke than as something anti-semitic. It’s as though they were making fun of the stereotypes.
There were two female Ferengi characters, IIRC- the “Rules of Acquisition” student who had to disguise herself as a male as females were not allowed to study the RoA (YENTL!) and Quark’s mother, who was played by Andrea Martin.
Now, if I hadn’t heard Andrea years before on a talk show discussing attending Episcopal Church, I’d have sworn she was Jewish (and I don’t know that ethnically, she isn’t).
They tried to push it away from Jewish stereotypng in their very first appearance , when the computer definition of them compared them to “Yankee Horse Traders”. I think they were trying to make the point that the money-obsessed stereotype wasn’t exclusively Jewish (which, indeed, it isn’t. There are plenty of jokes, at least in America, about the penny-pinching habits of the Scottish people). I always took the ears as the exaggerated characteristic, as if they could say “Of course they’re not anti-Semitic stereotypes! They don’t have big Noses! Thety have big Ears!” I get the clear impression that the Trek creative management actually tried to steer clear of most Jewish stereotypes – you haven’t got the Ferengi intellectual thing, for instance. With a few exceptions, the Ferengi weren’t brilliant inventors or thinkers.
Recall that the Ferengi in their original incarnations weren’t stereotypically Jewish. They were stereotypically hilariously creepy with their skulking about and their electro-whips.
I remember my dad showing dismay over the “Space-Jews.” I thought he was just being reactionary about it, but yeah, there’s a lot of similarity to the whole anti-semitic image.
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