Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.”

Anti-Semitism. It wasn’t precisely clear to me what a Semite was, but I knew what it meant to be anti one. It meant you hated Jews and wanted them dead.

The existence of such a prejudice was hardly news; the bookshelves in my room groaned under the weight of solemn tales of the Holocaust and the pogroms, stories festooned with grim illustrations of terrified children laden with bundles, peering helplessly through pen and ink fence of barbed wire. My parents had their own stories: anti-Semitism was the reason my immigrant grandmother refused to let her children go swimming with the non-Jewish neighbors, why my father had been beaten up several times a week on his way home from junior high by roaming gangs of feral Gentile children.

But that was years ago.

“I’m not saying it will happen,” she continued, “but I want you to prepare for it if it does.”

As I had not yet learned that my mother’s general pessimism towards the human race was not always based in tangible reality, her warnings filled me with a consuming, atavistic sense of dread. When would the assault come, and in what form? Would I be shunned in the cafeteria or disinvited from birthday parties? Would I be physically attacked: trapped in lockers or forced to gather change from the floor as a gang of Esprit-clad Aryans mocked the parsimoniousness of my race? At the very least, I assumed I would be taunted verbally with cries of “kike” and “yid”; “heebie” and “hook-nose” and “Red Sea pedestrian” and other racial epithets I learned from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

“You forgot sheeny,” said my mother.

“I thought that was an Irish person.”

“Nope. You’re a sheeny.”

As time passed, I would hear all those words and more. What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

Everywhere, young Jews are eagerly, even gleefully appropriating the traditional iconography and language of anti-Semites faster than you can say “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” We howled with laughter at Borat, at the grotesque puppet in “The Running of the Jew” laying its “filthy Jew-egg” as Sacha Baron Cohen spewed der Sturmer-worthy invective in pidgin Hebrew. We read publications with names like Heeb and Jewcy, and cheerfully throw around terms and stereotypes that would have sent previous generations straight to the local ADL office. Recently, I was watching TV at home when I received a phone call from a co-religionist friend.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m at home, watching The Jewish Americans on PBS.”

“Yeah? What’s happening?”

“Oh, I guess this episode is on Leo Frank. But as far I as can see, the whole thing is mostly about how we’re ugly and everybody hates us.” We dissolved with laughter.

There are a number of possible reasons for this change in attitude. The age we are living in is a peculiar one, equal parts irony and genuine turmoil. Festering internecine and tribal hatreds have once again become a very real part of how the world operates; as a result, political correctness has died an unceremonious death, while multiculturalism is dying a somewhat more tortuous one. At the same time, overt intolerance has become nearly obsolete, to the point that one can perpetuate almost any form of prejudice with the implicit understanding that if the speaker is of a certain social class or education level, he or she cannot possibly be a bigot. On a strictly Jewish level, I think my generation has simply lost patience with our Hebrew school educations, with the constant focus on victimhood and hardship, and the sometimes reactionary politics of the Jewish establishment—with the powerful lobbies and their professional outrage, the shell-shocked parents and grandparents ever at the ready to pick up a phone or file a formal complaint the second a Jewish child is made to sing “Silent Night” or assigned a biology midterm on Yom Kippur (I speak from personal experience here.) There are better things to do with one’s time than to be constantly on guard against closet Nazis. Or maybe after 5000 years of the being on the wrong end of the world’s general shittiness, we’ve just stopped taking it so personally.

But to borrow a phrase from David Mamet in The Wicked Son, his provocative and occasionally infuriating book on the subject, “The world hates the Jews. The world has always and will continue to do so.”

Fine.

In this, my mother was right. All of our mothers were right. My generation, we American Jews in our 20’s and 30’s, may have missed having taunts and dirt clods thrown at our heads as we waited for the school bus, but you don’t have to look very far to find our people held in general contempt. In fact, don’t look hard at all—just look in the comments section of any major internet blog that so much as mentions the State of Israel, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, or boiled chicken.

So welcome to The Protocols, named of course for the famous (and forged) Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or as I like to think of it, the book that started the international craze, the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. Here, I’ll strive to answer the important questions—not so much “Why do they hate us?” but “So what if they hate us?” I’ll look at how Jews have, for better and for worse, internalized the tenets of anti-Semitism and turned them inside out, how Jews judge other Jews, and what it means to be a self-hating Jew (as opposed to a Jewish self-hater.) I’ll examine anti-Semites through history, anti-Semites in the news, and once every few weeks or so, anti-Semites we love. (And yes, I’m taking recommendations.)

My qualifications for this mighty task, taken on by everyone from Moses Maimonides, Mark Twain, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Adolf Hitler? None whatsoever; except I’ma writer, I’m a Jew, and I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my life worrying about who doesn’t like me.

