The words goy and goyim are thrown around by Jews and non-Jews to mean very different things and to convey very, very different impressions. Some antisemites try to weaponize these terms to accuse Jews of being exclusionary or discriminatory against goyim (the correct Hebrew pluralization of goy, rather than the anglicized “goys”).
Some Jews have also weaponized the term against their enemies: Ben Shapiro has accused, Tucker Carlson, of “goyslop” for falsely claiming that Jews want “goyim” to die defending Israel.
The original meaning of the word goy is neutral. It simply means “nation.” The Bible describes the Jewish people as “goy Kadosh” – a holy nation. In post-biblical eras goy has come to mean “gentile” – any person or nation that is not Jewish. In its linguistic meaning it is descriptive, neither pejorative nor positive. But in common usage, it has taken both connotations.
When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, our non-Jewish neighbors used to do favors for us by performing tasks on the sabbath that we were religiously promoted from doing, such as turning on lights. We referred to these friend positively as “shabbos goys”– non-Jews who helped us evade our religious strictures. On the other hand, my grandmother who grew up among Polish anti-Semites in the old country, used to word more pejoratively: whenever I whistled, which I loved to do, she would refer to it’s as a “goyish” activity. She also referred to her once a month house cleaner as “the goya” – female for goy.
It all depended on who is saying it and what they intend to convey.
When Jeffrey Epstein used that word, as he frequently did in his emails, he meant it pejoratively, as he did when he used the word shvartza to refer to African-American people. Epstein was racist, in every sense of that horrible concept, and he was proud of it. I told him never to use either pejorative in my presence, but I couldn’t control his emails or his conversations with others.
I personally never use the word goy because of its possible negative connotation and the risk of being misunderstood, and I know that others do the same. Even Holocaust museums, which honor “righteous Gentiles”, stay away from using the technical Hebrew word for gentile (goy) and use the euphemism “righteous among the nations” which they translate into Hebrew as “chasidai umot haolam”– pious among the nations of the world.
So context is everything. When a Jew-hating organization names itself “the Goyim Defense League” – a takeoff on “The Jewish Defense League” – you don’t need a dictionary or history lesson to understand what they are trying to do: use the word goyim to disparage Jews.
In light of all this, can the biblical word goy or its derivatives goyim, goyish or goya now be used in its original neutral way? Or has it been so corrupted by its misuse and weaponization that it has become too loaded to employ without the risk of misunderstanding?
The Yiddish word svartza has suffered a similar fate. In its original definition it means “black person.” Svartch means dark or black. Many Jews are named Swartz, suggesting that their forebears were dark-skinned. The name Weiss suggests light skin, as the names Gross and Klein suggest tall and short. But polite people no longer call black people svartzas, because the connotation has become pejorative.
Language is a living organism with no fixed boundaries. So perhaps we should retire the word goy, rather than try to explain that it is not intended pejoratively. Fortunately, we have other synonyms – such as nation and gentile – which are less ambiguous and subject to misunderstanding and weaponization.
