What's in a Name?

Today, John Derbyshire gives 2 reasons for use of the word "Jewish" as opposed to "Jew":

(1) The word "Jew" is now very nearly taboo, except in very restricted contexts. You have to say "Jewish person," or some such formula -- though I suppose in ten years or so that will slip into taboo status, too, and we'll all have to use some different formula ("Hebraic-American"?). Why this should happen to words is an interesting question, which I guess linguists have theories about. "Jew" is awfully short and handy, though, and it's a shame to lose it, especially for headline writers and, well, waiters and bartenders, who have a pressing practical need for short, handy words. (Jonathan Miller in "Beyond the Fringe": "I'm not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish, you know...")

(2) The idea that a person can look Jewish is no longer quite respectable, because of our current determination to believe that differences between human groups don't matter a bit. Whatever you may think of this tendency, it kills about 10,000 jokes stone dead -- all those jokes that end with: "That's funny, you don't look Jewish." These jokes have mainly been told by Jews -- oops, Jewish people -- are in fact a component of Jewish folklore. I suppose they can no longer be told, This, too seems to me a shame.

But there may be more to it than that.

According to an old article by Jonah Goldberg:

But in another sense, hearing "Jew" is a bit jarring.

For centuries "Jew" was the preferred pejorative term for Jewish people. For example, "Don't Jew me" meant don't haggle me down to the lowest possible price. "Dirty" or "filthy Jew" were standard parings. Benjamin Disraeli the 19th century British Prime Minister offered perhaps the most famous defense of the word when he was taunted about being a Jew in parliament. "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

Still Hitler was largely successful in smearing the word "Jew." The word was so beaten up that after the Holocaust most American Jews took to saying, "I'm Jewish," rather than say, "I am a Jew."

If Goldberg is right, then in their success in defining "The Occupation" of the "Palestinian" "Homeland", the Arabs are simply following Hitler's succcessful twisting of the very word we use to define ourselves.

Apparently, learning Talmud has taught us how to examine and explain ideas, but still leaves us unable to convince the rightness of our views and who we are--neither to others nor to ourselves.