11 January—It’s commonly believed that people (like all animals, plants, and microbes—yes, even plants and microbes) are born with only the instinct of survival—self-preservation. That’s the so-called “tabula rasa,” Latin for “blank slate.” All other behavior is learned one way or another, for better or worse; and ultimately for the survival of the individual and the species. That’s what Nature is all about.

Keep in mind that any given person would be swinging from trees (before he was even living in a cave), throwing his own excrement at whomever and whatever he fears, and killing others for the same reason—if it weren’t for evolution and a social-moral contract that tells him how and how not to behave.

That’s profoundly philosophical, so don’t worry about it.

Instead, consider the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera “Iolanthe, The Peer and the Peri.” In it, W.S. Gilbert (the librettist) tells us that people are born with predetermined prejudices rather than a blank slate: The perceptive sentry at the Palace of Westminster (Parliament) opines, “I often think it’s comical how Nature always does contrive that every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative!”

That’s a theatrically expedient and delightful oversimplification that may have been true in Victorian Britain, to be sure. But let’s not dwell on it. Because in reality every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive is absolutely guaranteed to be an antisemite. Even Jewish boys and gals. (It doesn’t have to rhyme or scan because it’s socially relevant free verse.)

No kidding. As Tom Lehrer succinctly put it 60 years ago, “Everybody hates the Jews.” That’s the natural order of things. It’s been that way since Abraham allegedly was the first Jew. And through Darwinian natural selection—with no little help from linebreeding and inbreeding (intentional or otherwise)—antisemitism has evolved into a basic human instinct, just like self-preservation. People don’t have to be taught to hate Jews. People are born hating Jews. It’s coded in human DNA.

So being antisemitic is as natural as any other innate human trait, like throwing shit . . .