The Massachusetts suburb of Duxbury has the distinction of its very winning high school football team surprisingly jumping into the foray of anti-Semitic verbiage when the team thought it would be clever to use a play-calling system strewn with vairous Jewish words the worst of which was Auschwitz. Play calling systems are not new and are used by the pros as well as amateurs and professional wannabes. According to the Boston Globe sports writer Dan Shaughnessy "Peyton
Manning became famous for hollering
“Omaha!”
Duxbury football players thought they would try that but chose to utter the words referring to Jewish themes like rabbi or dreidel (a four sided spinning top) and, oh yes, not to forget Auschwitz, the most notorious of German concentration camp killing fields for the specific purpose of killing Jews -- 6 million or more of them to be exact, one million children or 2/3rds of the Jews of Europe during WWII. Where were the Duxbury adults and the Duxbury coaches, what did they know and when did they know that hurtful words referring to Jews would be used for calling plays in a football game? Some are calling for the dismissal of the head coach.
These words were used, perhaps, as comedy or worse used with serious antiSemitic intent. Both rationales for their use are unacceptable. At the risk of verbosity when addressing anti-Semitism I am succumbing to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words. The three pictures below address the seriousness of the words used and why so many are calling for the coach's dismissal and/or the firing of any others who knew of their use.
The pictures below are but a few of the scenes of Auschwitz and many other camps like it strewn across Europe. Look at them and know why the Jewish heart cries out for the dismissal of the head coach!
