From my hotel on Jew Street in Kochi, the morning begins gently – filtered light, the sound of footsteps on old stone roads, the quiet preparations of another day. At breakfast, a familiar melody drifts through the room: Ma’oz Tzur, the thirteenth-century Hebrew hymn sung during Hanukkah. It is a song of survival, of deliverance through successive calamities. Here, it plays without irony or tension, part of the hotel’s regular playlist.

In the antique shops along the street – filled mostly with Hindu and Christian artifacts – I find menorahs for sale. They are made here in Kochi. I buy one to take home, along with an old bronze mezuzah, complete with its rolled parchment prayer, recovered from a Jewish house. I can be visibly, unselfconsciously Jewish in a city that embraces coexistence. That ordinariness – that ease – is increasingly rare.

News alerts puncture the calm. A terror attack in Sydney targeted Jews gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, killing 16 people. It was Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in decades. The siege of Gaza grinds on. Israel’s brutal assault as a response to Hamas’s diabolical attack on civilians at a music festival has killed tens of thousands, devastating civilian life leaving so little hope for a just future. In the West Bank occupation deepens and settler violence intensifies. It has resulted in waves of antisemitism, both frightening and too familiar.

These events are often discussed separately. They should not be. As Israeli aggression proceeds with impunity, antisemitism is not merely rising alongside it; it is being actively fueled by a dangerous collapse – the refusal or inability to distinguish between Jews and the Israeli state. That collapse serves the Israeli war machine, allowing any criticism of state violence to be dismissed as antisemitic, while simultaneously flattening Jews everywhere into a single caricature, responsible for crimes we........

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