Vice President Joe Biden drew sharp criticism from the Anti-Defamation League earlier this week when he described unscrupulous bankers as "Shylocks" - a pejorative term based on a Jewish character in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," New York Daily News reported. He apologized Wednesday, saying it was "a poor choice of words."
Biden made the comment during a speech to the Legal Services Corporation, a non-profit group that offers legal aid to those who cannot afford it, while telling a story about his son, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, providing legal assistance to fellow soldiers after they returned from war.
"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 reference to moneylenders taking advantage and profiting from mortgages of military men and women serving overseas, Yahoo News reported.
The Anti-Defamation League swiftly criticized the vice president's choice of words, according to The Hill.
Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told Yahoo News that "Shylock represents the medieval stereotype about Jews and remains an offensive characterization to this day."
The term comes from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice," in which the villain, Shylock, is a greedy Jewish money lender that asks for a "pound of flesh" as payment. Some have argued that the controversial term has taken anti-Semitic connotations.
"The vice president should have been more careful," Foxman said. "When someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice President Joe Biden, 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."
In a statement Wednesday, the vice president agreed, saying it was "right" for the top Jewish group to criticize him for the comments.
"Abe Foxman has been a friend and advisor of mine for a long time," the vice president said. "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.' He's right."
Meanwhile, this could be considered classic Biden, who has a well-documented struggle with foot-in-mouth disease.
In 2007, he described then-Senator Barack Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," according to NYDN.
