It was just a picture.
My wife dropped in to say "hi" to the new hire. The new hire worked for the Medical Director, not my wife, but it was part of the culture... the welcoming health plan run by women dedicated to the sick and the poor.
"What a pretty picture."
"Yes, it's of my homeland, Palestine."
Though she's a devout Catholic, this meant nothing to my wife and what followed was a lot of small talk about children and family.
I'd never call my wife clueless. She'd tell you she was just too serious to have time for politics and world affairs. She was a nurse practitioner who'd worked in the Bridgeport ghetto and the Native American reservations and was now Chief Operating Officer of the second largest Medicaid health plan in Arizona. Her spare time was spent going to meetings with the governor's wife to figure out how they could improve immunization rates for Arizona's children. And though she had graduate degrees from Berkeley and Yale and could lecture long and loud about how clinical significance trumped statistical significance, she had no idea how much money she had in her retirement savings accounts. If it didn't have something to do with maternal-child health care or making a dying AIDS patient comfortable, it wasn't on her radar.
Time passed and administrations changed. The Medical Director who hired the Palestinian woman left my wife's company to become the State of Arizona's medical director. The Palestinian woman's new boss walked into her office, said "hi", introduced himself, said a few pleasantries and then stared at the picture on the wall for several minutes and left the room without saying anything except "goodbye." The Palestinian woman came running into my wife's office: "Julie, Julie... how can I work for a Jew."
At this point I might have said "You could start by taking down your picture of the "Dome of the Rock", the shrine built on top of Judaism's most holy place by a triumphant Muslim army."
Instead my wife said "Oh, don't worry. We've known the doctor for many years. He's a wonderful, kind man. You'll get along just fine." She didn't feel she needed to add that if there was a problem that she and the CEO, another devout Catholic woman, would deal with it. Many years have passed and they are all still friends.
