Berkelely economics professor Brad DeLong directs our attention to the answer: Write an academic paper on The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany. That worked for Nico Voigtländer, an Assistant Professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, and Hans-Joachim Voth, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
Professor Voth explains. First, Slate discussed the authors' finding:
Communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later. A culture of intolerance can be very persistent indeed.
Next, well let's go directly to Vothspeak:
I have been called many things...
but not a Jew. Nico Voigtländer and I wrote a paper on the persistence of anti-Semitism which is getting a bit of press. Now a pro-Palestinian website has decided that writing about pogroms is a sure sign of us being both Zionists and Jews. Needless to say, I am rather flattered that someone should think me a member of a tribe that has consistently produced more outstanding intellectuals and artists than any other group I can think of. And equally needless to say... neither Nico nor I are in fact Jewish. We just think that extreme hatred and an inclination to group violence are really interesting issues and deserve to be studied seriously, in a historical context, and that anti-Semitism is a particularly important example in this regard.
Voth seems like an interesting fellow. He writes about himself:
On a small personal note, there is a silly little illustration how deeply ingrained mental habits become, which occurred to me looking at the picture that accompanies Ray's piece. If I am not mistaken, this is Adolf Hitler's personal bodyguard, the Leibstandarte, shaking hands with the Führer. The Leibstandarte had an exacting minimum height standard (5 foot 11). Back in the 1980s, I did national service looking after old people, cycling from house to house to help with household chores, shopping, cleaning, personal hygiene, you name it. And since I am a little taller than average (6 foot 4), many an elderly lady, in the sweetest of voices and with no ill intention, would pay me a compliment: "Wow, you are tall. You could be in the Leibstandarte!" It would always remind me how very lucky I am that I was born when I was, and that I could do national service as a conscientious objector, those 20 months of menial labor be damned (the only thing that would have been better would, of course, have been to skip it entirely; but it took Germany a long time to do the right thing and abolish the draft).
In the Slate article, by the way, Ray Fisman, Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, makes some interesting observations about the persistence of cultural views:
Changing any aspect of culture—the norms, attitudes, and "unwritten rules" of a group—isn't easy. Beliefs are passed down from parent to child—positions on everything from childbearing to religious beliefs to risk-taking are transmitted across generations. Newcomers, meanwhile, may be attracted by the culture of their chosen home—Europeans longing for smaller government and lower taxes choose to move to the United States, for example, while Americans looking for Big Brotherly government move in the other direction. Once they arrive, these migrants tend to take on the attitudes of those around them—American-born Italians hold more "American" views with each subsequent generation.
"Good" cultural attitudes—like trust and tolerance—may thus be sustained across generations. But the flipside is that "bad" attitudes—mutual hatred and xenophobia—may also persist.
Antisemitism is part of the cultural heritage (baggage?) of western civilization. From time to time, not surprisingly, antisemitic memes, therefore, are used by people who may not be conscious of their antisemitic resonance. For example, in the Twilight series, a vampire may be just a vampire. (I don't know. I've neither read any of the books nor seen any of the movies.) But in its origins and popular western culture, vampires evoked Jews and the infamous blood libel. Marc Tracy explains in his book review for Tablet Magazine, War Diary of a Vampire.
Vampires—a secret cult with an ancient tradition, bent on world domination and feeding on human blood—fit a bit too snugly with the demented stereotypes that more imaginative anti-Semites have cultivated for centuries. Emory University professor Erik Butler traces this connection in his forthcoming book, Metamorphoses of the Vampire. Originating in 12th-century England, the blood libel—the idea that Jews ritualistically slaughter gentiles and feast on their blood—was so common by the late 19th century that Blutsauger, or “bloodsucker,” the German word for vampires, was a common derogation for Jews. Karl Lueger, the notoriously anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, amplified the charge, in turn inspiring his admirer, Hitler, to call Jews parasites in Mein Kampf
So, here, at Daily Kos. Not being a mind-reader, I can't know whether the person who likened Senator Joe Lieberman to a "vampire version of Elmer Fudd" intended to evoke the stereotype of Jews as blood-suckers. But in light of our cultural history/baggage the comment was, at best, imprudent. In contrast, a different user's writing "this bloody vampire disgusting country of Israel" clearly evokes the classic antisemitic meme. (In further contrast, Rep. Barney Frank saying of Hess LNG energy company's decision to drop its bid to build a liquefied natural gas plant in Fall River, Massachusetts, that "We finally put the stake through the vampire’s heart," surely was employing a pop culture expression with no antisemitic resonance.)