Well, no, I wouldn't normally use the term to describe prejudice against non-Jews, Allen. I was just philosophizing a bit about it being a kind of odd word in some respects.

You're right that children often show prejudice against anything that's noticeably different from what they're used to. Kids are great conformists, because they are often scared of things they're not familiar with. The thing is, though, a little kid doesn't know that certain other people are specifically defined AS Jews or Muslims or anything else like that until he's made to know it by things his parents say about those other people. He has then been primed to look upon all those other people as "different from us" and "all the same" (which they are NOT), when he might not otherwise have noticed it in the first place. :-) That's where I see the problem of unthinking prejudice arising.

What if the most important thing about another person was not that he/she is Jewish, or Russian, or Oriental, or Christian, but that he/she is human? That would be a good start, I think. Anyone who gets too hung up over his own or someone else's specific ethnic group identity tends to get unreasonable about it.

That's why I don't think Zionism was intrinsically a good idea in the first place. It's ethnocentric. Naziism was ethnocentric...to the point of utter madness. I wouldn't think it was a good idea if Gypsies or Six Nations Iroquois or some other people who have suffered in some way in the past decided to reclaim some extensive land area that has many other people already living on it now, and take it over by force as their inheritence, and call it a new "country". No one at the receiving end of that move would appreciate it, I assure you.

Ethnocentricity is not a good idea. It disregards and gets in the way of the much more important matter of human unity on this planet.

I shudder every time I see a self-consciously "persecuted" group of people attempting to divide themselves off from the rest of humanity and establish exclusive jurisdiction over some multi-cultural piece of national territory. It's the natural impulse of fascism, and it leads to war and disaster for all concerned.

I don't in the least mind, however, when groups of people like the Amish, for example, peacefully settle a privately-owned area of land within the context of a greater society, and exist harmoniously in that society, but in their own unique fashion. That's fine with me. That is not a threat to other people.

It's when it becomes an aggressively expanding military-national agenda that I consider it destructive.

Imagine what would happen if half the Gypsies in the World decided to go and take over, let's say, part of southern France or part of Spain...and establish a new Gypsy nation for themselves there, called "Roma". Bloody war, that's what would happen. It's a really, really dumb idea, no matter what happened in the Nazi death camps or in Palestine 3,500 years ago. Gypsies could nevertheless have decided it was a good idea, in the wake of their suffering at the hand of the Nazis in WWII. Let's all be glad that they didn't. We'd have another Middle East conflict going, only somewhere else.