In all my time on the earth, I only experienced antisemitism once, when the editor of a paper I was working on told me a Jew could never be the paper’s editor. I left soon after that; I liked the editor very much. He was no antisemite; he was trying to answer a question honestly.

It is common to hear unconscious remarks about Jews, like “he jewed us down” or “he’s as greedy as a Jew.”  Most often, I hear those comments from people who don’t know that I am Jewish and have never seen a Jew.

There aren’t too many of us in the country, but no one in my town has ever knowingly insulted or threatened me because I am Jewish.

I was born Jewish, left the faith to become a Quaker and admire the teachings of Jesus Christ, Thomas Merton, St. Therese, and St. Augustine.

I have no spiritual or emotional connection to the State Of Israel, which has never had anything to do with my life or values. I have never once thought of going there or moving there. It is not my other country; this is my country.

I keep hearing that antisemitism is very much on the rise, and I believe it. As my grandmother always told me, sooner or later, somebody is always coming after the Jews.

But Jews do not have exclusive rights to victimization.

Hatred is on the rise all over the place and has always been on the rise; it just isn’t cataloged as efficiently or carefully.

Just ask Asians, powerful women or immigrants, and refugees like Syrians or the victims of Myanmar.

The Jewish immigrant world I grew up in was so traumatized by the Holocaust that I had never heard anything about other people’s suffering.

The Holocaust was unique in some ways, but I am also keenly aware of the great sorrow of so many different people, some of whom have also experienced unthinkable genocide. We know much more about the world than they did.

I had a surprising and exciting experience Sunday while Maria and I watched a replay of Saturday Night Live, which we both enjoy watching together.

The night’s host was the provocative and often funny comedian Dave Chappelle.

Like so much of American culture – publishing, the movies, the music industry – SNL was founded and produced by a Jewish man. I’m proud of that legacy.

A lot of Jews perform on the show regularly.

I was not expecting a debate about antisemitism to emerge from Dave Chapelle’s monologue on Saturday Night Live.  

I was expecting to laugh, which I did.

There is much for Jews and others to worry about in America these days.

Antisemitism hit its highest levels in American history in 2021, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors assaults on Jews in America.

It is a basic tenet of American Judaism that Jews must never forget the Holocaust,  which killed 6 million European Jews and is now considered a hoax by many on the far right.

That is a fearful thing for Jews to remember and an integral part of their faith.

I’ve never heard it joked about. I started out laughing at Chapelle, but when I looked up at Maria, I saw a different look on her face. Slowly, it dawned on me that this was not just another funny SNL monologue. There was something else going on.

Chapelle did a riff on Kanye West, who is in the news, and about the antisemitism West openly espouses. Chapelle decided to riff on the fact that Jews dominate much of the film and music industry. The idea of Jews controlling things is a very loaded one.

During his monologue, Chapelle seemed to be chuckling at Jewish sensitivity and power and winking about black anger toward Jewish people who some think control show business and kept them out of it.

I wrote for Rolling Stone for a while.

I learned while working there that there was great tension between many black musicians and the music industry, which made a ton of money off of the music and talent of African-American musicians in the South and elsewhere without paying them and while stealing much of their pioneering work.

Jews ran almost every movie studio and music company for a while. This is no longer true, but some wounds linger.

Hollywood kept many talented black people and women out of movies for years and away from directing, a subject of bitter black anger and resentment. Those wounds haven’t healed there, either.

In recent years, Jews all over the country have supported the civil rights movement and were instrumental in helping Dr. Martin Luther King, but that didn’t erase the grievance.

There is a lot of mistrust and resentment among those artists and musicians about Hollywood and the music industry.

If you didn’t know that, then Chapelle’s comments seemed off-center and even more uncomfortable. To some, they appeared anti-semitic. To others, it was long overdue.

I understand that Chapelle is consciously offensive; he brings a kind of wiseass and scary male sensibility to his humor, similar to Donald Trump’s deliberate and shocking bluntness. Trump changed the rules all by himself and poisoned public life. Chappelle is more careful.

Both Trump and Chapelle are gifted entertainers and are very popular. They can also be cruel and insensitive. It’s part of their act.

Chapelle has made lite of rape and the Me Too movement more than once.

