“What did you think of Wolfsheim?” he asked me.

“Not a great representative of the tribe.”

“Did that bother you?”

I thought about it. “It didn’t strike me when I read it. But now you mention it, he was a little diabolical.”

“Cuff links made out of human teeth. Not his, I presume,” the professor said.

I remembered the line about the teeth cuff links. “I guess we’re meant to imagine that Jews are cannibals as well as puppet masters of shadow cabals and all that crap.”

“Where do you think it comes from?” he asked me.

“What, Jew hatred? I wish I knew. Hitler said he wanted to rid the world of the Jewish conscience. Maybe that’s why Fitzgerald writes Wolfsheim with such naked malice. Maybe he was trying to cast off his own conscience. I don’t know. I think you’ve ruined the book for me,” I said with dejection. I pushed it sullenly toward him on the table.

“Sorry for that,” he said, not sounding particularly sorry.

“Antisemitism,” I said to him as bitingly as I could manage, “Proves God more undeniably than anything else. More than creation ex nihilo, more than the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, ontological, cosmological, all the ogicals. More than anything.”

He gave me a sideways look. “This sounds like it’s going to be a good one.”

“Think about it. We live in a society where discrimination is the greatest and most unforgivable evil, but somehow it’s still okay to hate Jews. Maybe it’s a little impolitic, like farting at the table—if it’s loud it makes everyone uncomfortable, but if you can kind of squeeze out a quiet one, well, it’s only natural. It’s okay to invoke generational antisemitic tropes like Jews control the media, or Jews control the banks, Jews want to take over the world. All the Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff. If you say the N-word, you’re done. Game over. That’s just saying a single word. But Jew hatred doesn’t count somehow. The alt right and the alt left are the two furthest points on the political spectrum. They disagree violently about every issue under the sun except for one thing: They don’t like Heimies. The Arabs kill the Jews and the whole world goes out to protest for the Arabs. That doesn’t seem a little strange to you?”

“So, the fact that Jews are unusually disliked, in your opinion, is proof that your God is the true God? That is . . .” he craned his neck, searching for the right word, “Counterintuitive.”

“But we always survive. And our enemies always fall in the end. Always.”

“Yes, I think it says in the book you claim was written by all-loving God, not a few times, that the Lord will take revenge on His enemies. He will defend His suffering children and punish those who torment them. ‘All who bless you will be blessed and all who curse you will be cursed’ or some such.”

“Right,” I said. “Exactly. After the Philistines and the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, the czars, we remain and they’re gone. Now it’s the progressives and the nationalists who hate us most. We’ll dance on the dust of their history too one day. You don’t think that’s a fulfillment of those prophecies?”

“No. Not even a little. The Nazis killed six million of you people. They swung babies by their legs and bashed their brains out so they wouldn’t have to waste bullets in the hundred thousands. What was their punishment? How did your God take revenge for His people? The Germans lost the war? And then the country went on living pretty much the same as before except they had a wall in the middle of their capital for a few years? That’s the payback your all powerful God took from the people who murdered half your population? You’re satisfied with that? Ten scapegoats hung at Nuremberg, balancing the scales for two million Jewish children? And most of the Nazi officer corps escaped to Argentina, where they lived out the rest of their lives in safety and comfort. That’s some God you have.”

“We got Israel.”

“A desert the size of New Jersey gift wrapped in a dozen hostile countries that haven’t stopped trying to throw you out since that glorious day in 1947. And also the enmity of the entire civilized world for displacing the indigenous population. That’s an underwhelming consolation prize for two thousand years of pillage and rape at the hands of Christian Europe, ending with the bang of the Holocaust. If you ask me. I wouldn’t take that deal. You guys set the bar pretty low for your God. I wish my students expected so little of me.”

“Israel has got to give you some pause, Professor, come on. Think about it. There are kings and prophets, heroes and villains. The people are sinning and infighting and being called to repent. We’re surrounded by enemies and constant wars, we’re vastly outnumbered, but we keep winning and thriving.” So far. “If you don’t want to call it miraculous, it’s definitely miracle-adjacent. It’s literally a story out of the Bible happening in front of our eyes.” Wasn’t it? “It could be in the Bible. There could be a twenty-fifth book called ‘Zion’ and it would fit right in between Samuel and Kings.”

“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” he said sarcastically. “While we’re on the subject, I have to tell you I find the entire concept of a ‘chosen people’ to be distinctly un-godly. Your theology goes like this: God created the cosmos, the earth, and all its peoples, but He likes this one little group better than everyone else? If He was only a flawed parent and not a supposedly benevolent, omniscient omnipotent being I’d say He was doing a shitty job of it for that alone, and that would hardly be His greatest sin.”

“Chosen doesn’t mean better. He doesn’t like us better. And anyway, according to our history, we chose Him. Abraham recognized God and passed his faith on to his children while the world, people like yourself let’s say, are not interested in Him. That’s the origin of our nationhood. Our club is not a racial group. The Jews aren’t a race. We’re not an ethnicity or a nationality. We love our ancestral homeland, but we’re not defined by it, like Italians are defined by being from Italy. What makes us Jews is that our ancestors found God and tried to pass on the Word. Which they did, as is evidenced by the fact that the majority of the world is monotheistic in the Abrahamic tradition. And that obligation is, fortunately and unfortunately, unconditionally heritable. Being part of management comes with certain perks and it comes with some responsibilities whose dereliction comes with certain consequences. It’s not unreasonable. It’s more a job than an identity. We have an open enrollment policy by the way. If anybody wants in, they’re welcome to join the club. You get the Nobel prizes, but you also get the pogroms and the holocausts, so we just tell prospective initiates to make sure they’re sure. But there’s no doctrinal compulsion to join. As far as I know, we’re the only religion with a paradise that doesn’t require membership for entry. All good people go to heaven in Jewish ideology. Any religion, any lifestyle, as long as you’re a good person you get in. There’s nothing exclusive about Judaism.”