The New Battlefields of Antisemitism: Memory, Peoplehood, and Moral Clarity

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have always believed that memory is not passive. Memory asks something of us. It asks us to remain vigilant, but not bitter. It asks us to protect ourselves, but not lose our humanity. It asks us to understand the past, not so we can live inside it, but so we can recognize danger when it returns wearing new clothes.

In the last few years, and especially since October 7, I have been thinking deeply about antisemitism: where it comes from, how it mutates, and why it continues to find new language for an old hatred.

My mother and father taught me to look at this question from two different angles.

My mother, through ORT, through Israel, through the bazaars, meetings, friendships, and work of Jewish women, taught me that peoplehood is not an abstraction. It is something you live. It is the way you show up, raise money, build institutions, care about education, and feel responsible for Jews you may never meet.

My father, who became more of an atheist after the war, taught me something different but equally important. He had seen what religion could become when it was joined to power, hatred, and certainty. From him, I learned to be wary of any ideology, religious or political, that turns human beings into enemies and convinces people that cruelty is righteous.

Between my mother’s belief in Jewish peoplehood and my father’s suspicion of fanaticism, I found the lens through which I look at antisemitism today.

When people speak about antisemitism, they often picture street mobs, vandalized synagogues, violent attacks, or the poison of social media. My parents would have recognized those things immediately. But there is another battlefield that is quieter and, in some ways, more consequential: the world of education, ideas, and institutional prestige.

Universities are meant to be places of inquiry, nuance, and moral seriousness. They are supposed to teach young people how to think, not what to chant. Yet across campuses in Canada, the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, too many students are absorbing a flattened story in which Israel is uniquely evil, Zionism is treated as something wholly separate from Jewish identity, and anti-Zionism is presented as though it has no living connection to antisemitism.

For many Jews, especially those whose parents or grandparents had nowhere safe to go, the attack on Zionism is not an abstract debate. It is an attack on the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood, Jewish safety, and Jewish continuity after the Shoah.

This does not mean Israel is beyond criticism. Of course governments can be criticized. Israel, like every democracy, must be judged morally. There can be criticism, disappointment, and deep disagreement.

But when the one Jewish state is denied the right to exist, when Jewish self-determination alone is treated as uniquely illegitimate, and when Jews everywhere are made to answer for that state in ways no other diaspora is asked to do, the old hatred has simply adopted a new vocabulary.

My parents did not have the language of today’s academic theories, but they would have recognized the pattern: the world finding yet another sophisticated way to say that Jews do not belong.

I have also been paying attention to scholars who study the role of foreign funding and ideological influence in higher education. Some argue that large flows of money from authoritarian or ideologically driven actors into Western universities deserve serious scrutiny, especially when they coincide with rising hostility to Israel and to Jewish students. Their warnings resonate with my parents’ instincts. Hatred rarely arrives announced. Often, it enters through the back door of respectable institutions.

There is also a deeper ideological story that must be discussed honestly. Analysts have traced how movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have shaped later Islamist and jihadist currents, and they have raised concerns about the ways certain regimes use “soft power” investments in education and culture to promote narratives that are profoundly hostile to Jewish self-determination.

If even part of this analysis is correct, then what we are seeing on some campuses is not only spontaneous student anger. It is also the downstream effect of decades of money, narrative formation, institutional partnerships, and intellectual intimidation.

Jewish communities cannot be satisfied with treating only the symptom. If antisemitism is condemned in generic terms while the machinery that nourishes it is ignored, very little changes. Governments, universities, and civil society need to look more seriously at the organizations, financial channels, and networks that incubate hatred.

At the same time, precision matters deeply.

These words are not written out of hatred for Muslims. My life has included Muslim friends, colleagues, neighbours, clients, and families whose values are deeply familiar to me: devotion to family, reverence for God, generosity, modesty, and concern for the next generation. They too are often victims of Islamist extremism. They too can be appalled by movements that glorify death and sanctify cruelty.

Just as Jews should never be reduced to the actions of any one Israeli government, Muslims should never be reduced to the ideology of the Brotherhood or to the violence of jihadist groups.

My father’s critique of religion teaches me an important caution here. If religion can become dangerous when it hardens into certainty and power, then the answer cannot be to demonize one faith. The answer is to resist every ideology that turns God into a weapon, and every movement that makes death holy and cruelty redemptive.

For me, “Never again” means two things at once.

Never again shut our eyes to the deeper systems that prepare the ground for antisemitism.

And never again surrender our own humanity in fighting it.

That double lesson is part of what my parents left behind. It is also the responsibility I feel today: to stand as a Jew, openly and proudly, while still standing for the dignity of every human being.