Richard Spencer Has ‘A Face In Need Of A Slap’
Image by Getty
By Ari Feldman November 13, 2017
Richard Spencer was a racist, grandstanding, insufferable classmate — but an impeccable German speaker — wrote one woman who spent a summer studying the language with him in Berlin.
Julie Hill, a New Zealander, was one of a number of classmates who grew to find the future “alt-right” leader’s xenophobia so off-putting that they boycotted his speech about Nietzschean philosophy on the last day of class.
“There is a German word that applies well to Spencer: Backpfeifengesicht,” wrote Hill. “It means ‘a face that is crying out for a slap.’”
Hill describes how Spencer initially endeared himself by helping her master complex German tenses — before blowing it by railing against Mexican immigrants. In Hill’s telling, Spencer lost the respect of the entire class (and the teacher) when he suggested that the white lacrosse players accused in 2006 of gang-raping a stripper were innocent because they would not want to have sex with a black woman.
“Our class was composed of people of all ages, from all walks of life, and from all parts of the planet, but if there was one thing that united us, it was that we hated Richard Spencer’s guts,” wrote Hill.
Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