So, my fellow filthy Christ-killers, if you can stop counting your golden ingots and draining your neighbor’s kids of their blood long enough to actually read something, I hope you’ll join me. We may not win any hearts and minds, but in the words of the immortal G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

And after all, we’re supposed to be so smart.

An English professor is walking along Broadway in the Village when he's approached by a homeless man asking for change. The professor instead imparts classical words of wisdom: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." And as if to underscore the pedantry, he adds, "William Shakespeare." The homeless man wears a sour expression on his face and after pausing a moment replies: "Fuck you. David Mamet."

Who really didn't see this coming in the American playwright who invented a discourse -- and used a metronome to do it -- to accommodate every shade of masculine barbarity? David Mamet has confessed in the Village Voice that he's no longer a "brain-dead liberal," and he describes his slow-mounting epiphany, as it was helped along by his wife, the unnamed but lovely actress Rebecca Pidgeon:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

Anyone who has read Mamet's penultimate book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews is aware of his religious zealotry. And I can recall scanning his helpful guide to drama, Three Uses of the Knife, when I was playing Shelley "the Machine" Levine in a college production of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (half the cast was female!) and being surprised to find that even the smashmouth bad boy of the Great White Way reserved a saintly word for Theodore Herzl. If you will it, "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" is no nightmare.

The essay's written in Mamet-speak, which is a hard taste to acquire if you haven't got it already (I have, even though I enjoy parodying it as much as appreciating its staccato rhythms and intellectual abrasions: "Baby, I'm so cool, Disney Land visits me.")

What is it, though, about the stylists of heartburn prose that makes them all go public with their goodbyes to all that? Martin Amis had "The Age of Horrorism" in the Guardian two years ago, and there was Kingsley Amis' "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" in the sixties. Mamet's stuff is pat ball to this father-son team's champion game.

And yet... Mamet has his moments, too. He reminds us that there is such a thing as a tough-minded, no-bullshit liberalism that takes a view of history longer than the Bush administration, and an assessment of human nature more complicated than the Halliburton tax returns:

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

Knowing the symptoms of Mamet's conditions pretty well (I've made a minor study of changing ideological fever-dreams), I'd wager that most of his policy prescriptions have not changed much since he came to the realization that the free market is better than the command economy, and that the United States is not reflexively vicious, but rather resilient against vice because founded on the best kind of pessimistic doctrine of government.

The Independent newspaper in Britain has taken the occasion of Mamet's piece to distinguish between the British definition of "liberalism" and the American one (the "brain-dead" adjective must have really upset the leader writers).

Mamet will of course be called a "conservative" by his ex-friends in Hollywood. Or they'll use the more convenient dread term "neoconservative," which is preloaded ammunition for fools. You're either with us or against, the lefties will tell him. Either you're scrawling Etch-a-Sketch political cartoons of Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face for the Huffington Post, or you're calling the more pacifistic elements of the American Enterprise Institute "stupid fucking cunts." Which is it, David?

Welcome to the counter-revolution.

A smattering of cultural moments, both high and lowbrow, from today's news:

Making his wife proud: Beckham's new Armani ad • David Mamet talks in New York Magazine about his “surprisingly positive” new play about election season.

• Posh Spice says she’s proud to see her husband’s package “about 25 feet tall” in his Armani ad.

• The Golden Globes, um, happened.

• On his personal website, New York comedian Bill Dawes publishes a heartbreaking and extremely weird story about his three-year romance with amnesiac "Project Runway" contestant Elisa Jimenez.

• Joshua Ferris, whose novel Then We Came to the End was recently declared the only non-disappointing book of 2007 by the LA Times, has a melancholy short story in the current issue of Tin House.

• Chewbacca (not to be confused with his cousin Jewbacca), moments before slamming his head into other person, "Nobody tells this Wookiee what to do." Especially not the transgender George Lucas lookalike cruising the Sunset Strip.[Reuters]
• Smug and oftentimes pretentious Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter and playwright David Mamet has a new book out that sums Hollywood up in 13 words - and that's just counting the title. [New York Post]
• Rich people get all the grub as I've lamented before. This time it's Scarlett Johansson (yes, she's a Jew), the proud recepient of the golden key that unlocked a Miami condo worth $2.2 Million/yr. [Jewtastic]
• Crude, insensitive, and egotistical and no, we're not referring to Sarah Silverman, just her new show on Comedy Central. [Tufts Daily]
• Steven Spielberg is gay, or his Dreamworks is. Either way, he needs a marriage counselor. [Defamer]
• A remnant from the Britney Spears/Kevin Federline divorce. [EDGE Boston]