Every time I hear the word “Jew” tacked on to a pun, I do not know how to feel, particularly because I am a Jew who loves puns. For five years now, I have gone to a school whose name was applied to a Jewish pun on account of its striking Jewish population. Imagine my consternation when, after four years at New Trier High School — you can imagine the pun — I found out that my next school was known by some as Jewlane. If I ever think about graduate school, I must consciously avoid, lest I achieve the trifecta of Jewish puns, all New York or New Jersey state schools. This feeling is common.
Most Tulanian Jews, so far as I can tell, hesitate to accept the nickname “Jewlane.” None of us deny its cleverness or its accuracy. We acknowledge that the word “Jew,” in its familiar vowel and monosyllabism, makes for ripe puns. Of the countless examples, few work as well as “Jewlane.” We also recognize that Tulane University has a lot of Jews; estimates put the number between 25% and 30% of the student body — far more than the 10% required in order for an institution to be strikingly Jewish. The negative history of wordplay with the term “Jew” keeps us from embracing the nickname. Though a Jewish pun does not need to be derogatory, it almost always is. It can therefore be very difficult when we hear someone say “Jewlane” to know whether it is an innocent observation of Tulane’s demographic makeup or a cloaked expression of what Norman Mailer used to call “a gentleman’s antisemitism.”
The ambiguity of the pun flows from its equally ambiguous root word, Jew, which has never had one concrete meaning — except, of course, when it is used as a verb, as in, “You Jewed me out of those twenty bucks.” The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, it is clear, struggled to define it: definition 1A. the official one, is “A member of a people whose traditional religion is Judaism…,” while definition 1B, official in its own way, is “A hostile or contemptuous term for: a Jewish person, especially one regarded stereotypically as scheming or excessively concerned with making or saving money; (also) a non-Jewish person regarded in this way.” The last part of the second definition is crucial, since it allows for “Jew” to mean “people I do not like,” as it has in Henry Ford’s publications, Charles Lindburg’s speeches, Richard Nixon’s Oval Office Tapes and more recently, Kanye West’s tweets.
The constant use of the second definition of “Jew” blurs the meaning of the first. The more sensitive gentiles nowadays will refrain from using the word at all, saying “Jewish person” instead. Such gestures, though genuine, only affirm the idea that “Jew” is a dirty word, and allow antisemites, by twisting the meaning, to redefine the word itself along with the people to whom it refers. The goal of any Jew, I think, should be to recapture their name, so that one day its alternative definition in the Oxford English Dictionary will be categorized not only as “derogatory” and “offensive,” but as “archaic.”
As it stands, however, “Jew” has two definitions, and it is from the second one — the unfortunate definition 1B — that Jewish puns tend to draw. When a reporter asked Kenny Powers in a press conference, for instance, how he enjoys playing in New York, and he responded, “New York? More like Jew York,” he was not referring to the rich culture of The Children of Abraham, as embodied by definition 1A. Nor is the first definition intended when people say things like, “You passed up LSU for Jewlane?” or “Of course, everyone is snobby at Jewlane.” On the other hand, someone could be using the first definition when they say, “You can definitely find a Kosher meal here. After all, it is Jewlane.”
“Jewlane,” as with the word “Jew” itself, is only bad if you make it that way.
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