Hey, there! Log in / Register
You Jews
By adamg on Thu, 11/08/2007 - 1:33pm
The Patriot-Ledger reports on an alleged interchange between former Brookline School Superintendent Richard Silverman and a School Committee member in Randolph, where he now works, over Silverman's request for a five-day bereavement leave:
"It is not the standard in industry," Silverman quoted Kenney as saying. "Besides, don't you Jews plant them within 24 hours?" ...
"I don't see any side curls on your head, so what the hell do you need five days of bereavement leave for?" ...
Free tagging:
Ad:
Comments
Like my grandmother used to say:
From a pig you get sh*t. (old Yiddish proverb)
She was probably drunk when she said it (it was after 9am, wasn't it?)
I believe in fighting sterotypes with stereotypes.
Oh, why not... I'm sure her
Oh, why not...
I'm sure her remarks will go over big at the Knights of Columbus Friday Night Fish Fry.
What is it with the Irish and the Jews?
What is it with the Irish and the Jews? I've probably heard more anti-semitic ranting from Irish than any other folks. I went to a dinner with my friend Scannell and his (Irish) childhood friends from Southie, and it immediately became a parade of Jew jokes and complaining about how the Potato Famine monument was so small and the Holocaust Memorial was so big.
I'm sure our resident sociologists have some good theories about this.
What Is It With...
... folks who make blanket statements concerning ANY ethnicity based on a small sampling?
It's skewed, is what it is - just like anything else based on a minimum of information. It may be true for the small sample, but not so much for the ethnic group as a whole.
I'd say that the Irish folk you encountered had their attitudes shaped by a lack of interaction with a sufficient number of Jewish people, just as you may have had your judgement concerning the interactions between Irish and Jews similarly shaped.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Nevertheless, Kenyans seem to run faster than anyone else
based on recent history, anyway.
Oh, jeez
Are all Kenyans fast? Or are the Kenyans who win marathons an elite group of people who, basically, spend all their time running through the Kenyan highlands while their counterparts here in the U.S. largely sit on the couch eating fried Mars Bars as they wonder whether it's worth the effort to pick up the remote to change from the Nashville Channel to "Dancing with the Stars," because, gosh, they want to see what's going to happen to Marie Osmond this week.
Based upon my personal
Based upon my personal viewing experience, all Mormons who dance faint.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Plus they all have great
Plus they all have great pantries!
Indeed
Indeed, very well-stocked.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
You're probably right
I'd bet that you know more Boston Irish than I do, so you have a larger sample. If you say that my experience was uncharacteristic, I'll believe you.
I'm just reacting to what was one of the less pleasant nights of my life, combined with two incidents posted here in the past week about Irish people spewing anti-semitic comments. It seemed like a trend.
But I'm happy to believe I'm wrong about this.
No Problem, Gareth
No problem, Gareth.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, of course. I ran into more than my share of it when I was dating Jewish women and hearing some ridiculous stereotypical jokes from the less-enlightened of my neighborhood cronies, back in the day. But times change and I think that people do, too - however slowly. I'd be amazed to hear those same things from those same people nowadays.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
What is it with Rednecks?
Well, lets see. In the big cities, the Irish and Jews were kept segregated into their ghettos when they weren't kept busy fighting each other over scraps. That kept them from getting into any of that pesky solidarity stuff and overthrowing the dominant order.
In the South, impoverished whites were just as easily set against people of color (I say that because the roster is changing ...) for much of the same reasons.
MLK was trying to start a "Poor Peoples' Movement" when he was gunned down.
no
I grew up with Irish relatives and Irish neighbors... never once did I hear any jokes about people who are Jewish and never once did I hear any anti-semitic comments. Sorry, but your comment pisses me off.
Sorry
I grew up with mostly Scots-Irish Appalachian types, and the lot of them mostly complained about blacks. They saw so few Jews down in Kentucky that they really believed they had horns on their heads; consequently, they'd never be able to recognize a Jew to pick on him.
Active and vehement anti-semitism is something I think only exists in places with enough Jews for everybody to have seen one, e.g. Massachusetts.
I've heard people I don't know well and don't much like say obnoxious things, but the evening I refer to was particularly unpleasant because it involved people I thought were friends. I guess they thought I was sufficiently 'one of them' to involve me in the Jew-bashing. Like Mr. Sullivan says, it was probably somewhat random that I was the only person there who wasn't Irish and the only one there who thought jokes about the Holocaust weren't funny.
Anyone want to venture a
Anyone want to venture a guess why black families cannot buy homes in some parts of Southie, Charlestown and Dorchester, and why many properties for sale in those neighborhoods are unlisted?
Nope
That's a bullshit statement ...
Unlisted properties? Mostly in Chinatown.
That's not a bullshit
That's not a bullshit statement. Scratch the surface a bit and see what pressures home sellers in certain parts of the city face from their neighbors, and how those pressures influence selling practices.
Oh, so all those people of color I see
when I go to work in Charlestown are just traveling several miles out of their way and onto an isolated peninsula to cross streets, and shop at Johnny's Foodmaster.
Uh huh.
That was then, this is now. What once was in that space is no longer. The main thing keeping people of any type from buying property in Charlestown is home prices. It also puts pressure on elders and estates to sell within families because people will never have a home otherwise. That is the case everywhere that prices are extreme, not just Charlestown.
Could it be an example of in-yer-face Boston rudeness?
Being a nicely brought up polite Canadian who suffered agonies from in-your-face-I'm-proving-I'm-honest-by-being-really-rude Bostonians, I cringed at "you Jews" but I also wondered if this was not just one Boston way of saying "No way are you getting five days leave by pretending to be all-of-a-sudden-religious. You can't snow me, bub." My guess is that one normal Boston response to this would be "F--you, you anti-Semitic @#$%. Just because you break the ten commandments every Saturday night in some dive in JP doesn't make you an expert on my Judaism." To which the super would say, "Huh!" And the guy would get his five days and no hard feelings. Of course, raising a huge stink and possibly suing also strike me as traditional Boston methods of social interaction.
Speaking of bigotry...
...thanks for the gratuitous anti-Catholic remark, courageous Anonymous. Class-ay!
Reading in
Did Catholicism get sole custody of the Ten Commandments recently? Just wondering.
Er..
Certainly not. That was my point--or rather, the point of the bereaved worker I invented in my head. Note the "just because...you're not an expert on my Judaism" bit.
Fire with Fire
I think the right answer along those lines is "Actually, we're planning to give him a proper wake. So I need three days for the wake plus two to sober up."
Shabbat = Friday night
Shabbat (the Jewish sabbath) begins Friday at sundown and ends Saturday at sundown. So it's totally OK to go out on a Saturday night. It's going out on a Friday night that would be violating Shabbat.
Growing up Jewish on the South Shore
Dave Alpert read the article and writes that it doesn't surprise him in the least, based on his experience growing up as one of the few Jews in Hull:
Speaking of which
I was at an academic conference, and a professor referred the local culture he had immigated to as "whitey." I had never actually heard that word used in public before, not to mention a university, or, in fact, in Canada. Ummm. Is that word still considered offensive in, for example, Boston? Personally, I felt offended. I mean, the guy hasn't been in his community that long; it seems kind of narrow minded to refer to its people as "whitey." Anyone care to expound on the offensiveness or inoffensiveness of whitey? Nobody please confuse the issue further with Whitey Bulger. Thanks.