In the Peace Corps, I hid my Jewish identity. But that didn’t prevent me from experiencing anti-Semitism.

As my second year in the Corps began, I was teaching an eighth-grade English class. Strolling through the rows during an exercise, I stopped next to a student carving a swastika into his desk with a pen. He looked up guiltily as if he had been caught drawing cartoons. I took a piece of chalk and drew a large white swastika on the board, pointing at it repeatedly amid a scattered historical lecture about the Holocaust, World War II, and Hitler’s mustache. I left the room early and believed I had made my point. The next day, I bounded up the stairs to my classroom to find two words scrawled on the door in thick, red marker: Ghurfat Hitler: Hitler’s room. I pushed the door open slowly, and my eyes drifted to the blackboard, which several students had peppered with small white swastikas. I scanned the silent room for perpetrators. Everyone was grinning. I wiped the board clean, shrugged off what appeared to be a prank, and began teaching the lesson as if nothing happened. But when I went home that day, I called our Jordanian security officer and asked for guidance. He told me that to many people in Jordan, Hitler is considered a hero. I said it was wrongheaded history but avoided telling him that the swastikas had bothered me so much because I was Jewish.