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Bigoted Buzzfeed Quiz Mocks Orthodox Women

Proving once again that the rules of political correctness don’t count if you’re making fun of Jews

by
Liel Leibovitz
September 19, 2017
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Imagine someone posting a quiz on a hugely popular website titled “Build a Black Man and We’ll Tell You How Old He’ll Be When He Goes to Jail for Dealing Drugs.” If you decide to take it, you’ll be asked to answer question after stereotypical question: Which Harlem high school will your black man drop out of? What brand of jeans will he wear real low? What tacky tattoo will he sport?

If the above offends you to no end, I’m relieved: It should, because it’s the kind of revolting bigotry that appeals to none but the nastiest and most prejudiced among us.

Except, apparently, when it comes to Orthodox Jews. The above example, sadly, isn’t hypothetical—it’s the subject of a newly published quiz on Buzzfeed, titled “Build a Stern Girl and We’ll Tell You How Old You’ll Be When You Get Married,” Stern being Yeshiva University’s college for women. Among the quiz’s highlights are questions like “Pick a job for your Stern girl to have after college”—the answers for which include “stay at home mom,” “working at a preschool,” “working at an elementary school,” “working at a high school,” “social worker” and “nurse”—and “Pick a grad school for your Stern girl to drop out of when she gets pregnant.”

The quiz was created by a community user named CynicaShif, whose bio identifies her as “A Jewish Independant Woman Who Don’t Need No Man. Well, I might want one to buy me food…………” Few, it seems, are amused by the author’s sensibilities: Since the post went live yesterday evening, more than a dozen commenters, many of them Stern grads, took to the site to protest what one responder called the quiz’s “disgustingly stereotypical” treatment of religious Jewish women.

Everyone, of course, can post whatever they want on Buzzfeed’s platform. But it’s not unfair to ask whether a similar quiz so noxiously denigrating a member of any other minority would pass muster with the site’s overseers. Buzzfeed should take down the quiz immediately and apologize. Thankfully, we religious Jews have a holiday just around the corner dedicated to doing just that.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.