KEY POINTS:
To be honest, the emails piss me off. They land in my inbox every once in a while, usually forwarded by an older Jewish relative or friend.
The last one was "Islamic v Jewish Facts". It listed Islam with a global population of 20 per cent, then cited
Islamic recipients of Nobel Prizes: 1 literature, 2 peace, 2 physics, 2 medicine.
It then cited the global population of Jews at .02 per cent. Their Nobel Prizes were in the double digits: 10 literature, 53 physics, 13 economics, 43 medicine, 8 peace.
Was this just a case of catty religious one-upmanship? Perhaps, until it finished with, "The Jews are not promoting brainwashing their children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up. The Jews don't traffic slaves, or have leaders calling for jihad death for all infidels. Perhaps if the world's Muslims could invest more in normal education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems, we could all live in a better world."
I clicked delete, and gritted my teeth at one of my own people's pallid attempts to belittle 20 per cent of the world's population into a monolithic stereotype. Ironic isn't it, coming from a people that the world too often sees as Shylock instead of Albert Einstein?
Another arrived the same day with images of radical Islamic extremists with AK47s strapped around their chests and video of thousands chanting death to Israel.
I'd seen these images before. They are upsetting for all Jews, to be sure. But one important detail caught my eye, the subject line read, " The Basics of Islam".
No, I wrote back, isn't this "The Basics of Jihad?"
This isn't a matter of semantics; this is a matter of responsibility. Am I supposed to forward that email as a Jew to perpetuate the same hatred, the same ignorance, the same debilitating reductionism, which my people experience too?
I remember sitting across from a well-liked Ponsonby flatmate who was about to launch into anti-Semitic remarks, not knowing I was Jewish. There's always a point when you make a choice - do you say something before or after? I chose before.
"You aren't really all Jewish, are you?" He looked upset. I felt like I'd suddenly morphed into Dickens' Fagin to his Oliver Twist.
Yes, I explained, parents, grandparents, and theirs before. I could see him trying to reconcile the blue-eyed, straight-haired woman in front of him whom he'd heard argue against Israel's political Zeitgeist. I didn't fit his mould.
I think it is inevitable and necessary that Palestinians have a homeland. I think Borat is funny. I feel it is my duty to single-handedly eat every bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich in the Southern Hemisphere to make up for my people's tragic disdain for bacon throughout all time. I passionately want Israel to prosper, in peace.
I am a Jew. There are not many of us here in this country to learn from, fewer than 1 per cent of New Zealanders. The shape of my perspective is just as variable among other Jews as my Islamic friend, Rima, who would no more think of wishing to see her 9-year-old son hold an AK47 in his hand someday against my son than I would against hers.
Muslims make up the majority in 52 nations, speaking 60 languages. The minute we begin to see 1.5 billion Islamic people in the world as a monolithic voice is the same time that we erase the humanity behind any single one of them.
The CIA has become pretty good at it. It has created an Islamic "Ziggurat of Zealotry" which stacks Islamic people into a pyramid, each ascending level representing a leap in radicalism.
Can you imagine what that pyramid would look like if we did it for Christians? How comfortable would it feel to be categorised at a higher level than Methodists or the Exclusive Brethren, the Amish or Opus Dei?
As diverse as these Christian perspectives are, what unites them and defines them is a shared history.
In my lifetime I had always assumed that my Jewish history would be there incontrovertibly, no matter how distinct my personal perspective as a Jew. But this week I saw the division between intellectual intolerance and intellectual murder.
Today, as the ancient Jewish celebration of Hanukkah began, I realised I was wrong. History can be taken away.
Participants from 30 countries gathered in Iran under President Ahmadinejad for a Government-sponsored conference based on the premise that the Holocaust was a myth perpetuated to occupy Palestine.
They questioned whether six million Jews were killed and if gas chambers existed. Shining lights such as white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Dukes spoke.
He argued that no gas chambers or extermination camps were built during the war because the Nazis could have easily used simpler methods. Photographic proof, pictures of corpses, shows people killed by typhus, Holocaust deniers maintain.
Researchers from 67 countries and universities attended.
German attendee, psychologist Bendikt Frings, told the New York Times, "We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany. All my childhood, we waited for something like this."
I cannot think of any words more frightening to any Jew - no matter what their perspective on Palestinians or pork. It is a lesson all of us had better listen to, whatever your tradition.
All his life he has waited to erase my history. And for the rest of mine, I will never let him.
Happy Hanukkah, New Zealand.
