What does it feel to be a Jew in today's Ireland? Why does this question need asking? Do we ask it simply because Bloomsday, that peculiar fixture on the Irish literary/ tourist calendar, sends editors asking members of our diminishing community to answer the age-old "how odd of God to choose the Jews" just as they ask us, every year, how we celebrate Christmas.

Or does it need asking more urgently now, as media reports of "influxes" and "bogus refugees" draw attention to the fact that Irish society, despite the denials, is as racist as other societies?

My attempt to narrate the peculiarities of being a Jewish-Israeli woman in the Ireland of the late 20th century, as Ireland is beginning to grapple with the dark shadows of racism, must start with an amazing account of racialisation: the encounter between Joe Cohen, expatriate Jewish Corkman, "new boy in accounts", and the black porter Gary in the London firm of Levin Brothers Ltd in David Marcus's Who Ever Heard of an Irish Jew?

It takes the ethnically conscious Gary to racialise Joe, whose father moved from one ghetto in Russia to another in Ireland. It is Gary who makes Joe understand that those who suffer racial discrimination should stand up for themselves and stick together. In today's ethnic relations parlance, it would be called anti-racism and ethnic mobilisation.

Today, Bloomsday revellers, led by painter Gerald Davis, that Dublin Jewish incarnation of Bloom, will bite into pork kidneys and surf virtual recitations of Ulysses. And I ponder why the continued existence of a tiny Irish Jewish community, in the face of historical adversity and of decreasing numbers, has attracted such disproportionate attention from writers, historians, media producers and students.

Is it because literature's archetypal Jew, Leopold Bloom, was created by Ireland's own prodigal son, James Joyce? Or rather because of what Edward Lipsett, Dublin Jew turned convert, journalist, novelist and contemporary of Joyce, called the "peculiarly peculiar" position of Jews in Ireland? But Bloom, after all, was a Jew who was not a Jew, magnificently crafted as a double outsider both in Irish and Jewish society, the personification of the Jew's "otherness" and hybridity in the construction(s) of Irishness.

In today's Ireland, as the moral panic created by the trickle of refugees and asylum-seekers manifests in media and popular racism, we tend to forget that for Ireland's home-grown "old ethnicities", the travelling and Jewish communities, racism, as well as restrictive immigration policies, are nothing new.

In Irish-Jewish history there was the 1904-6 "Limerick pogrom" which, although no one was killed, as they were in Russian and Polish turn-of-the-century pogroms, raised the fear of the newly arrived small group of Lithuanian Jews and resulted in a near decimation of the Limerick Jewish community.

There is also the shameful history of the closing of doors to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-controlled Europe, as documented in Louis Lentin's and Katrina Goldstone's documentary, No More Blooms, and in Dermot Keogh's recent history of Jews in 20th-century Ireland.

SO WHAT does it feel to be a Jew in today's Ireland? With daily attacks on refugees and asylum-seekers, and on others whose skin colour makes them stand out on the one hand, and with calls to electronically tag Irish travellers on the other, is it fair to talk of anti-semitism? (And by the way, speaking of anti-semitism, rather than Anti-Semitism, implies more than dropping the hyphen - it means taking anti-semitism seriously as a thesis without an antithesis, for there is no Semitism).

Is it fair considering the fact that in recent years there have been very few manifestations of overt anti-semitism (such as daubings, grave desecrations, physical violence or verbal abuse). The only anti-semitic manifestations most Irish Jews encounter are jokes (although jokes, Freud reminds us, make it possible for us to hear the unconscious speak in the psychopathology of everyday life).

Or inappropriate comments (although such comments from public figures such as Francis Stuart about the Jew being "the worm that got into the rose and sickened it" do hurt, particularly considering Stuart's German past). In contemporary Ireland, instead of speaking of anti-semitism as hostility to Jews, we should speak of what Zygmunt Bauman calls "allo-semitism", the practice of setting Jews apart as people radically different from all others, needing separate concepts to describe and understand them.

Understandably, Ireland's Jewish community has not joined the antiracism campaign: best let sleeping demons rest. Ireland's Jews have been very successful professionally, politically and economically, although of course we are far from "wielding power and control in money matters far out of proportion to our numbers", as 33 per cent of the respondents in Father Micheal Mac Greil's 1996 attitudes survey believe.

However, Jews, I would argue, are the archetypal "others" of Ireland's national Catholicism. Being seen by others variably as displaying dual loyalty (to Ireland and Israel), or simply as "not really Irish", stands in stark contrast to the way most Irish Jews see themselves, as being fully integrated into Irish society. In private conversations some of us may admit to feeling "the odd man out", having to act as "Jews at home and Irish people outside".

Or, if we choose to operate as publicly Jewish, we must face the consequences. These can be "only" jokes, anonymous telephone calls or inappropriate questions, such as the one posed to me by a leading politician some years ago as to what the Jews have done that everyone hates them. The main price we pay, of course, is the emigration of our young generation in times of economic boom, many of them to communities where they can have a Jewish life.

If Jews are indeed "peculiarly peculiar" in relation to Ireland's self-perception as ethnically and religiously homogeneous, I, for one, welcome the shifting of that homogeneity towards a genuine multi-ethnicity. The new Bloomusalem, as envisaged by Joyce for Leopold Bloom, could still be my, our new Ireland.

Dr Ronit Lentin is a lecturer in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. She is also a member of the Platform Against Racism