Kahaney and able: Corey worries comedians won’t have the freedom to use certain words.

Black Comedy

It's time for "shvartze" to die.

by Liz Spikol

I got an email from my mother last week with the subject line: “We have a black president now.” It would’ve seemed a banal observation if I didn’t open the email, which read: “The word ‘shvartze’ is over.”

My mother was referring to a Yiddish word for an African-American—an ethnic slur roughly analagous to the N-word. I’ve heard some Yiddish speakers argue that shvartze just means black, but that’s an old linguistic canard. No Jew would use it in mixed company.

Unmixed, though? All bets are off.

First, some background. I’m not a joiner. I prefer to cuddle my hamster on my couch, read a book and then take powerful pharmaceuticals that make me feel like I’m traveling to Middle Earth.

But for Christmas Eve my parents and I went to a comedy-dinner show in Chinatown. As soon as I saw the communal tables, I felt uneasy. I always develop an irrational refugee-camp anxiety at shared tables, as though I have to squirrel away morsels for my five children who are huddled inside a tent somewhere. When I see a lazy Susan, I think, The kids are going hungry tonight.

On the plus side, the room was filled with elderly Jews, my favorite demographic. If I have to manufacture conversation, I’d prefer to do so with someone who knows a lot about American history and sex, which any person over 80 does.

On this night, all the teased beauty shop hair and earring-necklace sets made me nostalgic: My own elderly Jews are gone now. My father also got emotional, in his History Channel fashion, saying, “If Hitler had his way, these people wouldn’t be here.”

Sitting on the other side of me, my mother said, “Is your father saying something about the Holocaust?”

They’ve been married 45 years, and it shows.

People were complaining about the service, the food, the traffic … it was home.

But then, above the din of hundreds of people bragging about their children, someone at our table called a waiter “Gunga Din.” Another speculated on women who like “black pipe,” referring to African-American penises.

What the hell? Who were these people? Then the guy across from me joked, “There are two things I hate: prejudice and shvartzes.”

Ah, the s-word. I knew it was coming.

The first time I heard it, as a child, my grandmother complained that the TV news was all about the “shvas.” Later I asked my mother what that meant, and she told me it was a bad word. That was in 1976.

The man who made his “joke” was much younger than my grandmother would be if she were alive (in which case she’d be Methuselah). But he was probably pushing 80, as were the others who made nasty remarks.

Blotting everyone out (a defense mechanism), I developed a hypothesis about immigration, the history of civil rights, landlord-tenant relations and string theory that explained the racist patter at my table. It was complex cultural analysis that played out like this: Jews who would say this shit = 80 and up. Jews who wouldn’t = everyone else.

True, it was tarring rather a large swathe of people with the same brush—doing no great service to Bubbes and Zaydes for Peace. And it discounted the hipster-Jewish bible Heeb magazine, which used the word last year.

But it made me feel better—until Jim David took the stage.

He was the last comedian, and though he isn’t Jewish, he briskly incorporated the word shvartze into his bit, in a clear act of pandering. You go to Chicago, you make jokes about the Cubs. You go to L.A., you make jokes about the traffic. You go to Jewville, you make jokes about blacks?

People roared.

My mother elbowed me for the 37th time that evening and said, “You hear that laughter? That’s the reality.”

Comedian Corey Kahaney, organizer of the Moo Shu Jew Show, says she received great feedback on the event over email. “But then people would say, ‘By the way, we never got our rice,’” she said. “It took everything I had not to write back, ‘It’s coming!’”

She told me she didn’t get any other complaints about the use of the word shvartze, but she absolutely understood why I was upset.

On the other hand, she said, if it were an African-American comedian and an African-American crowd, wouldn’t the comedy be more “inside,” as she put it?

Yes, of course, I said. But though I can imagine Chris Rock using the N-word, I can’t imagine him saying “kike.” There’s a difference between critiquing your own community (as I’m doing here) and using a slur about another.

Jim David used shvartze to describe a woman behind a cash register. Can you imagine Chris Rock saying, “I walked into a store and there was a gook behind the counter”?

Kahaney has dealt with the problem of charged language before. A couple years ago, she created The J.A.P. Show, which paid tribute to women in comedy. The premise was that Rita Rudner, Joan Rivers and other contemporary Jewish female comics inherited the mantle from the generation before. Thus they are the Jewish American princesses of queens like Fanny Brice.

The Anti-Defamation League swung into action, and told her she should change the name of her show, despite its positive intent. “You just can’t use that word,” they said.

She now worries comedians will be afraid to use certain terms at the Moo Shu Jew Show. Will they want to play it if they feel they’re being censored?

I’m not advocating censorship. I’m advocating a new semantic consensus. We’ve done it before, countless times.

Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. all used the word “Negro” in political language and speechifying in the 1950s and ’60s, to cite one imperfect example. Politicians and activists of today could never do the same.

Did we pass a law against “Negro”? Was there widespread censorship that damaged not only our political discourse but our comedy-club patter? These changes in language take place by necessity, as group identities evolve. It doesn’t require censorship; it requires a new understanding of power dynamics, respect for others and an intolerance for ignorance.

So I ask my Jewish brethren—there’s only around 5,000,000 of us in the States; how hard could it be?—to take a stand against this hateful word. After all, as my mother points out, having a black president requires it.

And if there’s one thing our community can certainly agree on, it’s this: Jewish mothers are always right.