Imitation Is the Most Sincere Form of Mockery: Mock Jewish English in Online Extremist Communities

Abstract

This article examines the use of Mock Jewish English (MJE) among members of the modern far right as a means of perpetuating ideologies centered around antisemitic canards originating from the 19th and 20th centuries. In order to investigate MJE as an act of language crossing, I examine the 900+ million token Unicorn Riot subcorpus of the Corpus of Digital Extremism and Conspiracies (CoDEC). Following this analysis, I describe the linguistic features of MJE when it is used as ventriloquation, specifically the lexical and phonological features employed by the white supremacist parody advice show, Dear Rabbi. In my analysis, I find that these two strategies of MJE are used by members of the far right to spread antisemitic ideologies, further the semantic pejoration of Jewish lexical borrowings, and covertly affiliate themselves with one another in public spaces (via language crossing) or distance themselves from Jewishness (via ventriloquation).