The most bizarre news story to hit the headlines last week was the one about the American black civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, who was revealed to be covertly white. A respected leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at its branch in Spokane, Washington, and a teacher of Africana studies, she had transformed herself from a freckly, blue-eyed blonde Caucasian into a dark-skinned ''African-American'' with Afro-style hair. What a con!
Then details emerged of Dolezal's background. She had four adopted black siblings, had always been absorbed by issues concerning race and ethnicity, and developed a deep empathy for black people and their struggles. But then she then went a step further and jettisoned her own white identity in order to become black herself. Perhaps she reckoned that was the only way she could truly ''feel their pain''.
Her cover blown, she brushed aside her detractors with the unapologetic statement: ''I don't give two sh**ts what you think. I consider myself to be black.''
So this got me thinking: is there perchance any other race which has suffered from prejudice and persecution, and with whose historic struggles one might empathise, even though one wasn't a member of it oneself? Hmm. Oh yes, the Jews! Surely you needn't be Jewish, but only a compassionate fellow human being, to understand Jewish yearnings and anxieties, and to lament the endless burden of antisemitism. Any more than you need to be Jewish to laugh at the humour of Woody Allen (back in the days when he was funny) or love the music of Gershwin and the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Take me, for example. I grew up in a secular Christian family, but - particularly in recent years - have empathised far more with the Jewish cause than any other. I hardly need state the reasons: intensified antisemitism here and throughout the world, plus the unjustly negative press meted out to Israel. The blame for both lies with the global rise of aggressive Islam and its useful-idiot, liberal-left patsies.
But the truth is that my fellow feeling for the Jewish people was triggered long before these modern-day issues came to the fore, indeed many decades ago, when I was a child. Aged 12, I was taken to see the Anne Frank house while on a family holiday in Amsterdam. It was through her story that I first learned about the Holocaust, which hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks, and my world-view has not been the same since. After touring the house with its ''secret annexe'', my father bought me the paperback of The Diary of Anne Frank. I got stuck in straight away, in the back seat of the car as we drove off.
I still recall telling my father, after reading it, that even if Anne had been the Nazis' sole victim, the whole Nazi period would still have been a terrible tragedy. He smiled and said this was a ''fine sentiment''. And thus my empathy was born. I began in my early 20s to read many more books about the Holocaust, starting with Elie Wiesel's slim, horrifying memoir, Night, about his years as a teenage inmate in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Afterwards, I couldn't sleep for three weeks. But I felt I owed it to the victims to learn the horrific details, no matter how upsetting I found them.
Later on, I discovered my Hungarian mother's role as a rescuer of several Jews in Budapest in 1944, for which she was arrested and almost executed by the Gestapo. And I learned about the close Jewish friends she was unable to help, the ones who were murdered - in Auschwitz, in the labour battalions on the Eastern Front, or by the Arrow Cross on the Budapest streets. It was no longer a matter of six million victims with no direct connection to me. Now it was personal.
Today, when I look at the men and women of the Israel Defence Forces, robust, confident warriors who arose from the ashes of those six million and who - let's just say it, shall we? - can kick ass big-time, ensuring that never again will their co-religionists be led lamb-like to the slaughter, I feel a thrilling pride. I feel it, even as a non-Jew, on my own skin. And that is what empathy means.
Now, I won't be going around pretending to be a Jew, the way that Rachel Dolezal purports to be black. And not just because that would be weird. But because pro-Jewish sentiments are all the more potent when expressed by those from outside the tribe.
The message is clear: you needn't be a Jew to believe in the righteousness of the Jewish cause. So you see, Rachel, you could have skipped the black face and just been yourself all along.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.