Why is "Jew" not a slur?

[Flywheel]

@UDS

But if the usage was I’m Catholic, you’re Protestant, he’s a Jew - that seems just a bit off to me.

You know how Louis CK says you can turn “Jew” into a slur just by putting the right “stank” on it? Well, I knew someone who did that to the word “Protestant” by pronouncing it “protest ant.”

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@CC

Not at all. Here’s a stretch from Pinker’s book that makes it a little more clear (I hope). “The reason [for the common reaction similar to the one I mentioned in my earlier post] is that a noun predicate appears to pigeonhole [people] with the stereotype of a category rather than referring to them as an individual who happens to possess a trait. Logicians would be hard-pressed to specify the difference, but psychologically it matters a great deal. You can innocuously describe someone’s hair as* blond, brunette*, or* red* (adjectives), but it’s a trickier business to refer to the whole person, particularly a woman, as a blonde, a brunette, or a redhead (nouns). The terms seem to reduce the woman to a sexually attractive physical feature, and to typecast her, according to old stereotypes, as flighty, sophisticated, or hot-tempered.” etc.
Similarly, referring to someone as a Jew seems to reduce a person to a stereotype, and saying that they’re Jewish says only that among all other characteristics and factors about that person, that’s just another thing to be noted. As he says, more psychological than logical.
That help?

Not really. But it tells me this is probably one of those things I won’t understand regardless of how it’s explained. A valiant effort.

[dougie_monty]

@Flywheel

You know how Louis CK says you can turn “Jew” into a slur just by putting the right “stank” on it? Well, I knew someone who did that to the word “Protestant” by pronouncing it “protest ant.”

We do that here all the time. Those damn little critters have invaded our home and they are everywhere, even in places where we don’t keep food. We * certainly * protest ants.

[Johanna]

@RivkahChaya

If you want the Jewish version of the n-word, it’s “Yid.” That’s the Yiddish word for Jew, and Jews use it to refer to themselves a lot, including sometimes when they do something stupid, when they might say “Yiddisher kop!” (Jewish head), but would be offended if a gentile said this. FWIW, when gentiles do something gentile-ish, sometimes Jews say “goyisher kop,” but more likely just “der goyim.” It would usually be for something like asking “Why are you having your son’s bar mitzvah on Christmas?” though (I got asked a question along those lines once), which is a less serious thing than the sort of thing that might lead someone to say “Yiddisher kop,” which pretty much equals saying “What a stupid Jew.”

That sounds similar to a self-deprecatory locution in Turkish. When someone bungles up something, they call it “Türkiş.” According to the eminent (and fun) scholar of Turkish language, G.L. Lewis, the explanation for this has a couple of hypotheses:

The word iş means ‘job’. Written as two words, “Türk iş” means ‘Turk job’, being self-deprecatory humor for messing things up. (Rivkah, might they have learned this from the many Sefardim who emigrated to the Ottoman lands after 1492? Or is it just an Ashkenaz thing?)

Or they got the single word from German officers rolling their eyeballs while exclaiming “Türkisch!” in exasperation at late-Ottoman-era screwups.

[CC]

While I’m familiar with deprecating terms like goyishe kopf and Yiddishe kopf, I didn’t know this orientation existed in Turkish, too. But it’s somehow gratifying to discover that so many different ethnicities have this same ethic - we can say what doofuses we are, although, by god, you’d better not. There’s still hope, when people can laugh at themselves. Looking at the world today, it doesn’t seem like it, but I guess it’s true.

[jtur88]

@Captain_Amazing

The offense is grammatical. It might be something else beyond, but “Jew” is a noun. In the sentence “He’s a Jew lawyer”, “Jew” is modifying lawyer, which means it takes an adjectival form, and the adjectival form of “Jew” is “Jewish”, so “He’s a Jewish lawyer” is grammatically correct. It’s the same reason that while you might say, “He’s Jewish”, you’d never say, “He’s a Jewish” (unless you were Chico Marx, who was a-Jewish).

There could be a double entendre there (as in “He’s a criminal lawyer”), and ideally, a distinction should be made, if possible, between a lawyer who specializes in representing Jews, and a lawyer who is himself Jewish.

If I heard someone called a Jew Lawyer, my reaction at first would be to assume that the speaker is either meaning it a slur, or saying he represents Jews, or both.

[Ranger_Jeff]

@jtur88

If I heard someone called a Jew Lawyer, my reaction at first would be to assume that the speaker is either meaning it a slur, or saying he represents Jews, or both.

