No American Jew should be asked, for that matter, to account for everything or anything the Israeli government does, just because she’s Jewish. And if she is offended by the inference, as she should be, she is not merely expressing “Jewish fragility.” She is objecting to racism. Similarly, no white American should be asked to distinguish herself from “white supremacy,” solely because of the color of her skin. But what else does the wokes’ grotesque redefinition of the term “white supremacy” mean if not that, by virtue simply of their skin color, white people today are somehow responsible for a past they had nothing to do with, and may, in fact, find unutterably repellent?

In my view, racism is first and foremost a human impulse: it can infect anyone, of any race, at any time. Tribal identity goes very, very deep, and resisting it requires work. It’s also true that, over time, systems emerge which institutionalize racism — slavery, segregation, the legal restriction to certain professions, the denial of religious freedom, bans on intermarriage, Jim Crow, affirmative action etc. Those systems do indeed need dismantling (and have indeed been dismantled in America) if we are to move forward together.

But in a multicultural, multiracial society as complex as ours, the cross currents, the nuances and the complexities — especially in a population becoming more diverse and inter-married than ever — simply cannot be reduced to “always-oppressor/white” and “always-oppressed/black.”