This kind of story makes me want to cry. The fact that this is even still a phrase in common parlance is gravely upsetting to me.
The fact is, anti-Semitism has run its historical course. Can we be done with it already? Plus, the idea that Jews are somehow culpable for Jesus’s death is ludicrous, since Jesus himself was a Jew. Surely if the Christian messiah and the ones who killed the Christian messiah are the same ethnicity, that at least cancels itself out historically?
But this kind of racism doesn’t understand logic. You can’t sit down with someone and calmly and rationally discuss their anti-Semitism. Much like the current political climate of Islamophobia, it defies reason and logic, and says far more about the person saying it than the recipient of the slur.
This particular horribleness happened at a high school basketball game in Massachusetts last week. Catholic Memorial Central High School roared “You killed Jesus!” at the mostly-Jewish Newton North High School. True, Newton had called the all-boys school a “sausage fest.”
But “sausage fest” is not equal to “Jesus killers” in any measure.
We need to take these awful slurs out of our cultural lexicon. Any word or phrase that has been used a justification to systematically oppress an ethnic group over centuries does not belong in the mouths of high school students.
The school’s president, Peter Folan, said:
“CM students were reprimanded and each student personally apologized to the principal of Newton North High School and shook his hand before leaving the arena.”
The school may invite the Anti-Defamation League to help them discuss the incident with their students.
The Newton Superintendent said:
“To me, this is an opportunity for Catholic Memorial to really work with their students and hopefully they learn from it… [T]his was obviously way over the line and needs to be addressed.”
The fact that this phrase is even in these students’ vocabularies is the first problem. The second problem is when they should it en masse to Jews. These kids should know better, but they probably just got swept up in the testosterone-heavy atmosphere and the trash talking.
These kids have a chance to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they thought this was a good thing to yell. Let’s hope they take that chance, instead of getting a slap on the wrist.
Featured image is by Phil Roeder, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
