Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench in Berlin in the early 1930s. Things are not yet so bad, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get worse. One of the two is solemn­ly reading a Jewish newspaper. The other is scanning a Nazi paper, and laughing out loud. Finally, the first man stops reading and says, “It’s bad enough that you read that pro-Hitler rag. But to laugh at it!” The second responds with a shrug. “What if I read your paper? It tells me about Jewish windows being broken, Jewish shops boycotted, Jewish children beaten up in school. So ... if I read the Hitler paper it tells me that we Jews control the whole world.”

Like all jokes on this subject, the above story involves a dangerous flirtation with bad taste, with tragedy, and with irony. Irony has been an essential constituent of Jewish life ever since Maimonides wrote that, while the Messiah will one day come, “he may tarry.” That shrug—half hopeful and half pessimistic—is pres­ent in Woody Allen and in Lenny Bruce. And the tragic element is so raw and so recent that there isn’t any need to go over it. Amer­ican Jews may be the most successful mi­nority in American history, which is as much as to say that they are the most successful minority ever. But no other ethnicity has ever had to witness the physical destruction of per­haps one-third of its entire membership, carried out by a highly civilized European country that had been the model for assimilation, and involving the deliberate state murder of children. Still, no other American minority can also claim a stake in a local superstate of its very own, at the other end of the Mediterranean, where for the first time in history Jews can debate whether it would be proper to employ nuclear weapons on the Sabbath.

As I began to write this article, synagogues had been firebombed in several French towns and in one north London suburb, and a suicide assassin had massacred Jews who just minutes earlier had arrived from synagogues for a Pas­s­over dinner in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya. In response, American Jews in California had taken out an advertisement urging Woody Allen and others to boycott the Cannes Film Festival, on the grounds that the days of Vichy were back. Similar themes were being stressed by many Jewish and Israeli writers, who spoke darkly of the imminence of another Holocaust. Very often recently, this “Nev­er Again” note has been struck by liberal and even radical Jews who seem to regret their former softness. Nat Hentoff, civil libertarian and longtime friend of the civil-rights movement, told New York magazine that “if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, ‘All Jews gather in Times Square,’ it could never surprise me.”

I have to say that if such a voice were ever raised or broadcast, I would be much more than surprised, and very much more than shocked. I also think I could count on a very large number of Jews failing to report to Times Square, and an even larger number of non-Jews willing to support this refusal. Perhaps I should say here that I am related on my mother’s side to this ancient argument and that, according to the Law of Moses, the Israeli Law of Return, and the Nuremberg laws, I can be counted as a member of the ancient tribe. This isn’t much use, either to the tribe or to myself, since I don’t believe there is a single word of truth in either Exodus or Genesis, would never consider asking a Palestinian to move out and make room for me, and do not believe that the human species is subdivided into races. I maintain that I have the best evidence of Darwin and DNA on my side, as well as many recent ­anti-Biblical and ­anti-mythical discoveries made by Israeli archeologists. Ze’ev Herzog, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, has concluded that “the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign, and did not pass it on to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Furthermore, the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.” (Archaeological myths are often the most toxic. The legend of Masada involves believing as a positive and noble aspect of the story that Jewish resistance to Rome culminated in a ­suicide-murder.) Nonetheless, I like to think that I would be despised or hated by any movement defining itself as ­anti-Semitic. And on my shelf is an American Nazi pamphlet, denouncing the “Zionist Occupation Government” (or “zog”) that covertly rules these United States. This illiterate screed isn’t just a joke: it comes from the same swamp as those who murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver in 1984, and ultimately from the same mind-set that produced the atrocity in Oklahoma City. In these ­hate-clotted pages, I am—for the first and only time in my life—listed with both Henry Kissinger and Norman Podhoretz as a member of the international Jewish/Zionist conspiracy. As in the case of the tale with which I began: who knew I had such secret power?