Larry David's Preface to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

People fear what they don't know. Bias, racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism are most common in places where people don't meet anyone different from themselves. Yes, there is bias in diverse populations, and some haters will say their bias is due to their experiences with certain groups. Upon examination, their exposure to certain groups and their experiences with others,  have been of a very limited nature.

Stereotypes are more easily integrated into a belief system when there is nothing to challenge those stereotypes.

In the vast majority of cases the only exposure some people have to different religious, ethnic or social groups is from television, movies and, of course, the internet. Opinions are formed, solidified and fortified based on the thinnest of evidence; a script, an interview, a post on some website. Whether the information is true or false makes little difference. This is why monitoring, confronting and challenging hateful words and attitudes, regardless of how overt or tacit, matters.

I am a white male and would not presume to talk about racism or sexism, but I am Jewish. There are many people who have never known, met or had close contact with a Jew. Huge swaths of our population have never been to a city with a sizable Jewish population and seen it. I am not talking about the  ultra religious Lubavitcher sect who wear the back hats, not the Chabad missionaries, just the average Americans who are Jewish.

Many people spend the time to learn the reality, but for far too many, their ideas of me are shaped by what they are told. All too often the evidence of the distortions they are told are found in Henry Ford's International Jew, David Duke's Jewish Supremacy or The Elders of the Protocols of Zion. And that becomes all the evidence they need.

So, when Larry David makes a Holocaust joke, he has erroneously signaled, to far too many people,  that it is now OK to joke about the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it's not and may never be. We are talking about one of humanities darkest moments.

The best of people will understand where David is coming from, but the worst will use this as an opportunity to degrade something that must remain unassailable. The Holocaust is not just a Jewish thing, racism is not just a black thing and sexism is not just a female thing. Once we get that, maybe then.