It’s the big laugh line in a sardonically hysterical song— “National Brotherhood Week.”  Tom Lehrer satirizes the artifice constructed and later abandoned to pretend we can all just get along. Rich and poor, Black and White, New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans are all at odds.

In recordings of his performances of this song, you can hear the uncomfortable laughter of recognition from the audience beneath the tinkling of the piano. And then comes the big laugh line, sung by the Jewish math professor with the wicked insight:  “Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Muslims and everybody hates the Jews.”

The speech and drama team from Evanston High School, with whom my New Trier team shared a bus, loved singing this song on the way to tournaments. I must have heard it fifty times over the years, and each time, the lyric in question was sung with particular gusto, followed by laughter that mystified me because all those kids had sung it themselves so many times.

And so many of them were Jews!

I was fortunate to have a plenteous Jewish upbringing and a home in which the customs, rituals, and values of Judaism were central. I won’t say that everything positive in my life had a Jewish element, but almost every Jewish element was positive.

(Except fasting. I hated it then and hate it now.)

Even the devastation I felt as I learned about the Holocaust and other tragedies before and since came with a certain lack of comprehension about why it seemed that everybody hates the Jews. Eventually, I lost patience with the hatred and decided I was unwilling simply to ignore it.

I will admit to some small pleasure in watching people wriggle uncomfortably when they were confronted for intentional bigotry. For example, the time the young woman asked if she could “Jew me down” on the price of a waterbed I was selling. I receive the same small pleasure when they are confronted about the bias of which they were unaware, like the use of “Pharisee” as a pejorative.

Ironically, it was my own evolution on the subject of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews that set me free from my own constant worry about the persistence of Jew-hatred. At first, I believed that the marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew was a betrayal of the Jew’s identity. 

Then, I came to believe it was a threat to the future of the Jewish people. Then, as I realized that for every Jew who married “out of” their tradition, a non-Jew also married “out of” their tradition, I understood that those marriages were overwhelmingly factual rather than political statements for both families.

At this point in my life, I understand the prevalence of intermarriage and the embrace of Jewish partners by non-Jewish families means that there are more people who love Jews than hate us.

Setting aside everything else about intermarriage (just do me the rhetorical favor, please), that evolution in my thinking has persuaded me that, while some people are haters, it is most certainly not the case that everybody hates the Jews. Do you think you know where I am going? You probably do not.

There is, without doubt, still antisemitism in the world, and a lot of it. But I cannot think of a worse reason to cling to a personal Jewish identity than the idea, promoted by too many Jewish organizations explicitly and implicitly, that people will hate you for it anyway, so you might as well embrace it.

That attitude is only one small tick above the pathetic adage popular among some Jews, “Scratch a gentile and you will find an antisemite.” Not every act of antagonism, including violence, that has a Jewish victim is motivated by antisemitism. Yet the intensity with which the accusation is leveled says more about the accuser than the perpetrator.

The condemnable shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, on the Fourth of July 2022 is a notable example.

The murderer grew up blocks away from the site of the crime, had difficulties with local law enforcement and a variety of residents and fired randomly into a crowd, murdering seven, two of whom were Jewish. He then headed to Wisconsin, expecting to shoot up another town with a smaller Jewish population.

But, because Highland Park has a large Jewish population, the speculation that the shooter was after the Jews was dominant, especially in the Jewish press. And I write these words as a proud Jew, unafraid of being identified as such.

Similarly, not every attack on the State of Israel is motivated by Jew-hatred either. (At this point, I am almost obligated to include the phrase “but some certainly are” lest I be accused of minimizing the problem.)

The insistence of some individuals and groups to equate being opposed to Israel’s conduct or policies with being opposed to Jews strikes me as a desperate attempt to frighten Jews to remain in or reenter the fold. And I write these words as a proud Zionist, unafraid of being identified as such.

I still laugh at Tom Lehrer’s lyrics even as I still wonder, more than half a century later, at the enthusiasm of the Evanston HS forensics team for them. But not everybody hates the Jews.

We should save our outrage for those who actually do.