A Jon by any other name would pwn as hard

My dad just learned today that Obama is black.

Okay, yesterday, since it’s past midnight, but the point still stands: a few hours ago, when we were having dinner and Obama’s Kenyan father came up, and my (lifelong Democrat) dad goes, “Really! I thought he was Arab!”

…He’s not usually an idiot. I swear.

(Under the fold: a bit on ethnicity and naming, with mild spoilers for tonight’s TDS.)

All right, meta time.

*sits back, cracks knuckles*

So Judd Apatow has a new movie coming out, in which one of the Jewish characters changed his last name to “something less Jewish-sounding.”

This comes up on TDS. Apatow takes the cue a bit of razzing on Jon Stewart (who was, if you’re just tuning in, born Jon Stuart Leibowitz, and legally changed his name when he got married in ’99).

To which Stewart, right away, comes back with “Yes, because the most important thing in the world is to make choices that are approved by other people in your cultural group.”

It was a short joke, but it stuck with me.

Now, Stewart doesn’t exactly hide his Jewishness. There were jokes about Hanukkah earlier in the same show. And he’ll occasionally refer to his original name – although, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say it out loud. There’s at least one interview where someone asked him what it was, and he said “…somethin’ real Jewy.”

But what we saw here (in the form of sarcasm) was a glimpse of actual, serious defensiveness.

The sentiment didn’t pop up out of nowhere. There’s a history here: some kind of struggle over the switch. Maybe it’s ongoing, or maybe Stewart has made his peace with it. But it was still intense enough, and the effects are present enough in his mind, that when Apatow made a joke about names, that was the first place he jumped to.

Now, me, I use a fake, or at least personally chosen, last name online. (Along with my real, or at least original, first name). The pseudonym is also what I use at conventions, and on the occasional publication.

My real surname, meanwhile, could be accurately described as “somethin’ real WASPy.” It comes from the name of a town in England, that’s how Anglo-Saxon it is. There’s a Jane Austen character with my name, okay? Almost anything would be less English than that.

But I have no experience of the name change as An Issue. Nobody has linked me, even as a joke, to a larger pattern of white people eschewing their white-sounding names. I’ve never felt pressured to have my name meet with the approval of all the other WASPs in the world. (Er, cultural WASPs – I’m not Protestant by belief.) People have asked if this is my real name, but not in a “so, are you ashamed of your cultural heritage?” sort of way.

Stewart doesn’t go into the reasons for his name change in public. The most he’ll say is along the lines of “I was trying to distance myself from my family” – and that, in at least one case, was in an interview when he didn’t realize the show had cut back from commercial. But the message is clear: it’s none of our business.

And if he weren’t Jewish, I guarantee you nobody would think this private family affair was a good excuse to write scathing editorials declaring that the man is “fearful of…his own last name.”

…I don’t have a clever conclusion to this. (The best thing I’ve come up with so far is “And that’s how a bill becomes a law!”)

Stewart’s offhand comment just reminded me that, o hai, this stuff is on his radar screen. And I figured it was worth noticing.