To be normal, a person must be like others. When Jews lived isolated in their own communities, they were normal: each Jew was culturally like the rest. In the nineteenth century, superficial liberalism opened the outside world to Jews. The Gentiles still despised the Jews but called us their equals. Jews saw the world and its opportunities, and realized that they were not normal,not like others. The nineteenth-century German discussion of Jews is instructive: liberals countered anti-semites by asserting that Jews could eventually become like other Germans. They did not imagine that Jews were decent people in their own right. German Jews accepted that attitude and rushed to assimilate.

It’s hard, very hard to be different. The Jews wanted to be normal. Israel offers us a chance to normalize without Gentile-izing, to be like our neighbors, yet unlike the world that eats dogs and pigs, practices incest and homosexuality, and dislikes us at best.

It’s hard, very hard to believe you are right when the world is against you. And so the Jews suppose Gentiles are right, their customs better, that anti-semites have a point. And the Jews hate their Jewishness and see it as a stain and erase it. Deep in their minds they know their betrayal is bad, that they betray generations of Jews who went up on stakes and died in pogroms to pass on the spark of Judaism. The Jews hate the bug that makes them uneasy. They hate their Jewishness. They hate other Jews because they implicitly remind them that they are not Americans, leftists, or whatever other group they want to belong to, but Jews. Religious and nationalist Jews who wear their Jewishness proudly are a constant reminder to assimilationist Jews of their moral bankruptcy, of their betrayal. And gentilized Jews hate religion and take pleasure in suppressing it. They brainwash Israeli schoolchildren with stories of Judaism’s borrowing from neighboring religions; children don’t understand the qualitative differences of superficially similar rites. They ridicule religious people, their habits and their wardrobe, without telling the children that those funny-looking religious guys stood tall in the face of persecutions, tortures, and murder for centuries. They discriminate against Jewish religious schools in the diaspora and ostracize their sponsors.

Gentiles have religion, culture, empires. Gentilized Jews reject Judaism, Jewishness, and Eretz Israel, though they concede to ghetto-sized Israel. Gentilized, rootless Jews realize their inferiority to Gentiles with roots. Jews used to be proud of themselves, and inferiority ruins their mental health. Rootless Jews hate their parents and their compatriots who deceived them about Jewish pride; as they see it now, Jews have nothing to be proud of. Rootless Jewish leaders hatefully oppress common Jews, choose policies detrimental to them, and divert their money to irrelevant and even anti-Jewish causes. Many Jewish families forego having more children because they cannot pay the skyrocketing cost of education, but fat American Jewish organizations refuse to finance Jewish schools to make education free.

The rush of the Jews to strip themselves of Jewishness confirms Gentiles in their contempt for the Jews. “Even the Jews realize that their ways are wrong,” think the hereditary anti-semites, “and we’re right to dislike them. Let them become like us, if they could.” Educated, wealthy modern Gentiles are no less anti-semites than their poor and ignorant ancestors. The difference is, they don’t want violence. The Germans detested the unorganized violence of pogroms; the Nazis listened and switched to planned extermination in death camps.