Insensitive jokes will get you Fired!

Ronan Tynan, the Irish Tenor who (used to) sing God Bless America at Yankee Stadium has been dismissed

Ronan Tynan Fired for Anti-Semitic Joke

by the Yankees organization for making an anti-Semitic “joke”.

This ill-conceived attempt at humor was made when Tynan told a real estate agent who was showing an apartment in his building to a doctor from NYU Medical Center that he’s “ok” with the potential new tenants “as long as they are not Jewish.”

A joke? I think not. If it’s a joke told in a private setting, it’s one thing, but if he’s saying something like that in the context of conversation, well that’s a whole other level. One can tell an ethnic joke without having any feeling of resentment or bigotry toward the group, but when something like this slips out, it’s made clear that there’s some level, even if very minor, of antisemitism. And that’s why he got fired. I’m sure that if he said, “As long as they’re not Black, or Asian, or Muslim” or anything else, and the person behind the realtor was of that ethnicity, they’d have a serious problem with it too. I certainly would.

Classless, thoughtless, and rotten – that’s how Tynan represented himself. Let’s face it, a bigot is a bigot. Hats off to the Yanks for this move. If I’m a professional organization dependent on community support, I’d want nothing to do with him either!

This post was submitted by Jim Joyce.