"Are you rich?"

Dennis Prager is starting something interesting this year. He's going to write a series of articles about what it means to be Jewish. As he explains in the first of the series:

Love them or hate them, respect them or loathe them -- and most people have at least one of these reactions -- of all the world's groups, none receives as much attention, including hatred, as the Jews. And this has been true for thousands of years. Yet, for all their fame and notoriety, Jews are little understood. In fact, it may be said that those who do not understand Jews fall into two groups: non-Jews and Jews.

He's not kidding. I remember when I was in college, some 25 years ago, one of those evenings where a bunch of students hang out in the apartment kitchen talking. At some juncture in the conversation, it came out that I was Jewish. One young man, without missing a beat, and without any evidence of hostility, immediately asked me "Are you rich?" I had to laugh, considering the marginal middle class existence my parents had scrabbled for all my life, but I was also absolutely horrified that, near the end of the 20th century, there were still people who believed the canard of the "rich Jew." Considering the ever-escalating anti-Semitism that plagues the world today, Dennis Prager's proposed series isn't coming a moment too soon. It's only a shame that Prager is probably talking to people who, while they may not know all there is to know about Jews (and even I, a Jew, fall into that category), don't have a problem with Jews. His articles almost certainly won't be read by those who need to read them most -- the Jew-haters.