Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”
If you enjoy Philip Roth, you might be interested to hear that this school sits not far from where Alexander Portnoy, of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” was chastised by his mother for eating hamburgers and other chazerai — junk — while his constipated father drank “not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia.” That’s one typical use of “goy,” or the plural “goyim”: to refer to those who aren’t Jewish. The Hebrew “goy” just means a people; Bibles routinely translate it as “nation.” But it also came, in Hebrew and Yiddish, to describe the peoples that Jews lived among — say, the ones Portnoy calls “goyim with golden hair and silver tongues,” the ones whose company will never actually promote his father, only treat him to the occasional weekend away in a “fancy goyische hotel.”
All of this is really normal. The world is full of names for “not us”: haole, gaijin, Englischer, allochtoon. They can be totally neutral, or deeply unkind, or just about anywhere in between. Many Jews would tell you “goy” is like, say, “foreigner” — neutral, but certainly capable of becoming an insult if the speaker wants it to.
The abnormal part, in this case, begins with the distressing number of people who imagine that the world is controlled by secretive Jewish cabals, and that the very existence of “goy” is airtight proof of their supremacist plot. For years now, antisemitic extremists have engaged in a trollish embrace of the word — creating, among other things, a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe.
Some of these people felt vindicated by the release of documents concerning Jeffrey Epstein. Never mind the exploitation of children: Here in his inbox were wealthy Jewish men, writing one another sardonic emails about the goyim! The way Epstein used “goy” was often pretty similar to how gentiles might joke about WASPs, and his sourer uses just feel like a famously loathsome guy being loathsome, but still: Soon we had the far-right pundit Candace Owens treating this as proof of a bigotry fundamental to the faith. “This is, for them, a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over,” she told podcast listeners. That “cattle” idea traces back through literal Nazi propaganda to antisemitic sources like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; if Owens really believes it to be true, she differs from other Catholics in her understanding of Scripture, which would have God promising Abraham that “I will make of you a great cow.”
“Goyslop” has its roots in people who think this way starting to agree with Portnoy’s mother about the chazerai. But they imagine sinister Jewish elites purposefully feeding the masses cheap, enfeebling swill — a notion they express, for the most part, not on podcasts but in flippant internet postings about the pliant “goycattle” being herded to their troughs. And it’s that version of “goy” that ended up leaching into high school.
My source — 15, Jewish, a colleague’s son, resident of a racially and religiously diverse suburb — estimates that at least 70 percent of the students in his school would be familiar with “goyslop.” (Another student, who feels less firm on the exact meaning, puts the number at just under half.) He is fully aware that it arose via an “antisemitic thing about Jews trying to kind of poison the minds of the people through food and stuff.” But this is not, in his experience, remotely how it operates among his peers, who see it as criticizing, if anything, corporations. “It’s not really a thing like that anymore,” he says. “Like, everyone says it.”
This may be a wild journey for a word to take, but it’s not an unusual one. The internet is full of fringe jargon that breaks containment and seeps, mostly shorn of its original politics, into the way ordinary young people talk. How? One analogy might be the way that, in conversation, you can use a silly voice to playact as another type of speaker — say, pushing up your glasses and doing a “nerd” voice when correcting somebody. Online, people do this by parodying other posters’ vocabulary or typing habits — including, sometimes, the language the fringes are constantly bombarding everyone else with. It gets toyed with at an amused and dismissive arm’s length, then passes from arm’s length to arm’s length until it is miles from where it began, operating as a kind of 6-7ish in-joke that many young people will tell you is not nearly as deep or serious as whatever alarming origins you’re worried about.
For them, it simply means something else. Does that make “goy” an epic failure for antisemites, who feared the eye-rolling of a few million Jews and now have even gentiles using the word? There are times when a trip through this pipeline does seem to deflate extremist thinking; there are others when it feels as if incredibly unpleasant ideas are worming into the mainstream via glib, uninterrogated jokes. I cannot tell you which cases are which. Most everyone who says “goyslop” is, on some level, kidding. But given the history of the ideas behind it, you might be forgiven for worrying that the joke had spun out of control.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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