Jon Stewart sticking the knife in to JKR over "Jewish" goblins

[WandaWomblesaurus73]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10368289/Jon-Stewart-accuses-JK-Rowling-anti-Semitism-Harry-Potter.html

Ffs

Interesting you've moved on to castigating JK for... not seeing the filmmakers' adaptation of her creatures as having any relation to Jewish people. What can I say. Clearly she doesn't hang out with enough anti-semites.

If she'd had Dumbledore supporting Hamas it would have been fine but not saying anything bad about Jewish people is the wrong sort of antisemitism.

The Jewish people complaining, are they saying that the goblins must be Jewish because they have hooked noses? 🤔 I know plenty of Jewish people without hooked noses. My own uncle is one of them.

"I mean the whole series of books is little more than an upper class English public school fantasy where (almost exclusively) white elites preside over the 'lesser' races and classes."

We actually don't know about the classes of the vast majority of students at Hogwarts. The ones we do know about it's implied that the main characters are middle class (Hermione and Harry) and maybe working class (Ron - although he is merely poor).

The books were about blood status though. Again we don't know the blood status of the

Ethnicity wise we also don't know what the rest of the student population were as it's just not mentioned. The ones we know about these were the characters who were specifically mentioned:
the Patil sisters (probably British Asian - of Hindu religion) Harry and Ron go on a date with.
Ginny goes out with Dean Thomas. Angelina Johnson - quidditch captain of Gryffindor and dates a Weasley (and marries another Weasley).

Cho Chang who Harry fancies and dates.

Kingsley who is the Order.

Blaise in Slytherin.

Lee Jordan is implied to be black because of his hair.

The point of this post was to say that you're making an assumption based on what you thought. As a person of colour, I was thrilled to see so many kids who were like me. And the most important bit: These books were written in the late 1990s/early 2000s and it was rare to see characters from different ethnicities in children's books so JK Rowling did a brilliant job of representing us.

I'd always thought that Gringotts was the Padmanabhaswamy vaults under a particularly pretentious London Bank.

My twopenn'th

Cho Chang doesn't ring entirely true to me (not Chinese, but have lived in countries with large ethnically chinese populations) because it's just two names - my colleagues generally had three - so it would be something more like Wing-Cho Chang (hyphens optional depending on which country).

Chung is probably more usual than Chang (although the way Americans pronounce both I don't see much practical difference)

I've never met someone called Cho or Chang as a first name though I don't think - so that is also unusual (depending on whether you're assuming given or surname first).

The only person I knew with 2 syllable names was a chinese/vietnamese guy.

In case anyone missed it, Stewart defended Dave Chappelle at the end of last year when there was outrage over his last Netflix special. But then, he & Chappelle are friends

The absolute shamelessness of people shouldn’t surprise me, yet somehow it still does.

I’m amazed some people can see straight to post on social media as you’d think they’d send themselves dizzy lurching about from one convenient contradiction to the next - eg “the books & films are totally separate; the latter were nothing to do with JKR” to “JKR bears sole responsibility for any & all production & design elements that have even tenuous links to antisemitic tropes & she blatantly designed & laid the floor in Australia House too damnit ” within the space of a couple of days. And yet on they go…

@merrymouse

But she's added some diversity but that's still not right?

With 2020s eyes, if you were going to write a series of books that you had the foresight to know would be an international phenomenon and make billions and billions of pounds, you would make the main characters more diverse.

However people don’t seem to be able to appreciate that JKR was just writing a book that might never be published at a time when nobody questioned why the cast of Friends was all white. They talk as though she knew what the books would become, and as though she should be able to foresee their international impact.

Also, if the books were retrofitted to accommodate all current criticism, they would probably be unreadable.

Yes, the young people criticising the lack of diversity in books written in the 1990s should go back and compare them with other popular fantasy or YA series from the period, like Buffy or Queer as Folk. The characters were almost all white.

To be fair, I've never met anyone called Minerva, Severus, Albus or Draco. I wonder how many Scotswomen called Minerva McGonagall there can be.

It came up on another thread once that people took the evidence of intermingling cultures in the wozarding world completely for granted, except for Cho Chang

She's expected to have a name that follows the convections of one country, exactly. Otherwise it makes JK racist apparently.