Like Lenny Bruce and other cross-the-line comedians, Chapelle’s genius is for being funny and tiptoeing up the line but never totally crossing it. His humor is sneaky; it goes back and forth from outrageous to funny.

I don’t buy Chapelle as a racist or sexist, or anti-semite. We toss those words around like straw in a windstorm. They are all losing their true meaning.

Chapelle comes from a long line of outrageous and often offensive comedians who revel in breaking the rules. It’s hard to bear sometimes, but it’s just what John Adams had in mind when he insisted on a First Amendment.

Chapelle and Trump are on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, but both have mastered the art of saying things that many people are thinking but politicians and public figures have never dared to say.

Trump has blown the lid off of sensitivity and restraint. Anything goes.

If it’s in his head, it will sooner or later come out of his mouth and offend people; it seems to be a way to glory, fame, and money in America right now.

It’s about time, his followers say, that a politician will speak his mind. This becomes a kind of perverted, upside-down idea of honesty.

Chapelle is the person the Founders had in mind when they insisted on putting the First Amendment into the Constitution.

Many people have forgotten this, but the founders were more concerned with protecting offensive and unpopular speech than with protecting pleasant and inoffensive people. Nice people don’t need protection in that way.

But the number of things we are never supposed to say is growing all the time, and there is no end to people who feel like victims, and an awful lot of people are getting angry about it. It sometimes feels like we are becoming a nation of victims, each competing with all the others. Three times this year, I was accused of macro and micro aggression for what I wrote about the Amish; academics are creating a new vocabulary to handle all of the insensitive people in the world.

Dave Chapelle needs protection; the vapid TV anchors of today never say anything to talk about; they are quite safe.

The founders wanted the American people to be safe questioning everything, even the sacred cows dominating society then and now.

Chapelle has staked his brand on this kind of risky honesty.

I believe he is hilarious at times, and I laughed out loud when he did his riff on Kanye West and the idea that everyone knew that Jews ran Hollywood, but it was insane to say so publicly.

He suggested that we are not permitted to poke fun at Jews like blacks, gays, women, and African-Americans have often been targeted and stereotyped,  almost from the birth of our nation.

There is some truth to this. In a time where synagogues are being invaded and worshipping Jews slaughtered in their pews, the wiser comedian might have picked a different target to laugh at.

This is perhaps a conversation that Hollywood producers and outsiders need to keep on having about their history and values.

It’s not a conversation that should be banned from public life or made into heresy.

But if Chapelle had walked away from that issue or his kind of humor, he wouldn’t be Dave Chapelle. He doesn’t run from taboos; he walks right into them.

As a journalist, I was trained to respect the First Amendment.

Many people have wanted to hurt me, even kill me, for things I was writing that were unpleasant truths. I would not exist of free speech was not protected.

I am always wary of tossing labels like sexism and antisemitism around. Chapelle is no Hitler; there is no evidence that, unlike Kanye West, he supports conspiracy theorists or urges people to kill Jews.

Ron DeSantis has become the hottest ticket in politics by taking on targets no one would have dreamed of, from Disney to hapless school teachers trying to do their difficult jobs to district attorneys and prosecutors who disagree with him.

If there were ever a modern-day Mussolini wannabe, it would be DeSantis, who seems determined to punish and intimidate anyone who thinks differently than he and his wife. He is the angry candidate in a younger and more polished version.

I don’t know what the people of Florida are drinking these days, but I don’t think the rest of the country is drinking it.

Why is DeSantis a brilliant and gifted politician while Chapelle is a sexist and antisemite for stepping across the boundaries of civilized culture? Early on, Chapelle targeted the Me Too movement.

He said what many men thought but wouldn’t know: it sometimes went too far. I didn’t like or agree with what he said, but I know many others did.

Chapelle began his SNL routine by reading from a  “statement,” a paper that said, “I denounce antisemitism in all its forms, and I stand with my friends in the Jewish community.” He added: “And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time,” he joked, going for sarcasm and irony.

He said West had broken the show business rules of behavior, which he called “the rules of perception.”

“If they’re Black,” he said, “then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. But if they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence, and you should never speak about it.” He continued the routine – the audience was quieting down by the time he was saying it was apparent “if you had some kind of issue, you might go out to Hollywood and start connecting some lines, and you could adopt the illusion that the Jews run show business.”

