There’s a scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) that I have had stuck in my head for the past week, given its surprising relevance to the news cycle. I will get to why that is momentarily. In the scene, the staff of a large, elegant restaurant is cleaning up an unfathomable amount of vomit that has, due to events in the previous scene I will not elaborate, coated the entire place.

The focus turns to one cleaning woman (Terry Jones in old-lady drag), Maria, who is shoveling vomit into a bucket, and a French waiter (John Cleese), a head waiter or maître d’ sort, who is contemplatively smoking a cigarette and musing philosophically while everyone around him does the dirty work. The two get into a conversation about the titular meaning of life. Maria reflects on her own investigations at great libraries across the Western world, where, in an alluded-to previous life, she’d spent all her time reading up on this very topic, getting nowhere. Then, she explains, she got older and physically weaker, and wound up with the cleaning job. “But I can’t be really sad. Cause you see, I feel that life’s a game, you sometimes win or lose. And though I may be down right now”—she gestures at the vomit on the floor, for this is a literal down—“at least I don’t work for Jews.” The rhyming punchline. The joke being, of course, that for this woman, the one thing more abject, less dignified, less rewarding than literal vomit-shoveling would be having a Jewish boss.

“Not interested in working for a jew.”

So declared a 19-year-old Ivy League undergraduate, a Cornell student who decided against pursuing an internship where he’d have had to do just that. Why exactly he’d thought to work for a New York City real estate startup if this was his attitude is unclear, as is why he’d thought to attend Cornell, which is, according to Hillel, 20 percent Jewish. But who knows, he’s young, maybe he only just came into his own as a raging antisemite.

When I first heard about this story, I shoved it into the familiar framework of a young person saying something offensive that will now haunt them for the rest of their lives. It seemed like a tactical if not ethical mistake for an employer to publicize private correspondence in this way, naming the person it was from.

Then I clicked on an article about it and it’s slightly more complicated. The 19-year-old was applying to work........

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