Black and White Attitudes in a World That’s Full of Color

“With a name like Klein, I assume you’re Jewish,” the caller says, as other callers have said before her.

Her tone is not friendly. She is not about to share a joke that I might understand. She has left a voice-mail message that awaits me when I get in. She’s read a column I’ve written that she did not like.

This caller has much to say, not to my face, or when I might speak to her directly, but on her own terms. She suggests that I start “ridiculing the Jews and the Holocaust.”

“Jews have been chased out of every country they’ve been in,” she says. “There must be a reason for it, because they are damn offensive.”

The caller has more to say, then she hangs up. Without saying goodby.

I am used to this by now. The anonymous messages, the occasional letters, also unsigned, warn me that their senders “know,” or that they “assume,” or that they “would bet” that I’m a Jew.

This implies that I am not “one of them” and that I’d better be on guard. One letter writer told me to “go back to Israel, where you belong.”

I used to be rather amazed by all this, in the sense that this is the 1990s and Southern California is not exactly a cultural and social backwater where outsiders are viewed with suspicion and alarm.

But now I see that attitude as foolishly naive. People can, and do, hate other people simply because they are different, or because they believe that they are. Different, of course, means not as good.

Different might be black if you are white, or gay if you are straight, or Christian if you are Muslim, or vice versa to them all. The labels don’t matter here. Hate is the common thread.

And then, of course, there is ignorance and fear. Liberals like to talk about this a lot.

If only . . . they shared a back-yard fence with a black family. If only . . . they knew that their son is gay. If only . . . they realized their friend prays differently to the same God. Then we would all get along.

I know plenty of heartwarming stories that might prove these axioms true, but I know others that would cause the cynic to sneer.

The lesson to be garnered is this: The world is not black and white; it is not a one-dimensional flatland where the answers to everything are either true or false.

Even though it might be easier to think that it is.

My college roommate and I used to joke while preparing term papers that we should only read one book. That way we wouldn’t have to juggle competing and contradictory theories or evidence that says one thing but suggests something else. That way we wouldn’t have to think for ourselves.

I am convinced that bigots, and this includes anti-Semites, racists, homophobes, ageists and sexists, are intellectual slovens, too lazy to think of the world in brilliant and subtle colors, shaded and tinted and sprinkled and striped.

Or maybe they’re just not too bright. Anyone with intellectual curiosity would get bored with plain old black and white.

Until now, when an anti-Semite has felt compelled to put me in my place, I’ve just ignored the words, or sometimes I’ve passed a letter on to my editor to give him a taste of “what’s out there,” as we like to say.

And certainly, most of my hate mail does not center on whether I am, or am not, a Jew. Other topics include my views on women’s place in the world, or the fact that I happen to be a woman (bitch) myself, or anything having to do with the national debate on abortion (baby killer) or gay rights (closet dyke).

To which I usually say, Fine.

But just after I’d listened to that caller’s message the other morning, I read a report of a Roper Organization survey in which one in three Americans surveyed indicated they were open to the possibility that the Holocaust was a hoax. This did make me gasp.

A Jewish friend of mine said this was nearly as shocking as the Holocaust itself.

The survey was released on the same day that Vice President Al Gore joined Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Polish President Lech Walesa in Warsaw for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Three days later, President Clinton dedicated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Allen Krause, of Temple Beth Al in Aliso Viejo, says that at first, he was stunned with the survey too. But then he recalled other readings on the nation’s tolerance toward Jews, and no, on reflection, this latest reading did make sense.

He says people who have “difficulty thinking in shades of gray”--that is, those who think there is only one right and only one wrong--are the same who size up a people, or a religion, with one-dimensional adjectives that are not very nice.

And there are lots of those people “out there.”

So maybe those people who could be convinced that the Holocaust was an illusion--that the extermination of 11 million Jews, Gypsies, Poles, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled Germans, Soviet POWs, and political and religious dissidents--never happened at all, are just happily ignorant in their simplified view of the world.

The Holocaust couldn’t have happened because genocide is wrong . . . because somebody would have stopped it . . . because it’s obviously just another ploy of those damn offensive Jews to elicit sympathy for their cause.

And many people are sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust, and about slavery and racial oppression, and about men keeping women down. People are tired of the anger and tired of feeling guilty for something they didn’t do.

With much of that attitude, I agree. We’ve got to move on from the past. But not by ignoring it or pretending that it didn’t exist. We must open, and then use, our minds.

For that, you need more than one book.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.