Dilution of meaning is familiar in a way that can make us feel comfortable, or even worse, comfortably righteous. That’s a feeling the university presidents, or their scriptwriters, might have hoped to invoke. The reliably available terms of disapproval and approval, genocide and patriotism, antisemitism and democracy, convey large scale and importance, but sometimes while avoiding the heavy cost of paying actual attention. The more important the word, the more its meaning may be a matter of degree, from not much to quite a lot. The attainment of meaning requires work. The more important the meaning, the harder the work. Language is haunted.
Here are a few Jewish examples — wisps of meaning not to condemn but to recognize:
The word “antisemitism” in the spelling I just used, without a hyphen, is considered preferable because “anti-semitism,” or even worse “anti-Semitism,” implies the legitimacy of a discredited, racialist set of ideas, an old quasi-scholarly notion of Semitic with a capital S from the same swamp as “Aryan.” Even the hyphen, that minimal blip of punctuation, conveys into the present its little cargo of historical ghosts and violations.
I never see any more the phrase “Jews and minorities.” Good riddance to those well-meaning words that used to give me, along with others in the roughly 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population who are Jews (0.2 percent of the world), a wincing chuckle. Even the legitimate, standard-issue phrase “people of color” raises its teeny backwash. Possibly, some people who use it don’t realize that Jews were not white people in our country until recently — thus, at some point, neither white nor of color?
Certainly there have been times and places where we were not white, recent and nearby. Around 1970, when I lived in the town of Wellesley, Mass., as a college teacher, my family and I occupied faculty housing. Thanks to that fringe benefit, we didn’t need to worry that at least some of Wellesley’s residential neighborhoods were said to be restricted by a real estate provision that forbade selling a house to Jews. That kind of covert agreement was called a “covenant”— a biblical-sounding term that asserted a weirdly powerful, absurd authority. Even the expression a Black or Brown or Asian person might use about positions of authority — “I’d like to see someone in that office who looks like me” — can cause a queasy twinge at the word “looks.” Stereotypes of “looking Jewish” are repellent, the stuff of Nazi propaganda. And please don’t tell us we are smarter than other people. (I’m always tempted to answer that one with, “You’ve never met my Cousin Barney.”)
One of the first pieces of academic mail I received as a young professor informed me that the trustees had amended Wellesley College’s charter, so that faculty members were no longer required to be “Christian” men and women. “Phew,” I could joke to myself, “just in time.”