Friday, June 5, 2009

Jewish Racism



These students are an embarrassment to Judaism, even if the filmmaker's intentions are suspect. I am sad that Jewish people- drunk, stoned, American, Israeli, young, dumb, whatever-would respond this way to a documentary filmmaker. I also encountered a fair amount of bigotry in Israel that shocked me. However, I encounter a fair amount of bigotry in America...every day...and even in Seattle. Bigotry is awful, unsettling, disgusting wherever you find it. And it's everywhere.

5 comments:

Neal said...

Drunk people say stupid shit. I'm not as troubled as you are by this, but I'm not sure why. It's a gut response, I guess, or lack thereof, on my part. I've acted like an idiot while drunk, just not (as far as I know and have been told) like a racist idiot. When I see some backwards-baseball-cap-wearing dude blabbing into the camera about his grandmother's concentration-camp number, I just want to laugh. It's hard for me to take that seriously, even though maybe I should.

Steven Blum said...

I agree there's some ironic detachment going on here but still: invoking aushwitz? calling him a nazi? a terrorist?

genmaichai said...

disgusting

Michael Strangeways said...

dude..."emberassment"?

wtf?!?

really?

a certain tutor named Chelsea would be very "emberessed" if she found out one of her students didn't know how to use spellcheck...

Steven Blum said...

I just have NO idea what you're talking about.