We’re a black family. I have heard this phrase only once in my life, decades ago in North Carolina when the kindly wife of my youngest uncle used it in passing. Although I had lived in the Northeast (Boston, NYC) where I’d made Jewish friends, I was from the South and had never heard Jewish slurs or heard any black person in my life use slurs for any ethnic group (except racist white folks).

So, when this sweet elementary school teacher said it, I wasn’t sure what she’d said, whether I’d misheard, or what she meant. By the time I figured it out (I’d read an article analyzing antisemitism in Merchant of Venice), I was on my way home, sick to my stomach. I still don’t know if she truly understood it or understood how offensive it was, or whether she had ever even met a Jew.

She never said it again, though I had a response ready. She has since died, but I still feel sick.