Sooner or later, it will come back to the Jews.
Sweden’s mostly-awesome experiment of having a different ordinary citizen tweet weekly from their official @Sweden account went a bit off the rails today. Perhaps Sonja, 27-year-old mother of two, saw how well it worked for Henry Blodget. Perhaps she genuinely did wonder, “Whats the fuzz with jews. You can’t even see if a person is a jew, unless you see their penises, and even if you do, you can’t be sure!?” After all, she did ask a co-worker “what a jew is. He was “part jew”, whatever that means. [Note: More on what that might mean] He’s like ‘uuuuh… jews are.. uh.. well educated..?’”
The advertising exec in charge of the experiment told The Times that the guidelines for tweeting as @Sweden are loose: “I tell them, ‘Please, do this with some dignity — remember that this is an official channel and there are a lot of people reading this, so don’t make a fool of yourself.’ It’s only a soft suggestion.” Soft indeed, and so far masturbation has been fair game. So why not the eternal question of anti-Semitism?
A Swedish tourism official is unfazed, per the Journal. “How else are you going to show the multi-faceted people that Sweden is composed of?” Indeed. Particularly when some of those multi-faceted people do, in fact, have their own answers to Sonja’s question. Credit to Swedish brass for not whitewashing.
Sweden Stands By Twitter Strategy Despite Controversy [WSJ]
Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything [NYT]
Related: Sweden’s “Damn Jew” Problem
Irin Carmon is a senior correspondent at New York magazine and co-author of The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her Twitter feed is @irin.