I've only ever heard it applied to Jewish people or people being accused of acting like stereotypical Jews. For instance how Frank refers to the lawyer (alternating between calling him Jewish and that as derogatory slang, the lawyer is not Jewish), on Always Sunny.
You need stronger Google skills too apparently. Just search for if that is anti-Semitic and you'll find plenty of places pointing it out. Of course you'll find plenty of people trying to push back and there's arguments about where it originated or is derived (which are all over the place, from Shakespeare to just about every other place since - the issue being that words change meaning I mean you people can point to origins of gay and other gay slurs all you want, doesn't magically make them not slurs towards gay people as well):
Every word that we speak carries its own history. A tale of travel, a silly story or heavy hatred in its every syllable. Ethnophaulisms...
www.jewishtimes.com
Seriously, for fuck's sake some of you really are just...mindblowingly weirdly ignorant. I grew up in the rural Midwest where there basically was hardly any Jewish people (and hell even rare was anti-Semitism because of it - but of that rare anti-Semitism I heard it was one of two explicitly was anti-Semitic words that were), but I fucking knew that and pretty sure I've known that since like high school. Some of you claim to live in NYC and other large cities that have a healthy Jewish population and never knew this? What the fuck?
Do I think everyone using it is being anti-Semitic? Apparently some of you genuinely had no idea? Which, ok, some think it applies just to lawyers, but that doesn't make a ton of sense to be using that in that way about Chrysler so sorry I'm not buying that claim - its clear it was meant as greedy, which is the prime Jewish stereotype.
Something else to keep in mind, places like National Review champion its use, you might want to wonder why that is. I personally have never ever heard it said by someone who was not also being explicitly anti-Semitic.
And for further points about mixed uses of words: see the discussion of calling a black man "boy" in...forget what thread from the other day. If you look at the etymology, then yeah, benign meaning, right? Right? Does that mean everyone calling someone a boy is being racist? Obviously not. And, hey, there's apparently lots of Jewish people that don't have any issue with that word.
Looking more, its interesting. Some Jewish people even thought it was Yiddish and was Jewish slang for unscrupulous person (not even a lawyer) so seems like its had a lot of mixed usage. Honestly I'm more relieved that seemingly no one else in this thread had heard it used in the anti-Semitic sense (especially if you are around Jewish populations). Unfortunately that's been the only way I've ever encountered it being used. I'm not the only one either though either.
It'd be very weird if people were deriving it from Shylock and ignoring the blatant anti-Semitism with regards to that character, and instead gaining only that it was only about lawyers. Further would be weird if the assumption was the German origins and yet it wasn't used for anti-Semitism as well (since basically every insult they used for a time there was about anti-Semitism). Actually now, I want to rewatch that documentary, think it was Devil Next Door about the old guy in Detroit that was charged with being a Nazi war criminal. I know the lawyer that defended him (and was an Israeli Jew) was called anti-Semitic by other Jewish people, I feel like that term made an appearance in it.
Its kinda blowing my mind that no one else in this thread had heard it used as such? I kinda feel like I'm being gaslit like you're all Randall and I'm Dante in Clerks II.
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