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In 2009, one (presumably) Jewish person called another (presumably) non-Jewish person a “shkisa,” and the Toronto Police Service categorized the act as a hate crime. Menachem Kaiser wonders: Is “shiksa” pejorative? The word has been in use for so long in so many shifting contexts that your dictionary is useless here even as a spelling guide. (“Shiksa,” “shikse,” “schikse,”and “shicksa” have all had their moment.) The common understanding of “shiksa” (i.e., “a vaguely-pejorative term for gentile woman”) might be technically right, but it sieves out everything interesting about the word: the complex and layered notions of sexuality, its containment of both self-righteousness and self-loathing, the embedded yearning for and guilt of assimilation — in short, all the accrued (if often discarded) cultural valency of a word whose meaning has increasingly strayed from its Old World origin. Read the rest of “Anti-non-semitism: An investigation of the shiksa” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

In 2009, one (presumably) Jewish person called another (presumably) non-Jewish person a “shkisa,” and the Toronto Police Service categorized the act as a hate crime. Menachem Kaiser wonders:

Is “shiksa” pejorative? The word has been in use for so long in so many shifting contexts that your dictionary is useless here even as a spelling guide. (“Shiksa,” “shikse,” “schikse,”and “shicksa” have all had their moment.) The common understanding of “shiksa” (i.e., “a vaguely-pejorative term for gentile woman”) might be technically right, but it sieves out everything interesting about the word: the complex and layered notions of sexuality, its containment of both self-righteousness and self-loathing, the embedded yearning for and guilt of assimilation — in short, all the accrued (if often discarded) cultural valency of a word whose meaning has increasingly strayed from its Old World origin.

Read the rest of “Anti-non-semitism: An investigation of the shiksa” at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

  1. theredshoes reblogged this from lareviewofbooks
  2. obicificaltenaciousd reblogged this from lareviewofbooks and added:
    i thought it just meant ‘hot as fuck non-jewish woman’ tvtropes have you lied to me
  3. lareviewofbooks posted this
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