I’d think of it as a slur. I find using Jew as an adjective offensive.

[CC]

@jtur88

…If I heard someone called a Jew Lawyer, my reaction at first would be to assume that the speaker is either meaning it a slur, or saying he represents Jews, or both.

This is amazing! With all due respect, you are really naive. There isn’t such a thing as a lawyer who “represents Jews”. If you were to take that expression as benignly as your post implies, you would be revealing a great gulf in your understanding of culture and cultural sensitivity. A “Jew lawyer” is an offensive term. I believe you should try to learn and understand that, even if you don’t know it at this point in your life. I can’t think of a parallel expression that would illustrate the fact, but believe me, such a term would rankle virtually any Jew (regardless of how it was meant) and probably most aware non-Jews. If it didn’t, it would show a flaming lack of understanding.

[UDS]

@jtur88

There could be a double entendre there (as in “He’s a criminal lawyer”), and ideally, a distinction should be made, if possible, between a lawyer who specializes in representing Jews, and a lawyer who is himself Jewish.

If I heard someone called a Jew Lawyer, my reaction at first would be to assume that the speaker is either meaning it a slur, or saying he represents Jews, or both.

A criminal lawyer isn’t one who represents criminal lawyers; he’s one who practices criminal law. Prosecutors as well as defenders are criminal lawyers.

It would never occur to me that a “Jew lawyer” was one who represented Jews. I couldn’t possibly understand as anything other than a pejorative for a Jewish lawyer.

[RivkahChaya]

@UDS

A criminal lawyer isn’t one who represents criminal lawyers; he’s one who practices criminal law. Prosecutors as well as defenders are criminal lawyers.

It would never occur to me that a “Jew lawyer” was one who represented Jews. I couldn’t possibly understand as anything other than a pejorative for a Jewish lawyer.

If there is such a thing as a lawyer who represented Jews, or Jewish interests, the person, who would not necessarily be a Jew, would be an “ADL lawyer,” or “a first amendment lawyer specializing in issues affecting Jews and Judaism.”

I can’t imagine why there would be a lawyer who specialized in representing, for example, Jews accused of crimes, because unlike other minorities, Jews do not have a history of disproportionate incarceration due to poor representation or prejudices of the jury. About the only special issues Jews have faced is the sort of discrimination that would come under the purview of an ADL lawyer.

I would never call an ADL lawyer “a Jew lawyer.”

[UDS]

I ask myself if there is such a thing as “Jewish law”, analagous to criminal law or patent law, such that practioners could plausibly be called “Jewish lawyers”.

And, at a pinch, there is. You could say that a rabbinical court deals with issues of Jewish law, and that practitioners in those courts are therefore Jewish lawyers.

But, in fact, we don’t say that, because it would be confusing. In most contexts “Jewish lawyer” suggests a lawyer who is a Jew, not a practioner in a beth din. I don’t know what term is commonly used for such practitioners, but I’m willing to bet that it’s not “Jewish lawyer”. (I note that practioners in the tribunals of the Catholic church are not “Catholic lawyers”; they’re “canon lawyers”.)

As for “Jew lawyer”? That’s always going to be a slur.

[jtur88]

@CC

This is amazing! With all due respect, you are really naive. There isn’t such a thing as a lawyer who “represents Jews”. If you were to take that expression as benignly as your post implies, you would be revealing a great gulf in your understanding of culture and cultural sensitivity. A “Jew lawyer” is an offensive term. I believe you should try to learn and understand that, even if you don’t know it at this point in your life. I can’t think of a parallel expression that would illustrate the fact, but believe me, such a term would rankle virtually any Jew (regardless of how it was meant) and probably most aware non-Jews. If it didn’t, it would show a flaming lack of understanding.

There may not be any such thing, but there certainly could be. There are lawyers who specialize in representing immigrants, farmers, entertainers, handicapped, all sorts of groups of people who have litigation unique to their special interests. There could be a lawyer, for example, who specializes in family law cases involving clients who incorporate Jewish customs in their succession or child custody provisions.

Furthermore, I did not imply that “Jew Lawyer” would not fall on anyone’s ears as an offensive term, but only that does not mean the same thing as “Jewish Lawyer”. To imply that an expression that sounds offensive to you, by that fact alone, makes the uttering of the expression a willful act with the intent to be offensive is, with all due respect, really naive.