“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.”

“Cufflinks made from human teeth. Not his, I presume,” the professor said.

I remembered the line about the teeth cufflinks. “Well of course. After we use your goy blood for our matzah, what do you think we do with the rest of the body? Cufflinks.”

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

“What, Jew hatred? 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.

“Where do you think it comes from?” I asked him. “You’re the goy. You tell me.”

“A lot of people are pretty upset about what’s going on in Palestine. What’s been going on there for a long time now.”

I thought about the slurs I heard when I got on the bus. Shouts from car windows. Stories in the news of stabbing attacks and car rammings and synagogue defacings getting more and worse and everywhere. Public figures talking openly about a ‘Jew problem’ like in days of yore.

“What was Fitzgerald’s excuse? That was before Gaza.”

“It was indeed.”

“Sometimes I feel like, Thy rod and thy staff comfort me, but then sometimes I’m like, not so comforted.”

“I can see the comfort in being a sheep with a shepherd no less mighty than the Lord himself taking responsibility for everything,” he said.

“That’s not the comfort part. The rod and the staff are the shepherd’s tools for guiding his sheep away from the cliff, or the wolves, back to the safety of the farm and good grazing pasture. It makes no sense for us to be hated like this. Always and everywhere. An anthropologist couldn’t explain it. So then, the strike of the staff on your back tells you the shepherd is there, guiding you with purpose and love.”

“I don’t see how a God who makes everybody hate you for his own mysterious reasons is so much more comforting than the world spinning fiendishly but senselessly on its own.”

“God told us he will turn the nations of the world against us if we don’t follow His commandments. Which we don’t. Some do. I don’t think I follow Him too well. But he’s behind the scenes saving us each time, helping us survive and thrive despite the mistakes we make that cause him to strike us.”

“What a heartwarming portrait of a loving God; and a compelling version of world history,” he said sarcastically. “Or maybe telling everybody you’ve been Chosen, by God no less, is not terribly endearing. That might have something to do with the development of persistent enmity.”

“Doesn’t every religion consider themselves to be chosen?”

“Let’s see, Christians choose Jesus, so that is the other way around. And they joyfully encourage everyone around them to make the same cool-headed decision. Islam kind of chooses you whether you like it or not, so they are not terribly exclusive either. Hinduism and Buddhism are essentially voluntary even to their adherents, so that doesn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers. So yes, the Jews are really the only ones going around telling everyone God likes them better.”

“It makes a certain kind of sense when you put it that way,” I said, working out the details in my mind.

“Oh? Here I was starting to get confused.”

“God runs the world through natural processes. We tell everybody we’re chosen and the world says back to us, naturally, well then, you better freaking back that up. Which is exactly the way God says it’s going to work. At a superficial glance you can believe it’s happening by itself, but when you look closer, it’s the Shepherd.”

“That is an interesting theory,” he said, “But I would say exclusivity understandably provokes feelings of rejection and resentment.”

“Jews are not exclusive. I don’t know where you get that from. 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. It’s just that there’s no doctrinal compulsion to recruit because, and, as far as I know, we’re the only ones who believe this, our paradise 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. So there’s no need to join. But there’s nothing exclusive about Judaism.”