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.

It could happen to you: The book cover I was quite small, perhaps eight, when it occurred to me how deeply I disliked the other children. I mean, it wasn’t as if I had wanted them dead or anything; it just didn’t seem as though we had much to say to one another. I’m sure that murdering fireflies and smearing the glowing intestines in a lurid streak across the grass with one’s shoe has its own rewards, but none that compare to an evening spent indoors, memorizing the recitative to an obscure Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and congratulating oneself on one’s own superiority.

Peering out my bedroom window with bemused disdain at the local gang of young ruffians, vulgar Philistines who had probably never heard of Derek Jacobi, as they pelted one another with water balloons or gleefully terrorized some delicate future interior decorator, I invented games of my own. Solitary, secretive games, tailored especially to my peculiar fixations. For example:

WHAT TO PACK WHEN FLEEING FROM THE NAZIS

Food, of course: Ziploc bags of Cheerios and Skittles, apple juice boxes, and cans of Diet Coke from the pantry. Family photographs – I’d want images of my annihilated relatives to occupy a place of honor at Yad Vashem. A few suitably depressing items of clothing and, finally, books. The books were the most important. Even the an activity as challenging as fleeing the Gestapo was bound to include some downtime, and the titles I packed were chock-full of helpful hints, sure to help me out of any jam or rat-infested crawlspace under an abandoned Warsaw building where I and three others lay hidden, eating rotten potato peels and creeping in the dead of the night to relieve ourselves in the frozen sewers.

I speak, of course, of the genre known as Young Adult Holocaust literature, a body of work specifically designed to remind Jewish children that no matter how safe they might feel, there will always be those who wish to destroy them. As on perspicacious young reader observed in his “Kid’s Review” (in the name of research, I browsed a few such tomes on Amazon recently): “Would you want to be a jew when you are getting ready to be killed by the germans I wouldn’t.”

There was Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France by Renée Roth-Hano, outlining how to pass as a convent-educated Catholic. I learned the appropriate times to cross oneself (out of fear, reverence, or superstition), invoke a saint (for a lost object, a difficult problem, or when beset by a pack of thieves), and that Frenchmen who refer to Jews as “wily Israelites” are less virulently anti-Semitic than those who prefer the more traditional “filthy Christ-killers.” The Island on Bird Street by Uri Orlev taught me how to burrow under the ghetto wall, how to keep and shoot a gun, and that the only person you can really trust is your pet mouse. And in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, I discovered the importance of being Danish.

Way before Spiderman: Kirsten Dunst in the TV movie Such tales of woe were plentiful, yet unlike their real-life counterparts, these brave, benighted children, these Henryks and Hannahs and Boleks and Shmuliks, rarely wound up in Auschwitz. They might lose all their earthly possessions, be assaulted by classmates and teachers shouting racial epithets, even have parents or younger siblings murdered before them (all events deemed appropriate for young readers and beneficial to the formation of their Jewish identities), but clearly the experience of a death camp, even fictionalized, was just too scary. There as, however, one notable exception: The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.

  It was like a dare, that book. To have read it – not just to have checked it out from the library and stared at the cover, paralyzed with fear for three or four days, but to actually have read it – was a kind of status symbol. It marked you as a force to be reckoned with, a deranged loose cannon, the kind of kid who would stick her hand in a tank of piranhas or say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror at midnight with a death wish in her eyes. The others would whisper about you in car pool before they picked you up on the first day of school, like you were Dennis Hopper. Don’t mess with her. She’s crazy. Loco. Read The Devil’s Arithmetic cover to cover and ain’t been the same since.

While the film adaptation starring Kirsten Dunst has somewhat deflated its epic creepiness, The Devil’s Arithmetic is probably the most frightening book ever written for children. It’s certainly the most frightening book I’ve ever read. The chilling premise is that Hannah Stern, a modern thirteen-year-old girl, prefers the company of Gentile friends to studying for her Bat Mitzvah and is weary of visiting her elderly grandfather, a semi-catatonic concentration camp survivor who spend his days parked in from of the Hitler – I mean, the History – Channel, weeping uncontrollably. “I’m tired of remembering!” she exclaims.

Well, as every Jewish child who has had his Hebrew school class visited by an itinerant representative of the Anti-Defamation League knows, he who does not remember history is condemned to repeat it. I think it’s printed on the mini-Frisbees they hand out after they’ve finished terrifying you.

For Hannah, with her casual disregard for the suffering of her elders (and at thirteen, she should really know better), this concept will take a particularly vivid form. Upon opening the door for Elijah at her grandparents’ Passover seder (to which she has come grudgingly – bad girl! Bad JEWISH GIRL!), she feels a strange breeze across her face and is mysteriously whisked away to…the magical land of Birkenau!

Shameless: Shukert's memoirThe fish-out-of-water/new-kid-in-school scenario is very common to children’s literature, playing on a child’s fear of strangeness, loneliness, of not belonging. Most of these stories, however, do not feature Josef Mengele as a supporting character. But eventually Hannah, with a little help from her fellow inmates, masters the camp rules for survival – basic bowl-and-potato etiquette, exploiting the lesbian tendencies of the female guards, and of course, “never stand next to someone with a G in her number. G means Greek, and the Greeks don’t last long” – only to discover that such rules are merely a superstitious construct devised by the prisoners to delude themselves that they can somehow subvert, or at least delay, the inevitable, and lo, the ungrateful little JAP gets sent to the gas chamber. Ha! That’ll learn her!

But lucky for Hannah, instead of paralyzing her central nervous system as she claws futilely at the walls with her fingernails until finally suffocating to death in agony, the gas transports her safely back to her own time like three clicks of a pair of ruby slippers, sadder, wiser, and presumably more willing to call her grandparents once in a while. Maybe even come over, spend a little time, would it kill her? No, it wouldn’t. Typhoid, sadistic medical experiments, the hungry Rottweilers when you get off the cattle car, that’s what kills you. Bubbe and Zayde only want to see you once in a while, is that such a crime?

The message was hardly lost on me. And as I practiced taking apart the showerhead to check for Zyklon B pellets before I turned it on, I noted to myself that if anyone was going to open the door for Elijah at the seder, it was going to be my sister. She was almost five years younger than me and hadn’t even started kindergarten yet; she had a lot less to live for.

This is what we were raised on. These were the stories that filled our heads – I’m speaking Rothian “we” now, the “we” that means every Jewish person of my generation anywhere in America. Our parents’ generation, the baby boomers, had focused on happy Jewish things like the state of Israel and Sandy Koufax. They seldom spoke Holocaust at home or at religious school. It was too recent, too vivid, too painful a reminder of the world’s cruel indifference. But we could take this burden, this legacy of unspeakable pain. Enough time had passed. We wouldn’t be crushed under the weight.

Excerpted from Rachel Shukert's book of essays, Have You No Shame? due out April 29 from Villard.