Williamsburg. A Satmar drives up to a ba’al teshuva baker with his delivery truck filled with baked goods and tells the man, “Get your schvartze to unload my truck.” The ba’al teshuva took great offense at the term “schvartze”, pointing out that “Fred, my schvartze, is Mexican.”
For outsiders, “schvartze” is how traditional orthodox Jews refer to blacks, it is the Yiddish word for black, and it is no more pejorative than the words “goy” or “Chinese” or “orange”, but ba’al teshuvas, who grew up with secular inclusionist values tend to take offence at it.
I’ve made it a crusade to reclaim the word “schvartze” for the good guys, as in, “Baruch HaShem, my daughter’s marrying a schvartze.”
Chaim Amalek: “I understand that there are secret race tracks in the New York area where chussids race shvartzes against one another the way the goyim do horses.”
