Admittedly Amy Schumer is known for pushing the limits of taste with her comedy, but she went too far in the wrong direction with a recent Twitter pic caption that’s clearly anti-Semitic. Although Schumer was raised Jewish and even attended Hebrew school in Long Island, that’s no defense for what she said in the guise of a ‘joke.’
Schumer posted a pic of herself with a couple of musicians holding brass instruments and captioned it “A Jew with horns.” Taken literally, she’s a Jewish woman standing with two men, each holding a horn instrument. However, what’s also there is the propagation of a pervasive and ugly stereotype.
In an excellent article Gossip Cop perfectly captioned the history of this insult and controversy. They wrote:
“The misconception that Jews have horns was most notably propagated by Michelangelo, whose Moses sculpture, which sits in a Rome church, features the Jewish leader with two protrusions atop his head. That seemingly was a result of the misinterpretation of the Bible’s book of Exodus, which noted that after Moses communicated with God on Mount Horeb, his face had ‘karnay,’ the Hebrew word for shining ‘rays.’ But the mistaken translation of ‘karnay’ for the phonetically similar ‘karnim,’ the Hebrew word for ‘horns,’ led to the inaccurate belief that Moses (and the Jewish people) had horns.”
If hearkening back to the Old Testament is too far for you, consider that Nazi propaganda depicted Jewish people with horns and tails and associated them with dark powers – the devil – Satan. The bottom line is that any association of Jewish people and horns is in horribly poor taste and has been used repeatedly to bring about pogroms and other forms of horrific violence against Jews.
This is not simply a joke that’s out of date or cruel. Amy Schumer’s remark is associated with genocide and a frightening history of the worst sort of racial insensitivity.
Sure plenty of comedians say provocative things to offend and get laughs. But Schumer’s distasteful tweet is doubly disastrous because it’s not funny and also offensive. As a former fan of Amy’s this is disappointing to me.
I expect raunch from her, but not overt racism. When called out on this, Schumer’s attempt at an “apology” was to clarify with the disingenuous remark that she meant “A Jew with 2 horns.”
How is that any better? Shame, shame, shame Amy Schumer.
Image Credit: Twitter, FameFlynet
