As a child, the thing I found most startling about attending majority-black public schools was the fact that most of my fellow students had no idea what a “Jew” is. To them, I was just a white kid. A few of my schoolmates who had churchgoing parents had heard terms like “Hebrews” and “Israelites,” but there was little understanding of how those words applied to living people in the modern world. I recall one black classmate telling me she’d finally “figured out” what this Jew thing is all about: “You guys just wear the cross, but without the little man...
