I HAVE WRITTEN HUNDREDS of articles in which I rarely addressed anti-Semitism at all, certainly not my own encounters with it. I know it’s because of unease about calling attention to anti-Semitism. I would never have that unease calling attention to other dimensions of being targeted for who I am: it’s specific to anti-Semitism; as if calling attention to it could bring on more rather than less targeting of Jews; as if by speaking of anti-Semitism I could fuel it; as if anti-Semitism is ultimately about what Jews do.
This unease became clear to me only while working on this article, born of reading a definition of what it means to be indigenous, and realizing, with a physical sense of shock, that being indigenous is diametrically opposed to the experience of uprootedness that is so quintessentially Jewish. While uprootedness is indeed quite the opposite of being indigenous, it is also...