Eyn un Tsvantsik is a regular column by Sam Bolitzer on young Jewish American life in the 21st century amid larger cultural and political trends, both past and present.
Anyone under the age of 25 can tell you that the word goy, once a relatively niche piece of Yiddish out-group terminology referring to non-Jews and relegated to the vocabulary of Jewish grandparents, has recently experienced a resurgence of use in popular culture by non-Jews. From conversations about low-quality food to the sides of military aircraft, the term seems to pop up everywhere nowadays, emphasizing perceived Jewish “otherness” throughout. The implications of this usage are nothing new, of course; antisemites have long tried to argue for the existence of a malicious Jewish conspiracy to suppress a wider non-Jewish society. What is different here is that the word goy provides a catchy and marketable label for these antisemites to propagate their beliefs, a snappy phrase that us youngsters can use, along with “rizz” and “aura.” It’s no wonder that the term has become a mainstay on and offline, repeated even by some well-intentioned non-Jews unaware of the insidiousness behind its newfound popularity.
Coupled with this newfound popularity is a number of patently false claims about both the meaning and usage of the word goy. Ask the typical non-Jewish claimant about the label, and they may tell you that it originates from the Talmudic word for “cattle.” This myth dates as far back as the 1890s and has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. Regardless, this falsehood helps fuel the derogatory use of the word goy by self-proclaimed goyim. Fed by quotes from the Epstein Files and other anecdotes, this usage paints a fabricated picture of a malicious elite Jewish cabal seeking to control society, with the label of goy “reappropriated” as a banner of solidarity against it.
Claims about goy being pejorative towards non-Jews, as well as claims that it ought to be “reappropriated,” are simply silly. Many have discussed how saying someone is a goy or calling something goyish is often done in a neutral context within the Jewish community. It can be used in a negative way, but so can pretty much any ethnic descriptor. In my personal experience, almost every time I heard the term used by family members and Jewish friends growing up, it was in a purely ironic fashion, poking fun at the antisemites who would claim that the word is derogatory. This makes non-Jewish attempts to “reappropriate” the word seem even sillier, as it is not even an insult to be reappropriated. Calling yourself a goy or smugly musing that “the goyim know” is about as cringey as calling yourself a “cracker” or a gringo; it is neither humorous nor admirable.
Less discussed is the use of goy as a tool by far right actors attempting to hijack anti-Zionism. It is no secret that far-right figures like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson have all adopted opposition to Israeli apartheid, but they do so with the same antisemitism—like directly linking Israel to perceived intrinsic flaws of “Jewishness”—that left-wing anti-Zionism is often falsely accused of harboring. They replace criticism of white supremacy and its continued exploitation of the Global South with lambasting of the “Synagogue of Satan,” among other talking points. Meanwhile, these figures engage in the same kinds of prejudice echoed by many Zionists, extending their criticism of Judaism’s “spiritual failing” to Islam and comparing student protest groups to “terrorists” and other undesirables.
The resurgence of the word goy in Zoomer slang is of particular benefit to these far-right appropriators of anti-Zionism: it allows one to claim to oppose Zionism without confronting its relation to white supremacy. To oppose Israeli apartheid, a white person can think of themselves as opposing it not in their capacity as white, but in their capacity as a goy, treating their non-Jewishness as the relevant distinction. This facilitates a willful ignorance of Zionism’s wider reliance on white supremacist dogma, allowing one to seemingly oppose Israeli apartheid while eagerly supporting the systems that facilitate both it and antisemitism. Indeed, to be a goy is to conceive of the world through the binary of Jewishness, rendering oneself blind to the structures of power in which one participates and benefits from.
Non-Jewish appropriation of the word goy exemplifies this phenomenon. Not only does such liberal usage of the word enable antisemitism—it also enables a siphoning of potential allies away from genuine pro-Palestine politics and towards old white supremacist ideas that they may otherwise oppose. By centering such a fixatedly antisemitic perspective, many of these self-identified goyim are shifting focus away from the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians living under Israeli occupation, and toward old ideas of a sanctified White Christian identity worthy of suppressing all others, Muslim and Jewish alike. For the sake of resisting the continued dominance of narratives of superiority, however they may manifest, we ought to encourage each other to refrain from including the word goy in our vernacular of solidarity.
For similar reasons, I also tend to not use the word goy myself nowadays; I feel that the term itself is no longer useful to us Jews in any serious capacity. We live in a globalized world, where the divide between the Global North and the Global South shapes many societal problems. Merely dividing the world into Jews and goyim is not as helpful for us as it was for our ancestors in the Pale, for whom it was the tangible distinction that mattered most legally and socially. Today, we are Jews, not in a world full of goyim, but in a world full of many varied communities with which we interact and intersect in a multitude of ways. To reclaim our agency in deciding what these relationships look like, this old concept of the goy ought to be retired, by Jews and non-Jews alike.
