Term of art: "key Jewish persons"

On May 29, 2010, as she sailed with a self-styled "freedom flotilla" toward Gaza and a bloody confrontation with the Israeli navy, the American peace activist Ann Wright spoke with an interviewer who began the conversation by asking, "What happens if the Zionists were to attack this ship?"

The interview can be found online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppCxVDHPpcc. The interviewer's term "the Zionists" reflects usage in Palestine, where maps don't show Israel and the Jewish state itself is referred to as "the Zionist entity." The idea behind the usage seems to be that if Israel is nameless it doesn't exist, and its actual existence is therefore a distasteful anomaly in nature, to be addressed by periphrasis and euphemism.

Wright herself, however, follows American idiom and uses the term "Israelis." A retired State Department official, she follows State Department idiom, too, in deploring the bias toward Israel of successive American administrations. But at minute 2:04 of the video, a different idiom enters her language -- this one not Washington but red-state.

INTERVIEWER: How does the tail wag the dog?

WRIGHT: Well, the tail wags the dog because there are powerful influences in the United States, key Jewish persons with lots of money, who use that money and influence to influence our U.S. Congress, and to influence every U.S. president.

The idiom is "Jewish persons." In areas of the United States where Jews are few and religion is strong enough to permeate language, the word "Jew" has its traditional pejorative sense, but American meliorism has tried to heal that source of hurt feelings in a characteristically American way. Just as polite people in the United States say the phrase "the N-word" rather than utter the word "nigger," they say "Jewish person" rather than "Jew." Of course that clumsy attempt to change a referent into something that nice people don't think about doesn't work. I'm sure I'm not the only Jew who feels sad (as in, "Why am I here? A mistake must have been made") when the time comes for his interlocutor to assure him that her favorite, favorite song of all is White Christmas -- and White Christmas was composed by [dramatic pause] a JEWISH PERSON.

But it's the thought that counts.

In Wright's language, however, the thought is not benevolent. It's a thought that's currently expressed in such terms as "AIPAC," "Mearsheimer and Walt," and "Jewish lobby," and when it utters itself in such words it can accommodate a body of fact which can be factually discussed. But in Wright's sentence the squeamishly uttered euphemism "key, uh, Jewish, uh, persons" has an odd effect: by transporting the sentence's context from the State Department to, say, a front porch in Wright's native state of Arkansas, it transports us listeners too. Goodbye, world of Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; welcome back, world of Huckleberry Finn.