There’s No Need to Reclaim the Word “Jew”

“We Jews recoil from calling ourselves Jews,” writes Mark Oppenheimer, the host of the Jewish podcast Unorthodox, in an op-ed entitled “Reclaiming ‘Jew’” in the April 24 New York Times:

In my experience as an editor at a publication focusing on Jewish news and culture . . . I have noticed how many Jewish writers—me included—avoid calling anyone a “Jew.” I frequently edit articles that mention “Jewish politicians” or “Jewish artists” but not “Jews.”

The reason for this linguistic propensity, Oppenheimer believes, is that “Like our non-Jewish friends, we Jews have been conditioned to think of a ‘Jew’ as something bad. We will say ‘Some really nice Jewish people moved in next door,’ rather than, ‘Some really nice Jews moved in next door.’” And as an example of how such conditioning is built into our English, Oppenheimer cites a recent speech by Donald Trump, given on the occasion of Passover and Easter, in which the American president hoped for an age in which “good people of all faiths, Christians and Muslims and Jewish and Hindu, can follow their hearts and worship according to their conscience.”