I love this line that you see increasingly on social media and in politics: “Jews get to decide what antisemitism is.”

I won’t go through all the obvious problems with the claim. I’m more fascinated by idea that somehow it’s part of our inheritance, our heritage, our privilege, our right, our pleasure and our joy, as Jews, to get to decide what antisemitism is. It’s not that, as Jews, we get to worship God as we see fit, or we get to celebrate our holidays as we see fit (and even, as is the case in New York, have the government acknowledge our holidays as public holidays), or that we get to cherish and teach our authors and texts. No, the great privilege of being a Jew is we get to decide what antisemitism is.

Jews used to say, my God is a jealous God. Then it became my genocide is a jealous genocide (and thou shalt have no other genocides before me). Now it’s my racism is a jealous racism, and only I get to decide what it is. I know she’s problematic in many ways, but I’d love to see Amy Schumer doing a bit about this, where she treats antisemitism as a stuffy, and does her pouty, no, you can’t have it, only I get to have it, this antisemitism is mine!

It’s so comic and ghoulish at the same time, you’d think only someone like Kafka could have dreamed it up. As it turns out, the world is such that it no longer takes a literary genius to come up with something as hilariously brilliant as that. Any schmuck on the internet can do it.