Doug: "I like the way the controversy is entirely over whether the remark is anti-semitic, not whether the program itself smells of the work camp."
Yes, this is very weird. I'm Jewish, and most of my extended family was either exterminated in or survived the Nazi death camps. I'm quite sensitive to anti-Semitism, including veiled anti-Semitism and unconscious anti-Semitism. But it is perfectly clear that Jews are not the objects of the remark. Welfare recipients and workfare workers are.
Non-New Yorkers may not know that workfare workers have been organizing and winning support. They call the program slavefare, because they lack even the most elemental rights of the free workers they work beside, or who they are replacing. Turner was implying that unless they work hard, and work as they're told, a worse fate awaits. Though I don't think he meant it consciously, the remark thus points in the direction of slave labor camps and even the Final Solution.
Andrew ("Drewk") Kliman Home: Dept. of Social Sciences 60 W. 76th St., #4E Pace University New York, NY 10023 Pleasantville, NY 10570 (914) 773-3951 Andrew_Kliman at msn.com
"... the *practice* of philosophy is itself *theoretical.* It is the *critique* that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea." -- K.M.