#smartJews- The Tricky Nature of Language, the Answer to Apathy
Laptops open, my seniors stared at the blinking cursor on their screen, waiting for flat, specific instructions-- a kind of “just tell us what to post so we can please you and be done with this.” When I had announced my Shakespeare Twitter project that day, the floor almost caved in with the weight of their groans. Most of them didn’t have a Twitter account, didn’t want to use Twitter, and expressed that Twitter was completely stupid and annoying. My pitch that I needed their help so that I could use it in a later project with younger students did nothing to assuage their reluctance. Dutifully, they all signed up, resolutely refusing to believe that Merchant of Venice and Twitter would enjoy a marriage. In effort to shake them from their reluctant moorings, I directed them to a couple of example posts involving the so-called “cake wars” in the States, using the litigious nature of the cases to probe their ideas about Justice and allowing them to respond via Twitter, playing with the hashtag conventions, using the options given as well as coming up with their own thematic ones. Though not yet convincing them of the assignment’s worth, the activity did begin a discussion of the themes and motifs in Act 1 of Merchant.
My goal, however, is for the kids to take over the conversation, for them to have some intrinsic motivation to participate in the study of the play. Twitter itself is not the ultimate goal, but the tool by which students engage in discussion and own the literature themselves. While I know that “seeding the project” on the front end by responding frequently to their tweets is necessary, I hope to do that less and less as their participation grows.
It didn’t take long for things to get interesting. One of my students decided that Bassanio, the romantic hero of the play, is an idiot. He posted “I hope Bassanio fails,” generating lots of responses from his peers along with laughter and encouragment from me. Emboldened, he next tweeted, “This is the perfect time for Shylock, the Jew, the get his revenge. #Flesh.” Awesome! While not a personal fan of Revenge or those who seek it, and a little uncomfortable with the phrase “the Jew,” I felt like we were getting somewhere with associating the literature of Shakespeare’s work into the modern medium of Twitter. Gratified that things were taking off, I looked forward to checking my TweetDeck the next day. When I got to school the next morning, I opened it up and saw “I can see [Shylock’s] decisions are not affected by his emotions..surely a wise way to deal with money! #PateKIS #smartJews.” My first response was, “Oh whoa! My name is associated with “#smartJews!” Great. What kind of tweets and replies am I now going to get? My colleague and I spent the better part of a half-hour trolling Google for references to this hashtag to see what kind of conversations are associated with it. It turns out that it’s pretty benign, but it led to one of the best conversations we have had as a class about language.
What was it about “#smartJews” that triggered such a response in me? She was complimenting him, so why the immediate “oh no?” Louis C.K. once said in his stand-up that the term “Jew” was a strange one because it was not only the proper term for someone of a particular ethnic group, but also the slur at the same time. You just put a little “stank” on it, and you’ve got a slur. I brought this up to the kids, that many people often say "Jewish + Noun" to reinforce a sense of politeness. My reaction was also connected to the “smart” part. Smart people are awesome, and for the students, the fact that Shylock is clever is good, making him likeable. So, I asked them if intelligence can ever be negative. Can I compliment be an insult at the same time? I think that, in terms of the Jewish stereotypes that inform this play, the answer has to be yes. So, I asked: Are there words that express intelligence as a negative quality? They quickly generated a list that included “crafty, sneaky, sly.” I then asked them if they connected any animal to those terms, and they immediately answered, “a rat.” One of the kids then said, “oooohhhhhh, the Holocaust.” Yeah. That was it. We have a quality that seems good, but also taps into historic demonization of a particular group. It was indirect and, for them, pretty distant since their main knowledge of anti-Semitism comes from academic study rather than witnessing anything first-hand. They also are not part of any national conversations in the States that would treat anti-Semitism. We talked a lot about language that day and the power of words. And the responses on Twitter tripled.