Jon Stewart is friends with Dave Chapelle and defended him and was then accused of being transphobic.
Slinging mud at JKR is his way to get everyone to "Do it to Julia" surely?

There was a storyline in Curb Your Enthusiasm where a black actress kept bumping into Larry David and berating him about there being no black friends in Seinfeld.

To be fair, I've never met anyone called Minerva, Severus, Albus or Draco. I wonder how many Scotswomen called Minerva McGonagall there can be.

Yes, very true, the wizarding baby naming board clearly isn't like the muggle one :D

The thing that drives me mad is how people have no nuance about any of this. I'm a big Frank Sinatra fan and in the 40's and 50's he was very outspoken about racism and segregation in the USA, at a time when it was a brave thing to do. Roll on 20 years he was accused of being racist because of his nickname for Sammy Davis Jnr. And it was a racist nickname. Times change, attitudes change, we shouldn't judge people by our standards. The Harry Potter books were incredibly diverse for the time in which they were written. It's the lack of critical thinking that drives me crackers.

Ethnicity wise we also don't know what the rest of the student population were as it's just not mentioned. The ones we know about these were the characters who were specifically mentioned

I always assumed that Hermione was mixed-race. So I found Emma Watson's casting very jarring and wrong. I also assumed, because a few non/WASP names and characters were given, that there must have been more and that the school body was not overwhelmingly white. To list lots of non-WASP characters would have been sickly virtue-signalling. After all, Neville (just for example) is not described as white IIRC, just that he has jug ears. He could have been black, or Korean, or anything. So non-WASP readers could well have imagined the characters in their own images. And ethnically diverse individuals in the UK do not always have 'forrin' names, anyway.

The film makers should have cast so much more diversely. What a missed opportunity.

Yes, the young people criticising the lack of diversity in books written in the 1990s should go back and compare them with other popular fantasy or YA series from the period, like Buffy or Queer as Folk. The characters were almost all white.

And those were tv shows with multiple writers and producers.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was a book by an unknown author with a small print run whose initial popularity was driven by word of mouth.

As a Jewish person all I hear is that these people think Jews are like goblins?? Because they're ugly and like money? How progressive.

Its just stereotyping and antisemitism - and to make matters worse they're only doing it for woke points.

@Alysskea

As a Jewish person all I hear is that these people think Jews are like goblins?? Because they're ugly and like money? How progressive.

Its just stereotyping and antisemitism - and to make matters worse they're only doing it for woke points.

Yes I'd feel the same. It's sick.

twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1478772881979056137

It's an interesting tweet but since it's from a woman, less persuasive than Jon Stewart.

JK said once that she tried to pick unusual names because she didn't want a real life child of the same name to wind up being picked on. So we have Vernon, Dudley, Hermione, Ronald and Ginevra.

Antisemitic tropes are deeply ingrained within our society. I do consider the goblins, in the films especially, to perpetuate these tropes.

I wish it were possible occasionally to raise/discuss these sorts of issues without discrediting ("cancelling") people altogether, and without the expectation of a nauseating, vacuous, insincere tweet of abject apology 🙄

I'm very glad I'm not famous!

@JellySaurus

Who am I support to be booing at then?

Voldemort?

In Oliver Twist?

@nauticant

twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1478772881979056137

It's an interesting tweet but since it's from a woman, less persuasive than Jon Stewart.

Very well put

Jon who? Is he trying to become famous. Is he the channel 4 guy that looks like a goblin?

JellySaurus
Who am I support to be booing at then?

Voldemort?
In Oliver Twist?

Bill Sykes.

@nauticant

twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1478772881979056137

It's an interesting tweet but since it's from a woman, less persuasive than Jon Stewart.

Interestingly, James O'brien has re-tweeted that tweet.

I thought he would be on the 'JKR is a bigot and everything she has ever said or done is bigoted' side of things.

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

JK said once that she tried to pick unusual names because she didn't want a real life child of the same name to wind up being picked on. So we have Vernon, Dudley, Hermione, Ronald and Ginevra.

Yes, none of the characters, bar Harry of course, have common names in the story do they? Even the ones from muggle backgrounds. I have never thought about that before!