Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged Wednesday that he used a “poor choice of words,” a day after being criticized by Jewish groups for describing predatory lenders as “Shylocks” in a speech.
Anti-Defamation League National Director “Abe Foxman has been a friend and adviser of mine for a long time. He’s correct, it was a poor choice of words, particularly as he said, coming from ‘someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice President Joe Biden,’ ” the vice president said on Wednesday.
A day earlier, Biden initiated a controversy in telling a story about his son providing legal help to military members returning home from overseas.
“People would come to him and talk about what was happening to them at home in terms of foreclosures, in terms of bad loans that were being — I mean, these Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas,” Biden said in remarks to the Legal Services Corporation.
It didn’t take long for Jewish leaders to condemn the vice president’s remarks.
Foxman said when the vice president “uses the term ‘Shylocked’ to describe unscrupulous moneylenders dealing with service men and women, we see once again how deeply embedded this stereotype about Jews is in society.”
Some have called the term anti-Semitic, noting that the phrase was used to describe the Jewish villain in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”
This is hardly the first time Biden has landed in hot water for controversial comments, something that the White House has acknowledged is an unfortunate side effect of his trademark folksiness.
