Wertheimer writes:

As I read your impatient remarks about those who believe “ someone is a less appropriate object of our love and commitment because of the particulars of their genealogy,” I can only conclude that either you don’t accept that human beings have a special responsibility to give back to their own family or that you don’t regard the Jewish people as your family. Given the world in which I grew up, these are unthinkable options for me.

This IS ethnocentrism. Kurtzman will hopefully respond as a good universalist would: Everyone on earth is our family. This might strike Wertheimer as syrupy drivel, but it is instead a deeply felt moral imperative for cosmopolitans.

I suppose I have a different Jewish heritage than Wertheimer does. Mine is not Middle Eastern and rabbinic. Mine is European, skeptical, intellectual. Mine is Spinoza, Einstein and Freud rather than Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Ariel Sharon. As a Jew, I have learned to reject nationalism as evil in and of itself - even if that nation is my own.