on the subject of "blood libel"

[rm]

Someone else on my friends list did a poll, and I realized that I was also curious and have enough people here to get a large sample even if it's not a scientific one.

Since my big discovery of today was that lots of people didn't realize that the "blood libel" thing was a totally anti-semitic thing to say and I was surprised by that, the question becomes is this one of those things _every_ Jewish person knows but non-Jews may not have encountered?

ETA: Comments filled with fascinating anecdata. Have fun.

For those of you who still haven't caught up with this, Boing Boing explains.

Poll below.

[Poll #1667388]

Comments

[airspaniel.livejournal.com]

I answered that I did not know, though it's likely I used to and had forgotten until this debacle. It felt more honest than saying I did.

[airspaniel.livejournal.com]

Also, I think it's likely that Palin had no idea what it meant, just that adding the word "blood" to a word as awful as "libel" would make it some kind of super awful, using that lovely violent style of rhetoric she's so fond of.

I know that Alaska is not the same as where I grew up in the midwest, but on a number of fronts they're similar in terms of voting trends, population and education, and I know that no one else in my family would know that "blood libel" carried such a connotation.

[effervescent.livejournal.com]

I'd believe that if I thought that Palin wrote the speech, but I highly doubt she did.

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

I feel like this, especially after having read the link there. It's all sounding vaguely familiar but obviously not familiar enough that I knew it off the top of my head.