Thoughts on Antisemitism

When words had meaning

“What’s wrong with this donut?” That’s what I said after I bit into my first bagel as a 19-year-old undergraduate at Emory University. I grew up in the land of Krispy Kremes after church. There was one Jewish kid in my class, Neil Bartman, and, as far as I knew, his was the only Jewish family in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Going to Emory was a great introduction to the culture of “the Tribe.” I swam in the wisdom and wit of kids from Long Island and other non-Dixie lands. My first girlfriend was Jewish (Amy Singer, call me!) and I began to learn about the human toll of the antisemitism that was so effortlessly expressed in the South (and also everywhere else). One of my professors at Emory was Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, one of the world’s leading scholars of antisemitism. (One year after I earned my Ph.D., Lipstadt was sued for libel by a Holocaust denier in an English court. She won and the 2016 trial about the film, Denial, is worth watching.)