my interest here is Jewish consciousness, and again– many Jews believe this. For as Roger Cohen, Alice Rothchild and Gershom Gorenberg have said in recent weeks, Jews are post-traumatic. A group doesn’t see half its population wiped out in Europe in a genocide without deep scarring. I’ve heard about Jews who keep a bag packed under their bed because they think we could be rounded up. My old editor used to ask me if my wife’s family would hide me. I don’t have the would-they-hide-you gene, but many Jews do. And Jewish politics are more temperamental than anything else. How far out you are on the paranoia curve determines whether you are a full-on neoconservative or just a garden-variety liberal Zionist, and the two categories blur.