I start by stepping back about fifty years. I was growing up in a small French town in Quebec. I doubt if I knew what a Muslim was, but I did know that the Catholic kids would chase me home from school yelling that I’d killed Jesus. I did know who Jesus was (within the limits of a five-year-olds’ spiritual awareness) and I was pretty sure that I’d never killed him. And I had an increasingly accurate idea of what the Holocaust was, about which my parents (both of whom had escaped from the Holocaust) would say almost nothing, but about which my grandmother, who got out of Germany in 1940, would talk to me at length.

And then I started reading, and as my four year older cousin, Frank, in Boston got all sorts of Jewish history crammed into him, he would pass the books onto me, and I’d read them. This culminated at his Bar Mitzvah, when he came to me with ALL of the books, and handed them to me, saying, “Now I never have to look at these again.” I read all of the books, and I became knowledgeable about Judaism, and this plucky little people who had somehow survived 3000 years of attempts to kill them, and who now had finally gotten a little country that was surrounded by big bad countries who wouldn’t let the Jews have a place of their own, and I was very proud when Israel defeated the Arabs in assorted wars, (in a similar way to my pride when the Montreal Canadians defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs for the Stanley Cup) and when I heard that the UN had passed a resolution equating Zionism and racism, I just couldn’t believe it.

This was, as I recall, pretty much around the same time when I discovered that my grandfather had fought for Germany in World War 1, and I couldn’t believe that either, because everyone knew that the Germans were always the bad guys, and yet my grandfather was very clearly a good guy, which made no sense. It’s very hard when the map by which you navigate shows a clear easy walk ahead, and you keep running into those damn swamps.

So I gradually became a bit more open, and then I started to read material that really contradicted some of those early concepts (plucky underdog Israel turns out to be the fourth largest military force in the world) and I started to think about what racism was, and I threw away the map, acknowledged that I was at least waist deep in swamp, and tried to figure some things out.

I went to Israel, a trip that another cousin had said had changed her life, and “made her realize for the first time what it meant to be Jewish.” I had the family ritual picture taken of me standing under a street sign on Marmorek St., in Tel Aviv, named after a great uncle who worked with Hertzl to create Israel 130 years ago. And when I cashed travelers’ checks at a bank on the street, I enjoyed being able to explain to an amazed teller why my passport had the same name as the street. But I went to Mea She’arim, and looked at the orthodox “Black Hatters,” and felt that these people had nothing to do with my life or values. I stood at the top of Masada and thought that contemporary Jews owe their existence to the Jews who chose to find a way to live through the Romans, not to the ones who died fighting them.

So for a while I felt I wasn’t Jewish. I didn’t practice Judaism, I wasn’t part of any Jewish community, and the only Jewish thing I did was to go to Passover at my parents’ house because it made them happy.

Then I wound up teaching a World Religions course, so I did lots of research, and I noticed how much the social ethics of Judaism, and the values of Judaism were generally the same as the ones I had. But I didn’t believe any of the theology, and when people asked me, “Are you Jewish?” I’d answer by asking them what they meant by “being Jewish.” Answering a question with a question is, of course, a very Jewish thing to do. And like so many other Jews of my generation, there was that memory (pretty faint when awake, more vivid in nightmares) that when the Gestapo knocked on your door, they didn’t ask you about your theological beliefs. They believed in a Jewish race, and if your parents belonged, then so did you. And of course, I knew that I could go to Israel tomorrow, paid for by the Israeli government, and be made a citizen on arrival, get to vote, and live anywhere I chose because my mother is Jewish. And I knew that someone whose family has actually lived there for a thousand years cannot become a full citizen, cannot choose where to live because they aren’t Jewish. Jewish privilege, like white privilege, like male privilege, felt really wrong.

Then fate felt I needed another nudge, and I became the staff advisor to the MSA, the Muslim Student Association, a job I took on exactly two days before Sept 11, 2001. And a dear friend dragged me to a Tikkun meeting, where I found the first (mostly) Jewish community I’ve ever been part of. Both of these got me talking, arguing, and thinking about religion, and what being Jewish was, and what my role was as a Jew. And I realized that there are things I can do, things I need to do, to try and meet those ethical demands that I believe in.

If I say “All Nepalese people are...” it’s a racist statement, whether I attribute good or bad things to them. I can fight anti-Semitism by making it clear that “all Jews” is a null concept. I can certainly make it clear that all Jews do not support the Israeli government, and that all Jews do not hate Muslims. By doing so I start to slowly build a bridge that might cross the swamp. And I know I have Muslim friends who are working to build that bridge from their side of the swamp. Can we make our two parts meet? When we start to see each other and it’s clear that we’re not quite on the same pathway can we manage to twist our halves so they do meet? And when we have a bridge, will we find others who are willing to walk across it?

I believe we will. I do know that fighting swamp isn’t getting us anywhere. I have a friend with whom I talked deeply in the MSA who told me how when she was growing up in the Sudan, a Muslim country, she was taught that all Jews were evil and she believed it because she’d never met any Jews. Then she moved to Canada, and she met me, and some other Jews, and she doesn’t believe that any more. Her description of wrestling to give that belief up sounds to me a lot like my giving up my belief that all Germans were evil when I realized my grandfather was German. It’s a hard and slow job, building bridges. Perhaps it’s even harder than building pyramids, I don’t know. But it is work that needs to be done, and part of that work is giving up the vision of Israel that I had as a child. For me, that map only led deeper into the swamp.