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As I was paging through the Nov. 21 issue of The Jewish State, I noticed an article about Ron Blomberg, a former New York Yankee, who grew up a couple blocks away from me in Atlanta, Ga., and went to both my high school and synagogue. As I started to read the article, I was quite taken aback by his comments, which reflected a reality far different than what I had ever experienced.

Blomberg was quoted as saying: "We had probably 50 to 75 families were Jewish. We had a lot of anti-Semitic people that lived down in Georgia." The article continued: "One such example was on his baseball team at Druid Hills High School, where many of his teammates were members of the Ku Klux Klan."

His statement worried me on many fronts. Probably foremost is that I assume many readers would take his words at face value, taking it on faith that "the South" is racist and then concluding glibly that it must also be anti-Semitic. I find that many people who grew up in the North like to relieve their own consciences by caricaturing the South as "the evil empire," as it were, which was not my own experience. In fact, at my recent 40th high school reunion, my math teacher commented on how happy he was about the improvement in his neighborhood, because it was now lined with Obama posters!

Certainly memory can be elusive and piecemeal, modified as time passes, rather than a dependable report of what we call reality. Memory might be likened to a Rorschach test where we project the sense of the self we have developed through our life journeys back onto the inkblot of the past. And yet, if memory serves me, my experience of Druid Hills lacked any experience of anti-Semitism but for maybe a single wayward remark.

So to test my own memories of Druid Hills High School and of "the South," I did two things. One was to question my 81-year-old mother, an Atlanta native; and even she had experienced little anti-Semitism as a child beyond a single remark in elementary school that never recurred after my bubbie took time off from the store, went to the school, and notified the principal.

My second action was to post the two offending paragraphs from The Jewish State's story on the Yahoo group listserv created for my class's recent 40th anniversary (Blomberg graduated in 1967, just one year ahead of me).

The immediate reaction of my classmates was anger and indignation that the name of our high school had been smeared. Although one person did admit to having heard occasional anti-Semitic and racist remarks at Druid Hills, others made moving testaments to the acceptance of difference that they grew up with. Two of Blomberg's baseball teammates denied seeing any anti-Semitic behavior on the team and were adamant that no references to the Klan ever came up; one person ventured the possibility, partly jokingly, that Blomberg had perhaps confused the Key Club, an international high school service organization, with the Ku Klux Klan.

Although two Jewish classmates did confess privately to me that they had experienced single incidents of anti-Semitism during high school, in reality Druid Hills stood out as a liberal paragon in the Southeast at the time; certainly my own liberal politics was probably influenced more by my high school teachers than my parents, who were fairly apolitical.

One classmate, a Ph.D. educator, provided a little history of the high school that corroborated my own memories of my high school and those of my classmates.

The school was established in 1917 by the faculty of Emory University to provide their children, he wrote, with "a superior education that was removed from the politics of the period. The faculty was not typically in line with Georgia politics." Druid Hills became a public school in 1928, with the dedication of its new building, which, by the way, was featured in the film "Remember the Titans."

The Druid Hills community, my classmate explained, did not mirror the demographics of Atlanta or the state of Georgia, but rather in the late 1950s and the 1960s had the highest graduation rates and the highest SAT scores of any public school in the Southeast, and some educators referred to it as the only "private public school" in the state.

And, by the time I was in high school, even if the Ku Klux Klan was not active at Druid Hills, it was certainly alive and well in Atlanta (one high school classmate remembered being frightened by a Klan protest she happened to pass while heading to a downtown department store with her). And certainly the segregationist Democrat Lester Maddox was elected governor of Georgia in 1967 - but I can tell you that was not with the support of my high school. I remember my teachers tearing themselves up trying to decide whether to vote Republican (which they were decidedly not) or vote for the more liberal write-in candidate, which would have meant throwing away the chance to vote against Maddox.

One of my classmates shared with me frightening memories of her own relating to racism and anti-Semitism when she was as a child in Atlanta in the 1950s. Her father, a public personality, was asked by the radio station where he worked to change his very Jewish-sounding name, but that was the least of it. Here's what she wrote:

"We were regularly treated to middle-of-the-night threatening phone calls and mail from people who harbored hate for African-Americans, Jews, and the civil rights movement in general. Because my dad editorialized on the subjects of equality and integration, he was a target. I grew up with fear every day - and I remember the telephone call on the morning when the temple was bombed. As a child, I would lie in bed and rationalize that if my dad were hurt or killed because of hatred, that I could at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he nobly stood up for values that were right."

In the shadow of the horrific murders of Jews in Mumbai for the simple crime of being Jews, we still know that anti-Semitism is always with us, sometimes in the shadowy background, sometimes front and center. As part of a generation touched by the Holocaust through the experiences of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, it is impossible not to be over-sensitized on some level to anti-Semitism in the environment. Many, myself included, are very uncomfortable when Israel is criticized, even as we ourselves are not happy with some of Israel's choices.

Yet I believe that, at least at this moment in the United States, we will not find anti-Semites lurking behind every tree, and so as not to undermine the good will of what I hope is the majority of Americans, for whom freedom of religion is a fundamental human right, I would urge all Jews to take care about what they say in the public realm and remind them that the line between paranoia and truth is a narrow one indeed.

Michele Alperin is a Princeton-based freelance correspondent for The Jewish State.