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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27630 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Wait where did the Jew hating come from?

Aside from the goblins there was also an effort last year to label her a "Holocaust denier" for denying that the Nazis specifically targeted transgender people. "Holocaust denial" and "Nazi apologia" are anti-semitic, so she's anti-semitic. Here is an article from the time arguing the pro-Rowling side.

Take the case of Gerd R, one of the victims mentioned by Pink News. Gerd was a married, heterosexual man who had a history of crossdressing. He was arrested multiple times for public indecency after his neighbours grew tired of finding him hiding naked in their communal bins. He was later rescued from a concentration camp by the intervention of his doctor, who pointed out that he was heterosexual.

I think this segment is worth highlighting. It illustrates Rowling's point (Nazis were targetting LGB, not T) in a very darkly comedic way.

People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.

People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature.

Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)

(Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)

Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?

Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?

I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depicts Makima's grooming of Denji, even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.

Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….

(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)

Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…

You can't just tease me like that. Go on...

Well, this one was from a different young twenty-something steeped in Tumblr leftism, ready to pounce on the slightest "racism" in ways that displayed their serious ignorance.

But they were quite vehement that the people at DC (specifically Julius Schwartz, Dennis O'Neil, and Neal Adams; not that they knew that) were engaged in deliberate racist messaging when they (back in 1971; again, not that they knew that) created an "Eastern" villain (Middle Eastern with some East Asian ancestry, I believe) to threaten the "Western" — and "implicitly white" — Gotham City like some kind of "racial ghoul"… and then named him exactly that. Oh, sure, they deliberately misspelled it to look pseudo-Arabic, but c'mon, "Ra's al Ghul"? It couldn't be any clearer what they really meant.

This one isn't inherently silly. Sure, pointing to the name is stupid, but Ra's al Ghul is clearly a Fu Manchu imitation complete with daughter. And the fact that he was created by people with a good record dealing with other races doesn't mean they can't be wrong when it involves Asians.

Everyone knows (I say jokingly) that it's actually that JK Rowling expressed a bit of subtlety and restraint by not outright referring to them as gnomes instead.

I have seen people claim it's because the illustrations (which she approved) look like stereotypes of anti-Jewish propaganda (due largely to the noses), but I haven't done the comparisons myself.

The goblins are allegedly Jewish caricatures. A lot of the bits of evidence that are brought up - like a Star of David on the floor of Gringotts - are either coincidences or issues caused by the adaptation (the location they were filming in had them already).

On the other hand, they do run the banks, hounded at least one person in canon over debts and do have a different understanding of property (anything wrought by goblins is seen as only leased for the lifetime of the wizard who bought it which...you can see how that could lead to misunderstandings) that leads to at least one goblin betraying the team for treasure.

There are people that believe that the goblins in the world of Harry Potter are a (racist) reference to Jews.

Supposedly the goblins who run Gringotts bank are reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. Your mileage may vary, I don't really see it.

Even if the accusation was well-founded, I imagine the Venn diagram of "people calling for JK Rowling's death" and "people enthusiastically celebrating the massacre of unarmed Israelis on October 7th" would show a great deal of overlap. Very few trans activists accusing JK Rowling of antisemitism actually care about antisemitism qua antisemitism: they just hate her because of her gender-critical opinions and are trying to tar her with as many other brushes as are available. See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.

(As an aside, there is at least one character who is canonically Jewish, a heroic Ravenclaw.)

See also the rather contrived accusations of Sino- and Hiberno-phobia.

Hiberno-phobia? I can only remember one Irish character, and I don't remember them being portrayed particularly badly (apart from being bad at quidditch).

Séamus Finnegan. I recently heard someone arguing in earnest that his name is a "reverse spoonerism" for Sinn Féin (I'm sorry, what?), and the running gag in the first book/movie of him accidentally causing small explosions is meant to make the reader think of the IRA.

I'm an Irish man who grew up when the Harry Potter books were all the rage. My friends and family literally queued up to buy them on publication day and devoured them over the course of a weekend. I don't recall ever hearing an Irish person contemporaneously suggesting that Séamus was a negative stereotype.

I actually really like that theory. It's so obscure as to be pretty clearly false but would be a hoot to advocates for at dinner parties.

Well, the names of Harry's mentors are references to esoteric alchemical processes, so it's not the craziest fan theory I've ever heard.

I mean, the HP world is pretty quaintly simple in a '50s-cartoon way, and in fact everything non-British (the French (of course), the Bulgarians, ...) in it is presented as the sort of droll stereotype you would expect from old monolingual British people who have never really left the country except perhaps to go and be drunken pests on Tenerife or the like. This does not really register as malicious, as much as it is just ignorant and provincial. I find myself drawn to the charitable(?) explanation that many of the activists themselves are rather ignorant and provincial, and quite self-conscious about it in the modern instagrammable world of jetsetting global citizen cultural trivia mongery, and it's well known that humans are particularly cruel towards displays of identity markers in others that they are desperate to shake off themselves (hence all the older children hating on childish things, Indians hating on "pajeets", people in a hierarchy hating on people one step down in the hierarchy).

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