I think it's the direct connection you're seeing from the lenders to the big New York firms that I'm missing. The people who are actually giving out huge amounts of money to average Americans mostly work for places like BofA and aren't anything like Jewish. You have to make the connection from there to the market and the underlying market forces that led to the moneylending bonanza (a connection I doubt Palin understands). Is the myth of Jewish moneylenders still active and something that an average "Joe Six-Pack" will pick up on immediately? I guess I think people like Palin and her supporters are generally so ignorant that even historical forms of anti-semitism are probably beyond them. I'd almost be happy to be wrong--it would mean she's aware of at least some history, even if it's bad stuff.
Yeah, Joe Six-Pack loves the story in the New Testament about Jesus breaking up the moneylenders in the temple, and still extrapolates to presume that all Jews are bankers or Hollywood producers. It's still what happens in regions where the Jewish communities are few and far between and most folks don't like to drive an hour or more to temple so that means a lot of small towns with no Jewish residents at all. It's sort of a subliminable thing, but yes, that association of Jews with lending is, sadly, still there.
Yeah, thanks for that note. I know certainly that I've seen other people called out for (what they thought were "harmless") praises of Jews as being "good with money" and so forth, and I do think that there's still that association. That said, you may all be right that it's too complex a set of associations for most people to have picked up on - though her speechwriters are masters of subliminal messaging.
I didn't pick up on any of the alleged anti-semitic associations being discussed here, but I *definitely* consider "never again" to refer to the Holocaust. I've heard it used more appropriately in other settings where people were discussing the threat of genocide to groups other than the Jews.
That having been said... I'm not sure most Joe Six-Packs would have picked up on it in this case because it went by pretty fast... and a lot of majority-Christian middle America really does NOT understand the holocaust, so they'd have to both get the significance of "Never Again" in that sense (which they just haven't been very exposed to), AND also have their hokey Jews as moneylenders bullshit activated, and that's kinda a lot of stuff for them to have taken in all at once.
So, um, I'm saying it's possible in theory. I'm also saying that in practice I don't think it was successful dog-whistling. Cuz i don't think Palin is actually capable of successful dog-whistling, she doesn't have the finesse.
And not to post a third time, but I was just thinking to myself "Huh, census.gov could help us with this question!" Except I then remembered they won't touch religion questions with a ten foot pole, so you'd have to get population density data from them and distribution of Jews from some other source and overlay it with GIS software, and I just don't have the librarian fu for that. And it's really only accessory to your query anyway. But it got me thinking. I should shut up and go work now.
Census.gov won't help you, but the Association of Religion Data Archives will provide the missing religious statistics, with very nice color-coded maps, broken down to the county level). It will also provide mundane demographic information in exactly the same graphic format, which facilitates the identification of correlations. Sadly, the data is getting a bit long in the tooth (it dates back to 2000), but it's still pretty spiffy.
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So, um, I'm saying it's possible in theory. I'm also saying that in practice I don't think it was successful dog-whistling. Cuz i don't think Palin is actually capable of successful dog-whistling, she doesn't have the finesse.
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Here are some statistics... knock yourself out