Career Brings First Look at Anti-Semitism

When I announced in 1973 that I had an appointment to interview for a management position with a San Diego firm, everyone offered me advice.

Friends told me what to wear. Acquaintances suggested what to say. Relatives advised me, once I was hired, how to get promoted to a better position. Everyone told me everything--but this:

When a Jewish woman goes to work, she can expect to hear, probably for the first time in her life, anti-Semitic remarks. I recently was reminded of this when a young Jewish woman I know came to me in bewilderment at the casual, anti-Semitic remarks she is hearing for the first time as she begins her professional career.

It is possible for Jewish girls to grow up in San Diego without ever hearing an anti-Semitic remark or slur, for girls and young women appear to practice a toleration unknown to boys and young men.

Unlike Jewish men, Jewish women rarely have a story to tell about playground taunts of “kike” or “Christ killer.” Jewish and Gentile sororities seldom feud as fraternities do; swastikas and ugly names are rarely painted on the walls of our sorority houses or on the sidewalks in front of them. And, as few Jewish women volunteer for military service, we avoid the frustrating experiences many Jewish men can tell and write of in the armed forces.

I went through high school, college and years of volunteer work without hearing any of the mean-spirited jokes and slurs that I heard in the coffee break rooms, in the board rooms, in the executive offices and in the corridors of the firms where I worked.

“I met the marketing director from the L.A. office today,” said the San Diego sales manager. “What a jerk. A real New York Jew.”

“Grow up,” my friend Louis said when I told him of the remark later that evening. “People have always spoken this way.”

Where? Not at the aggressively tolerant schools I attended, where we were taught to write beautifully crafted essays titled, “The House I Live In,” during National Brotherhood Week, and where the only black student was sure to win any student office she cared to run for. Not in the San Diego neighborhood that I grew up in. It was only from books and from tales told by people from Back East that I was aware of cities with self-contained Jewish communities where Jewish children heard ugly names each time they had to pass through the neighborhoods surrounding theirs.

All of my life I have had friends, both Jewish and Gentile, with whom I have shared the same principles and values. It was not until I went to work that I met people who were savvy enough to know that in these litigious times one had better not use words like spic, nigger or wop during the business day, but who did not hesitate to perpetuate stereotypes of Jews.

They ranged from the painful:

“I tell you, Keith, the Jews stick together. If it weren’t for those two in the marketing department, that promotion would have been mine. What does that little Jew boy, Singer, know about local store marketing, anyway?”

To the pitiable:

“I don’t care about the rest of your people, little lady,” the vice president of operations said in his Georgia drawl. “But it does truly pain me that a sweet thing like you won’t know the joys of everlastin’ life in God’s heaven.”

“You’ll get used to it,” counseled my friend Fred. “I did.”

The conversation with my young woman friend made me realize how accurate Fred’s prediction was. I have gotten used to hearing anti-Semitic remarks. I no longer pounce on every slur said in my presence. Rather, I try to tune them out, as I do the Muzak from the speakers in the walls, for to object to one slur . . .

“Really, Charley, I wish you wouldn’t say that. I’m Jewish and I know it isn’t true.”

. . . is to give birth to another . . .

“You are? Really? You don’t look it.”

. . . and changes nothing, for prejudices and stereotypes are irrational and are never eradicated by a reasonable discussion and a logical presentation of the facts.

Perhaps the only solution is to do as Louis and Fred did: Become very important to the corporation you work for, or buy it out to become the boss, since only fools make these remarks to those higher on the corporate ladder than themselves. It is those of us on the same rungs with the bigots, or perched below them, who are condemned to listen over and over again.

“This bid’s too high,” said the vice president of sales and marketing. “Why don’t you call on the expertise of your ancestors and get it down to where I can live with it?”

I remember every person who advised me of what to wear to the office each day and I remember everyone who told me what to order for a business lunch and how to pay for it when a man was my guest.

But I do not remember anyone, ever, telling me that the odds were good--very good indeed--that one day the person who worked in the office next to mine would boast to me of how well he “Jewed the dealer down” to get the great deal he did on the new Mercedes-Benz he drove to work that morning. Or, that the administrative assistant in the purchasing department would answer, when I objected to her saying, almost word-for-word, the same thing: “Oh, don’t be so sensitive, Jenny. That expression is as common as Kleenex.”

“You lived in a fool’s paradise,” said Fred, and he is right. Once upon a time, I did believe that everyone lived a smooth, seamless, frictionless life as a Jew in San Diego. Had not the most obvious restriction--the real estate covenant preventing Jews from owning property in La Jolla--disappeared along with others not so obvious but equally as odious?

Now I know--from the jokes and slurs, from all the casual bigotry I overhear when I am at work--that the feelings that gave birth to the restrictive covenants and quotas are as strong as ever. I know, too, why no one warned me of what I might hear.

“And then,” said the company’s comptroller, “the Rabbi gets into his Jew canoe . . . “

“Jew canoe?”

“Cadillac. Get it?”

For now I do not talk about it either. No matter how secure my self-image, it would be painful to tell the same tales over and over again. To answer when someone asks: How was your day? with stories where I am either the conniving outsider or--at best--the punch line to a very poor joke.