#in general using an accent as a coder for morality is wildly lazy and almost always racist and/or antisemitic

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the NYC accent and all its variants and stereotypical presentations in media is about as foreign as you can get in an accent without having to actually source one from overseas. Characters in stories where new york does not or cannot exist, or where characters literally have had no contact with earth, will get a new york-bronxy accent. You know, the oi for words that have ir/er/ar/or, etc (foist instead of first).

the author of this book offers several examples, including one about star wars in which 3PO was originally supposed to have a bronx accent--and his personality matched in terms of sarcasm, street smarts, wittiness, and tendency toward being snappy. He was supposed to sound like a cabby from NYC.

The author then goes on to give an example of that accent in World of Warcraft, where the goblins--written to be greedy, obsesse with money, hoarders, crafty, shrewd, conmen/artists/generally lying, untrustworthy people--sound like New Yorkers. He sent the description of the goblins and an audio clip of their voice lines to a linguistic colleague who refused to listen to the actual audio because he read the description and immediately picked up on the antisemitism in it.

Sound familiar?

The author says "I dont think the accents borrow from Jewish speech patterns" which is wild to me considering how she spent a decent amount of time talking about how academic institutions went out of their way to stifle the jewish populations in their undergrads, which replaced what was commonly associated with smarts/education/Jewish people with the SAE people speak with now. LIke. I completely disagree with her on that aspect and I think frankly its a dumb take.

But what I'm getting at here is that antisemitism in media often presents itself in accents and mannerisms of characters. Notice how a character that needs to be quickly coded as untrustworthy, unreliable, or any other host of negative things speaks NYCE (if they're not given an explicitly foreign accent, like British or eastern european).

The linguistic colleague was right that that description just calls back to wildly antisemitic stereotypes; they likely made the connection that if the goblins are written like this and they sound like New Yorkers, they're meant to be stereotypes of Jewish people.