Anti-Semitism in America

I have an attorney friend, whose last name is, let’s say, Rosenberg. It sounds Jewish, but he’s not. As a joke, the other day I emailed him “Happy Rosh Hashana”. Later he told it happens quite often that people mistakenly think he’s Jewis, but he rarely corrects them, since it helps land clients.

For example, just the other day some Jewish guy who needed a lawyer in this field was flipping through the yellow pages for attorneys in his town and decided on my friend because of his name. So he didn’t disabuse the guy of the false notion that he was Jewish.

So here we have a gentile who avoids correcting others’ false impression that he is Jewish. An interesting indicator as to whether anti-semitism is really a signficant problem in America.

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10:19 am on September 23, 2004