State Rep. Walker Thomas, a Hopkinsville Republican, was heard saying an antisemitic slur and then laughing during a legislative committee hearing Tuesday in Frankfort — and another lawmaker repeated the slur before quickly trying to backtrack.
Thomas and Sen. Rick Girdler, a Somerset Republican, both later apologized, the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper reported.
Thomas’ comment came during the Capital Projects and Bond Oversight Committee meeting, where lawmakers received information on a pair of $1 leases in Graves County to provide office space for the Department of Corrections and the Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
In a Legislative Research Committee video on YouTube, Thomas is heard asking if someone could “Jew them down” on the lease price. He then laughed.
Girdler, the committee chairman responded, “We got a representative up here (asking) if you could Jew them down a little bit on the price.” Then he added, “That ain’t the right word. ‘Drop ‘em down,’ I guess.”
No one else responded, and the meeting continued.
The Lexington Herald-Leader was the first to report on Thomas and Girdler using the antisemitic slur.
In an apology that the Lexington paper ran, Thomas said, “I sincerely regret using that term and apologize to anyone harmed by my use of it. This is not who I am, nor is it what my faith leads me to be. It is a phrase I have heard throughout my life, but this experience has provided me with an opportunity to reflect on the impact that words have and the fact that we must be smarter today than we were yesterday.”
Hoptown Chronicle emailed Thomas to ask if he wanted to comment further but has not heard back from the lawmaker.
The 58-year-old businessman has represented the 8th House District since 2017. Portions of Christian and Trigg counties comprise the district. Thomas is seeking re-election this year, and a Democratic opponent, Pam Dossett, 55, of Hopkinsville, criticized Thomas over the slur.
Dossett also challenged Thomas in the 2020 election and narrowly beat him in the Christian County vote but lost by roughly 1,200 votes in Trigg County.
“My opponent, Walker Thomas, used a racial slur when he thought no one was listening. This reveals his true character: offensive, and degrading to the office he holds. It’s time for him to go,” Dossett, an elementary school teacher, said in a Facebook post.
The slur that Thomas and Girdler used comes from a false stereotype that portrays Jews as “cheap or stingy,” according to the American Jewish Committee.
The AJC’s Translate Hate project states, “… the phrase ‘Jew down’ may seem to be a harmless expression that’s used in everyday vernacular. However, it is an insulting, antisemitic misrepresentation of Jewish behavior that plays into the trope of Jews as greedy money handlers who are unwilling to part with their earnings. The common, mainstream use of antisemitic terms, like Jew down, plays a dangerous role in normalizing antisemitism and reinforcing conspiracy theories in the minds of anti-Semites.”
Melanie Maron Pell, the chief field operations officer for the American Jewish Committee’s Louisville office, issued a statement critical of Thomas and Girdler.
“While belated apologies are welcome, any elected official willfully using the ‘Jew them down’ phrase is contributing to the spread of a classic antisemitic trope. Certainly, there are plentiful words and phrases in the English language to use in making a point in the state legislature without succumbing to traditional, derogatory references to Jews,” she said. “Elected officials must be among the first to recognize the harm derogatory terms can cause, especially when antisemitism is on the rise in the United States. We look forward to working with Rep. Thomas and Sen. Girdler, as well as other members of the Kentucky State Legislature, on concerted efforts to combat antisemitism, and using AJC’s Translate Hate as a vital resource in this fight.”
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also has materials about antisemitism. The museum’s “Voices on Antisemitism” podcast addresses “the broad impact of modern-day antisemitism.”
According to the American Jewish Yearbook, less than 1% of Kentucky residents identified as Jewish in 2020.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, several Jewish families settled in Hopkinsville and ran businesses here, including Sam Bohn’s department store, Dan Metzler’s men’s store, Klein’s department store, Sabel’s Western Wear and Arnold’s House of Fashion.
“Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity,” published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2012, features a chapter on sisters Sarah and Frances Myers, who ran Arnold’s House of Fashion.
The local Jewish community established the Adath Israel congregation and built a synagogue on Sixth Street between Liberty and Clay streets. It was dedicated in 1925 but the congregation had dwindled to only a few members in the 1970s. The roof of the synagogue collapsed in the late ’70s, and the building was torn down.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
