I still call myself a gay liberal. At least, that is how I define myself. Whether every person who now claims those words would still permit me to use them is a different question.

I want to think aloud about something I have not fully resolved. I would rather ask the question honestly than pretend I have arrived at the answer.

Let me say who is asking. I was born in South Africa and left in 1986, in my twenties, because my family and I were involved in the fight against apartheid and staying had become impossible. I am a gay man who immigrated to the United States at a time when gay people were still legally forbidden from entering the country. I am a Jew and a Zionist, from a Litvak family most of which was murdered in Lithuania. I have spent my life on the wrong side of more than one orthodoxy, usually by choice, and I have paid for it more than once.

So when I ask the question that follows, I am not asking it from safety, and I am not asking it only about other people. I am asking it about every group I belong to, including my own.

How does a society decide who belongs, and what does it do to the people who fall outside the line?

I am not equating the consequences of the systems I am about to place beside one another. The Holocaust was industrial murder. Apartheid was state violence. A quarrel over language is not either of those, and I will not insult the dead by pretending it is. What I am asking about is not consequence. It is mechanism: the underlying human move these systems share at wildly different intensities.

The move is familiar. A community defines the acceptable member: the right beliefs, the right words, the right loyalties, the right identity. Then it treats deviation not as disagreement but as corruption. The dissenter is not merely wrong; he is dangerous, contaminated, a traitor. Facts cease to determine conclusions. Conclusions determine which facts are permitted. Belonging stops being something you are and becomes something you perform. People prove themselves not by what they think, but by repeating the approved slogans and policing those who do not.

Every society needs ways of distinguishing insiders from outsiders. That instinct is probably older than civilization itself. The problem begins when membership ceases to depend on conduct and begins to depend on ritual demonstrations of ideological purity. Once belonging must constantly be performed, someone must always be found performing it more loudly, more absolutely, and more cruelly than everyone else.

I have long suspected that people need something to hate in order to feel better about themselves. The object changes. Jews. Gay people. Black people. Capitalists. Communists. Socialists. Liberals. Zionists. Internationalists. Isolationists. “Rootless cosmopolitans.” The vocabulary changes with the fashion and the political need, and Jews have been made to fit an astonishing number of those categories, sometimes several of them at once. The target moves. The emotional reward does not. Hatred offers........

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