Hath not a Jew etc.

[words have meaning, chapter 2,379]

Yesterday, as you may well know, the president of the United States, at a rally in Iowa, referring, as always, dishonestly, to the contents and implications of his newly passed Doomsday Bill, commented:

Think of that: no death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker and, in some cases, shylocks and bad people. They took away a lot of, a lot of family. They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.

This morning, CNN had this to say:

President Donald Trump said early Friday that he wasn’t aware that some people view the word “Shylock” as antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral money lenders.

Translated into unshitty journalism, that would read:

President Donald Trump claimed early Friday that he wasn’t aware that the word “shylock” is antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral moneylenders.

Noting that, for references not explicitly and specifically concerning Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice character, lowercasing “shylock” is more appropriate than capping it, and also that “moneylenders” is, by now,¹ a single word. As well, I might have opted for a word less fancy-schmancy and, in the context, weaselly than “amoral” (“unscrupulous” would do the trick just fine, or “unethical”), but let’s not split further hairs.

To be sure, the word “shylock” is inarguably antisemitic—and not to be confused, by the bye, with the word “shyster,” which is applied to corrupt lawyers rather than to corrupt moneylenders/bankers/usurers and which is not antisemitic.²

Know your slurs.

The president of the United States now claims, re the word’s antisemitism, “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”

He is, to be sure, lying. Or as The New York Times might put it: falsely claiming.

As of 10:00 Pacific time this morning, speaking of The New York Times, The New York Times has mentioned the use of the slur only in passing, in one of their feed snippets. Perhaps they’re exhausted from rummaging through Zohran Mamdani’s college applications.

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A passing thought: It would have been amazing to have heard the president attempt to pronounce “usurers.”

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Not much (not any) better from The Washington Post, I note:

President Donald Trump used a term many consider to be an antisemitic slur while referencing unscrupulous bankers during a campaign-style rally in Iowa on Thursday night.

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Post-publication addendum: Finally (check out the timestamp), from The New York Times:

Note, of course, that only Jewish Democrats are upset. Jewish Republicans and goyim at large are, presumably, perfectly happy.

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Post-post publication addendum: The Times has updated itself. Somehow I am not comforted. If anything, anything but.

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A bit of housekeeping:

When I kicked off this series about a year and a half ago, I pledged that I would not conceal any of my posts behind a paywall, and I am holding to that pledge: All posts, back to the very first, remain available to all readers.

That said, I find myself lately, after each new post, spending an inordinate amount of time monitoring the comments section underneath, which—and you may well be unaware of this, because I remove, as quickly as I can, both the comments and the commenters in question—is regularly littered with remarks I find, at the least, irrelevant and, in the extreme, condescending and discourteous if not outright offensive, either to me or, worse, to other commenters.

So I’m going to experiment going forward, with some regret, with limiting comments to paying subscribers, in the expectation that this will cut down on the unseemly racket and also on my post-publication policing, which is not, not to put too fine a point on it, any fun for me.

(I’m not, to be sure, going to retrace my steps over my previous hundred-odd missives and lock down their comments. What’s done is done, as Lady Macbeth says.)

I am, as always, grateful to subscribers, and I am, as always, especially grateful to paying subscribers, who make it possible for me to do this work on the regular.

Quoting my fine friend Andrew Moxon in words that might well be my own:

I do [this] because I love it, and I don’t want people to have to pay to see any of it, even if I do appreciate and rely upon the payment very much.

So why pay? Because while I like doing this, I also think there’s value in it, and while I love the labor, it is significant. And I also think people should be paid for the value of what they create. I believe doing so encourages them to keep creating, and probably makes it a bit easier for them to do so.

That said, as Andrew adds:

Perhaps you can’t afford to pay, or you already have creators you pay and you just can’t prioritize this particular outlet. If so, do not pay! I truly don’t want you to! Please continue reading my stuff as long as you want to, and know that I appreciate you.

Truer words, all of them, and all that good stuff. I am happy that you are here and reading my words; that’s paramount!³

Sallie, as always, is grateful as well.

Happy Fourth, by the bye.

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Cover photograph: Robert B. Mantell as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, c. 1905–10

1. And by “by now” I mean since 1900 or so.

2. Another day we can discuss, carefully, the etymology of “shyster” and the stylistic debate between “antisemitic” and “anti-Semitic.” Today being a holiday, such as it is, I’d like to be relatively brief here.

3. Or universal! Or metro! Or fox!