The night before we left for California, I had what may be the strangest dream I ever dreamed: I was in a passenger plane – flying who knows where – until the airplane was split in two by a lightning strike so fierce that it cleaved the sky itself. There was no salvaging the plane and I lost sight of the other passengers.

However, and despite all, it seems that I landed safely on an undiscovered island, situated somewhere in mid-Atlantic. The island wasn’t empty. It held one tree and one inhabitant. That individual used to be a man but was now identifiably a woman wearing red lipstick. But somehow this turnover-gendered person still continued precision-tooled for an ongoing assignment of Jew-hatred.

Clearly this was a dream that called for decoding. I believe that we as a culture have got past the point where we must pay an expert to decode our dreams. At an earlier era in my life, I had – like many of my fellow New Yorkers – a Freudian psychoanalyst. For him, involuntarily but obligingly, I produced the dreams to which Freud himself had given Latin names. Later, when I’d left the Freudian guy and was either reading Jung or else reading about him, I can recall at least one dream inhabited by Archetypes: with Norse gods who gave way to the Arthurian cycle. Anybody see a pattern here? Anyway at this point, for better or worse Abbie gets to decode her own dreams.

I think the stroke of lightning represents an event that was heaven-shattering. And the individual of flipped gender whom I encountered on the island exhibits the same anti-Jewish hatred – unchanged beneath any and all outward changes – and ever-ready to return to his/her/their unvarying work.

The phenomenon has been so continuous in the past 2000 years that one can characterize the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the time) by the kind of Jew-hatred that typified it. Thus:

(a) In the great age of Christendom, Jews were vilified for the newly-conceived crime of deicide, whereby they – collectively and in every generation – crucified God in the person of Jesus. (By contrast, Judaism lists no crime called “deicide” in its conceptual compendium, nor is rabbinic Judaism comfortable with the notion of hereditary guilt – either individual or collective.)

(b) In an age that celebrated universality (e.g. the 18^th century’s Age of Enlightenment) Jews were vilified for their stubborn particularity.

(c) In an age that celebrated particularity (e.g. the early nineteenth century’s Romantic period) Jews were vilified for their universality, often called rootless cosmopolitanism.

(d) In the Darwinian age that celebrated survival of the fittest, Jews were the only “race” deemed inherently unfit and yet a competitive threat to the master race.

(e) In the present “anti-colonial” era, Israeli Jews, and other Jews by extension, are deemed colonialists, even though they were returning to their ancient homeland. Nor does it make any difference that their sincere attempts to live as assimilated citizens in European lands had been answered by the Holocaust.

So it’s been a weird and wacky business – with every indication of worsening in its continuing weirdness. So let me make my own effort to explain the whole thing. There’s an incident in the New Testament that may help out here. Jesus is accosted by the devil who tries to tempt him in the following way:

“If you’re the son of God, prove it! Come over here to the edge of this cliff and cast yourself down. Jump off the cliff! If you are who you say you are, you won’t get hurt!”

Jesus replies by noting that it’s not a good idea to play “I dare you” games with God, no matter who you are.

Anyway, I see the underlying sameness of the hatred-of-Jews as expressing a somewhat similar offer:

“If you’re really the Chosen People, prove it! Show us all that you can survive the Newest Fashion in the Oldest Hatred. N’yah, n’yah, n’yah!”

So far, they haven’t yet managed to kill us all. There’s a tuneful hillbilly hymn with a refrain that says, “I know who holds tomorrow”:

So we’ll see, won’t we?