“It’s not a crazy thing to think,” added Chappelle, “but it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.”

I saw Chapelle poking at posturing and hypocrisy, something our society could use much more of. He was taunting ideologies and the self-righteous.

Very few were asking tough questions about it, including journalists who are supposed to be doing that.

Chappelle was immediately and passionately criticized the following day of the SNL broadcast. One prominent Hollywood writer said that Chapelle had done more to normalize anti-Semitism than anything Kanye noted.”

Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt took to Twitter Sunday to criticize Chappelle and SNL. Asking, “why are Jewish sensitivities denied or diminished at almost every turn? Why does our trauma trigger applauses?

I was surprised by this; Jewish sensitivity has been a national political policy for decades; Jewish feelings are often and eloquently expressed.

Maria and I had one of our rare disagreements about Chapelle’s monologue. I thought it was risky and uncomfortable and yet still funny.  She thought it was borderline offensive and, yes, anti-Semitic. We had some good talks about it throughout today.

If you ask almost any black actor or musician, there is some truth to what Chapelle was saying, and few of them would dare to say it.

Chapelle is a taboo-buster, which is what good journalists used to do and what good comedians have always done.

It’s a complaint too far to accuse Chapelle of being responsible for normalizing antisemitism. William Randol Hearst, Henry Ford, Charles Lindburg, Donald Trump, and so many of his faithful have been pushing conspiracy theories about the Jews forever in America. Chapelle is a latecomer.

My grandmother was right. Sooner or later, she told me, someone would come for the Jews. She and I went to the movies every Saturday, and if she saw a police car anyway near, she would throw herself in front of me to hide me. I never managed to convince her that America was different.

The Jewish community is understandably fearful and paranoid. I’ve talked to some Jews who tell me they are quietly thinking about leaving the country if Trump and his party take over the government.

I am not one of them. I love this country and will end my days hear proudly and without reservation.

But I empathize with the worry of a Jew whose family was decimated in the Holocaust, as mine was.

I know why it is frightening when influential people suggest that Jews control all the world’s money, power, and culture. That idea has killed more Jews than anything.

They make an easy target. They are not fighters by nature and are always outsiders and refugees in almost every place they go. In most countries, they weren’t allowed to do anything but handle money.

But aren’t we learning in this country not to shy away from too much power in any institution? Billionaires in America are running wild, destroying politics, work, and a fair economy, and exploiting our divisions.

A lawless and damaged President nearly destroyed our democracy and was celebrated for it. I wonder if it’s even possible to challenge authority too much in our time.

I can’t speak to whether or not Jews have had too much power in the theater, Hollywood, or the music industry. I don’t know if this was a good or bad thing. Jews are often creative and innovative. It doesn’t surprise me that they should be drawn to shaping and creating culture.

I know that many people see it differently. I’d rather see it brought out into the open air than hidden away, the exclusive subject of bigots, traitors,  gutless politicians, and conspiracy theorists.

Jews can take it for all of our sufferings. We love to argue and debate. We have had to learn how to defend ourselves.

There is nothing new to this or uniquely American. This trope is the ancient and eternal blaming of the Jews for the troubles of failing governments, troubled countries, and disenchanted and angry people.

Whenever those people gather throughout history, the slander and pain of the Jews rise in proportion. That is our sad history.

But as a Jew, I do not feel I am made of crystal. We have learned to fight and protect ourselves.

Jews can speak up for themselves, and they do. It seems absurd that one comedian pushing the envelope on Saturday Night Life will bring antisemitism back to the fore single-handedly.

You don’t need to be a political scientist to understand that America, a troubled and angry and divided society recovering from a brutal pandemic, will also be a country looking for scapegoats to blame.

Jews are the favored scapegoats of history.

I loved my grandmother dearly, but she was a victim of another time and another world. Ours might be better, or it might be worse. But it’s not the same.

I admit that a part of me applauds Dave Chapelle’s strength and daring in challenging us to look more deeply into some of the issues we don’t think much about, to laugh at sacred cows and taboos, to think about them when we can, and even when we are told we can’t. He makes me think, every time.

Chapelle is a poster boy for the First Amendment, which is why Adams and Jefferson fought so hard to have one.