Lawyer and University Professor, Carlos Reusser tweets: “I found my daughter with an expression between comic and afflicted. She told me she had made up a joke, but that she couldn’t bring herself to say it to me. After much back and forth, she agreed to tell me: -A Jewish boy asked me for my number. –I told him in present times we use names.”
In the case of a university professor, whose activity is supposed to be to educate where is good and where is evil, even more so if he is a lawyer, the goal of the tweet is expected to be a teaching to his daughter about what good taste means, absent in this case. Or about empathy, that is about learning to put oneself in the place of one another who suffers or has suffered in order to be able to understand, accompany, comfort him, which is not seen in this case either.
By ending it there, without any other comment, shows he wants to celebrate the sense of humor and occurrence of his daughter, sense that of course she learned from his home educator’s role. Moreover, at least his daughter still had doubts if it was something humorous provoking or something not only not funny at all but would cause affliction instead.
Publishing it implies a certain pride in telling how well her daughter learned from his sense of humor. Then, we understand he liberated her from the affliction she might feel.
The tweet is not presented as an attempt to spread hatred towards Jews, so probably when faced with the accusation of anti-Semitism, he will undoubtely show some record of Jewish friends or feel offended because he never perceived himself as anti-semite
Maybe, instead of apologizing, he will insist mumbling about the high level of sensitivity of those who are obfuscated by his tweet, about their short understanding and that “In the end, you can never say anything about them because they always take it the wrong way.”
Mr. Reusser, there still are survivors co-existing among us (thankfully), coming from a time that when somebody made such alleged jokes celebrate that The Final Solution was possible. We learned that when somebody threaten with our destruction we must take it seriously. And if that implies having a high level of alertness, then fine. Not to make you angry but to make you reflect about your high level of aggression and your non-existent level of empathy.
That leads us to another point. Being you an University Professor, what is the quality of education you provide?
I am not referring to amounts of information but to the true content.
Often, when face with anti-Semitic demostrations, the first reaction is to uphold they are ignorant people whom need to be corrected through education.
In your case, as University Professor, I discard it is not ignorance but the content of your education. No intention of offending, you show your thinking by celebrating your daughter’s joke instead of making her understand her grieving part was the right one. If you had narrated it that way, another would have the reaction been to your publication.
I insist it is not about ignorants. After all, the German people of the 1930s were the most cultivated in History. What we are talking about is that University Professors prioritize the quality, content and values of education in a single package. Only them will work for the sake of a rich and diverse society, a society in which it would excel to have daughters like your’s who felt some sort of affliction, with a father who took advantage of that feeling in order to do what is expected of a father that is also an educator and teacher. Teach values.