Questions about prejudice

I attended a talk last night about Prejudice in the 21st century. It was a well constructed address, delivered in a beautiful deliberate priestly voice. It was well received. But I felt short changed. True, prejudice has its roots in the past, whatever the prejudice is, and to understand it one has to explore these roots. But before doing so, there has to be an agreement on terms. What is meant by prejudice. Is one man's prejudice another's plain blindingly obvious common sense? Some individuals might dislike, Maoris, Blacks, Chinese, Muslims, Jews, or smokers, obese people or any other raft of categories, but surely when one talks about prejudice in our age one talks about more than individual dislikes. Underscoring the talk was racial prejudice, and in particular, as the address was at the AGM of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, racial prejudice as it manifests itself in anti-Semitism. There is, without question, an amazing and quite unexpected rise in anti-Semitism the world over, but particularly in Europe, where one would have expected anti-Semitism to be dead and buried after the Holocaust, but whether anti-Semitism is racial or cultural is something that can be debated. You can't be converted to be African or Chinese, but you can be converted to be Jewish, and your DNA, which remains unchanged will be part of the heritage of future generations, obliterating clear racial divides. Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews, irrespective of their distinctive DNAs. It is also an irrational hatred, and can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, the 'some of my friends are Jewish, I am not an anti-Semite, but ...' and here fill in your own qualifications, "I don't like Israelis, or Zionists, or Jewish bankers, or socialist who are Jewish". Describing such views as prejudice is using the term so loosely that it loses its meaning. This has a bearing on Holocaust Studies. If the object Holocaust Studies gets absorbed in studies of 'prejudice', 'genocides' 'intolerance' its core focus, the unprecedented rift in liberal Western civilization that made the Holocaust possible gets obscured.