Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 14, 1993 TAG: 9302110049
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
JEWS MUST NEVER ABANDON THEIR NAME
"He looks like a Jew."The first time I ever heard words to that effect, I was a freshman at a university that had almost twice as many students as there were people in the small North Carolina town I'd come from.
I was baffled. I had no idea what a Jew was supposed to look like. Back home there was no synagogue; I'd never met anyone I knew was Jewish, though I'm sure there must have been a few even in so small a place.
What I knew of Jews I got from TV. I guess I knew that there were some comedians on the Ed Sullivan Show who made jokes about their Jewishness, but they didn't look any different to me.
As a kid in the 1950s, much of TV - cartoons and movies, in particular - had World War II as a theme. In those programs, the word "Jew" most often came out of the mouth of the Nazi villain.
So, when I heard "Jew," it was nearly always as if it was accompanied by spit. The way the Nazis said it. The way the people who killed Jews with no more thought than if they were ants said it. The way people who bulldozed Jewish bodies into mass graves or incinerated them like garbage said the word. The way Anne Frank heard it.
I was taught how wrong that was. I was taught that with the Christian beliefs I was being taught came the conviction that God maintained a special relationship with the Jewish people. That their persecution should never be repeated.
But it was hard for me to get over that image of the Nazi Gestapo agent screaming "Jew" the same way I'd heard some people back home yell out the word "nigger."
The first time I interviewed a rabbi, I was taken aback by how freely he talked about how "Jews do this" or "Jews believe that." I almost choked on the word. It was an incredibly powerful reaction that I was ashamed of and embarrassed about for some time.
Then I came to learn that I wasn't the only person uncomfortable with the legacy of the Nazis - indeed, centuries of anti-semitism.
On a television talk show recently, in fact, a man was talking about how he always referred to himself as a "Jewish person" - never as "a Jew." "Jew" had been forever stained as an epithet by the Nazis and every other anti-semite, the man argued, so he wouldn't use it to describe himself or any other "Jewish person."
Only a day or two later I was at a meeting of a Protestant group where a man with a dark, short beard rose to address the packed house. As he spoke against a proposal obviously favored by the majority of those present, there was some mumbling in the crowd.
From the standing-room crowd peering in through the back doors of the sanctuary, one man spoke just loudly enough for the four or five around him to hear. "He's not one of us," he said twice. "He looks like a Jew." Another man agreed; a few others - most likely ordained Christian ministers - chuckled.
The man who made the observation didn't spit when he said the word "Jew." He didn't modify the word with any adjectives. But it seemed painfully obvious to at least one witness who overheard it - and the reaction to it - that the intent was an insult.
No one who heard the remark protested it as unworthy of Christians - or just plain wrong for anybody.
It was exactly the situation the Jewish man on the TV show had been talking about. "Jew" was just another "nigger" word.
But it seems to me that abandoning the word is to let the Nazis win. A half-century after closing their extermination camps, we should not be willing to give in now to the hatred that built them.
Jews mustn't abandon their good name. And those of us who are not Jews should defend it just as fiercely as those who bear it.
Cody Lowe reports on religious issues for this newspaper.