When I was young, my parents in the early 1960s told me to ignore stories about the “Jews.” Of course, out here in rural California, I never met such distant persons, but only heard about them from disgruntled farmers (who, I wager, had never met any either). These pesky “Jews” apparently in some secretive cabal controlled the entire fruit-market of the United States! “They”—not the paradoxes of interstate commerce and the cutthroat nature of American marketing—explained why we got $3 a box for plums while “they” took $20.

Middle men, market manipulators, and secret smart guys who trafficked in inside breaks and shady deals—all these right-wing farmers used to swear pulled the strings of the American fruit market. When I asked my mother if this could possibly all be true, she would sigh, and say, “No, no, no. You see when people fail, or when they are angry, or they become afraid and confused, they always blame those who are different or successful or confident. And often that means Jewish people, most of whom our neighbors have never met.”

And then I grew old, and learned that it wasn't any more reactionary men of the soil who evoked the Jews to explain why they were not listened to, or felt weak, or were frustrated, but rather often very liberal, and self-acclaimed progressives. Instead of Shylock fruit merchants, the new sneaky Jew was the neoconservative—with a funny-sounding name like Wolfowitz or Perle who, due to some sinister genius, had hoodwinked red-blooded Americans into fighting and dying for the Likud party in Israel...