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Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the beverage.

The CEO of Goya Foods, until recently a popular brand, if not the most popular, among Latinx consumers, praised Donald Dump, as if to say, “I have no idea who buys our products, and even less what they care about, and even less than that why I should care what they care about, so I’ll just add the most offensive thing I can come up with into the public discourse, dragging the company name down with me.” And it worked like a charm. An instant, ferocious boycott was initiated, and in sympathy with the boycott, the hashtag “Goyaway” came about. It’s a play on “go away,” I think.

Goyaway. To me it sounds like a brand of gentile repellent. Like something you would spray on yourself before going outside to keep a mob of late-19th-century Polish peasants from coming to burn down your shtetl. Something to keep priests from landing on you and sucking your blood. A shield in the war on Christmas.

I recently had an interaction with a Jew who treated the word “goy” as if it were the N word, or at best equivalent to the derogatory shin word for Black person in Yiddish. Goyim, though, is the Hebrew word for gentiles, it is in the Torah, where its literal translation is “nations,” that is, the nations other than the Jews. Goy is not a bad word, as much as Anglophone Ashkenazi dabblers in Yiddish might beg to differ.

It’s interesting, because the day after Goyaway was first trending, the hashtag, JewishPrivilege, also started trending, and Jews on Twitter claimed it, turned it on its head, and used it as a label for their own stories of anti-Jewish oppression. I’ve had a great deal of contact with ghetto, labor, death camp, and death march survivors, so I was familiar with a lot of the material, but some of it – being killed in Ethiopia for being Jewish, jumping from a death camp train to uncertain danger, but at least alive, getting stabbed in front of your house in Odessa, getting pennies thrown at you on the bus, not even too long ago – some stories were outside the Elie Wiesel model, or the Wilna Ghetto narratives, or the mass executions and mass live incinerations with which I was more familiar.

There are so many ways to harass, torture, and kill a Jew! You’d think they’d all been attempted by now. And maybe they have, but the well-played hits and the... read more