A few years ago, I attended a conference in Europe where one of the participants was an Egyptian graduate student. As it turned out, she was also an outspoken anti-Semite, as we found out shortly after she made the mistake of assuming that the redheaded guy from Texas was a safe person to talk to. Apparently in Egypt there are no Jewish redheads.

In the space of about an hour, those of us at the conference who were Jewish became palpably aware of it, both in ourselves and in our acquaintances. It’s not that we suddenly distrusted the goyim—in fact, the universal rejection of this woman’s beliefs at an international conference was highly encouraging—but for an American who happens to be Jewish, it was a sudden reminder that others see me as a Jew who happens to be American, should they happen to care.

At the end of that conference, I had a long conversation with one of its organizers, who had been hidden during World War II from Nazi sympathizers. He is secular and (so far as I know) staunchly agnostic, but he’s from a Jewish family, and he would have died at the age of six if a few dozen people hadn’t given him a place to be. During this conversation, I commented that as an American, I think of anti-Semitism as a largely historical artifact.

He responded, in essence, that I had the luxury of believing this because I was young and naive, and that I lived in a place that temporarily allowed me to remain ignorant. If I were lucky, I could remain so, but he didn’t expect this would happen.

This experience has informed my view of both Judaism and anti-Semitism since, and it’s with this in mind that I think every Jew should be required to watch the HBO documentary Protocols of Zion. I think it’s a fairly important movie for everyone in the anti-hate community, Jewish or gentile, but for us it’s compulsory. Especially for those of us living in urban areas where being Jewish is so common that we forget for years at a time that it makes us different. Separate. Apes and pigs, in the words of one three-year-old interviewed in the documentary.

The thing about being Jewish is that we forget that it’s not us who decides whether it matters. I’ve been called a kike from time to time, but so far as I know I’ve never been discriminated against, nor do I think it’s in the least bit likely. But cultures have a way of changing course, and I note how simple it has been to flare up anti-Muslim hatred in the last five years. It seems to me to be a short step from hating the followers of Allah to hating the followers of, well, the same God but without the Jesus part. It’s something I think about when evangelicals use the language of religion in the pursuit of political office. It’s something I think about when I hear hateful, and sometimes justifiable, things being said about Israel in regards to their Palestinian policies.

In 1990, I got lost on the Leningrad subway, and a local who spoke English escorted me halfway across town and spoke with me for nearly an hour. I introduced myself as an American. He introduced himself as a Jew. He planned to emigrate to Israel, where he would then be regarded as Russian, and probably persecuted for that. He was teaching his children self-defense, because the one thing he knew is that they would be in many fights at schools in both countries.

He didn’t decide that he was a member of something Other. That was done for him. And while I still think it ludicrous that my own ancestry might ever do the same to me here, history has a tendency of surprising the hell out of many people who felt the same way I do.

Protocols of Zion is available on Cinemax on Demand through May 10th.