It’s been obvious for a long time that there are a lot of people in Irvine who really don’t like Jews. But we know that the one or two liberals readers we have won’t accept our word for this (let alone the dramatic chronicle that is LGF’s extensive archives) – so we went out and got actual numbers on this question.
First, some linguistic pedantries. When people use Google to search on the word “Jew”, they’re usually either checking the results of Googlebombing or virulently anti-Semitic. Very little in between. Google itself used to carry a disclaimer stating as much:
If you use Google to search for “Judaism,” “Jewish” or “Jewish people,” the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically.
So let’s examine who was doing an unusual amount of searching on the word “Jew” in 2005. And what’s that? Right there in slot #6? The lovely city of Irvine, California. It seems that there are a lot of people there who are both very interested in Judaism and who seem to think that the word “Jew” is just the way normal people talk. Not conclusive evidence of entrenched anti-Semitic rhetoric, of course, but suggestive.
Now, someone’s going to point out that there are 5 cities ahead of Irvine: New York, Cambridge, Newark, Reston, and Pleasonton. Why aren’t we saying that these results are suggestive (only suggestive, mind you) of deep-seated anti-Semitism in any of those places? Two reasons.
First, we can imagine good explanations for why tons of people in those cities are searching on “Jew”. It’s because there happen to be a lot of very Jewish Jews living in those areas (or, in the case of the greater New York area, some not very Jewish Jews too – nb. hate mail should directed to omri@mererhetoric.com). But there’s no large Jewish population in Irvine. Which means that last year there are a lot of non-Jews in Irvine very, very interested in Judaism – interested to a far greater relative extent than non-Jews living anywhere else in the United States.
Second, these people are interested in Jews in a very unusual way. In most of those other places, there’s a more nuanced interest in Judaism. Four of the five cities ahead of Irvine for searches on “Jew” were also in the top 5 for searches on “Jewish”. In Irvine, however, there are there a lot of people searching on “Jew” but far less people relatively searching on “Jewish” (the other exception is the town Pleasanton, which is a notorious Google Trends false positive because of ATT/SBC station out of there) So: most of the top-6 cities that has a relatively large number of people searching on “Jew” (of all of the top-5 if we exclude Pleasanton) also have a relatively large number of people searching on “Jewish”… except Irvine. In Irvine, it occurs to lots more people to search on “Jew” – a word that anti-Semitic communities are predisposed to using – than on “Jewish”. Linguistic habits are formed within communities… one wonders what kinds of communities these Irvine residents are running in.
[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
UPDATE: People have pointed out that Irvine is in the 2005 top-10 for relative searches on “Judaism”. We actually linked to that search in our original post. Our point is not that everyone in Irvine searches for Judaism only by typing in “Jew”. It’s that when many people in Irvine do go searching for that information, they have an abnormal predisposition to have the word “Jew” occur to them as an overly appropriate search term – and that in most other places where people are searching for information on Judaism, such a predisposition is not found.
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