An interesting bit of linguistic education.
My view of English: I'll never accept using loan as a verb.
The cognitive bias of recency effect made us think the post-WWII holiday from Jews' history of lethal anti-semitism was a new norm when it was really anomalous. We're now returning to historic norms:
* Restricted: Columbia b-school prof's ID deactivated and Columbia ethnically cleansed, with its Jewish students deported to virtual attendance and exclusion from using the university facilities they paid for.
* No Jews and dogs allowed. Jewish students at my alma mater UCLA prevented from entering the campus where they paid tuition.
In People Love Dead Jews Dara Horn uses the legend of Ellis Island name changes to explain the bargain Jews made to gain a passport to acceptance and why it no longer works:
"The Ellis Island legend is simply the final step in this multigenerational process of denying, hiding, and burying the reality that American Jews feared most—namely, the possibility that they were not welcome here.
Joseph’s name change is nothing compared to the later biblical Book of Esther, in which the title character, who bears the Hebrew name Hadassah, becomes the queen of the Persian Empire and keeps her Jewish identity a secret—helped along by her new name, borrowed from the Persian goddess Ishtar. Jews have been changing their names to non-Jewish ones and lying about it for a long, long time....
There’s a clear pattern to these legends, which are all about living in places where you are utterly vulnerable and cannot admit it.
Not merely accepting this new and devastating reality, you lie in court about your motivations for succumbing to it—or, even worse, you yourself believe your own lies, because the reality is too painful to acknowledge....
Now imagine telling your children, years later, about what you did. Telling them the truth wouldn’t only implicate you. It would also implicate America. You’d be telling your children that you thought you would be accepted here, but you were fooled, because this place is just like everywhere else—only more insidious, because the discrimination isn’t written into the law, so you can’t even publicly protest it. All you can do is submit to it, publicly agree with it, announce in court of your own free will that your name is “un-American,” that the very essence of who you are is unacceptable. If you tell that story to your children, you’d be confirming two enormous fears: first, that this country doesn’t really accept you, and second, that the best way to survive and thrive is to dump any outward sign of your Jewish identity ...
you’ve made America into a place so welcoming that happy non-Jews greet you at the door, and then make innocent mistakes that coincidentally help you to fit right in, at no cost to you or to the three-thousand-year-old tradition you want to maintain. This is the legend that the ancestors of today’s American Jews created for their descendants. 82
We don’t simply prefer this founding legend. We need it. The story is more important than the history, because the story is the device that makes meaning....
We can’t change the past, but we can change its meaning. Doing so is an act of creativity, but it is foremost an act of bravery and love. To those who gave us that enduring legend of names changed at Ellis Island, I have only one thing to say: Thank you.
After Pittsburgh, I knew what to tell my children to comfort them: that this wasn’t like those ancient horror stories, that our neighbors love us, that America is different. After that Passover, I no longer knew what to tell them."
I'd always believed my grandfather's tale of his name change from Gol d'en Gerschel to Golden. My father always said "we are guests in this country." I always told him to take the ghetto out of his head. Now we're finding out he was right.
With what I know about how history's long cycles work, ruffling feathers may amount to no more than trying to turn back a tsunami with a teaspoon. But thanks for trying.
