Last Sunday at the Montreal airport, a stranger asked where I was headed, and I said Vienna. It was true the way the easier thing is true: I was changing planes in Vienna and flying straight on to Tel Aviv. The word Israel stayed in my mouth. Saying the easier thing took so little effort that I barely registered the choice.

I was traveling to Haifa, to a conference where, for four days, every aspect of contemporary antisemitism from every corner of the world was tackled — and where we launched the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association (CASA), spearheaded by sociologist David Hirsh, who has been drawing this map since almost nobody wanted to admit the territory existed. The association is a partnership spanning Gratz College in the United States, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and the Comper Center at the University of Haifa. This is my field. I came to it through curiosity and study. And then, for some of us, October 7 clarified that this was now an active condition, and we had a real research problem on our hands.

There were dinners and wine with colleagues from Austria, Germany, Britain, France, and beyond. The most honest thing I can report from all of it: none of us pretended to have the answers. What we have is humility, a commitment to rigor, and a willingness to work together, which turns out to be a research method.

Four days later, at Ben Gurion Airport, I chatted with an older couple on the first leg of the trip home, Tel Aviv to Vienna, and then on to Chicago. Somewhere over Turkey, the woman told me about her last trip to Chicago to see her daughter. In a café in Chicago, a young man had asked where she was from, and she said Germany. She is Israeli. She told me she still felt ashamed of the answer, and I told her the most important thing is that she protects herself. She is my mother’s age. I knew the shame she meant because I had felt a smaller version of it in Montreal and filed it under convenience.

For the rest of the flight I sorted the four days.

The night before I left, Bernard-Henri Lévy had closed the conference under the stage lights, looking tired. I had seen him speak a year or so ago when he came to Ohio State, and I remembered the force of him; the tiredness seemed new.

Fifty years ago, Lévy told us, he wrote that antisemitism moves like a virus, mutating its wording with each generation, and that its next wording would be Israel. Everyone asks whether antizionism is antisemitism, he said, and the question runs the wrong direction. The old fuels are spent: nobody assembles a mob anymore over deicide, or over Voltaire’s contempt for the people who produced Christianity, or over the racial pseudoscience of the nineteenth century. Ask instead whether antisemitism today can be anything other than antizionism. Convince the world that the Jewish state commits apartheid and genocide, that Jews everywhere are complicit, and millions can hate in good conscience.

He had toured the American campuses to see it up close — protesters chanting the slogans, Jewish students keeping Shabbat with fear in their bellies. The protesters, he said, were no worse than he had been at their age. They believed they were defending the weakest people on earth. Their hatred spoke the vocabulary of love, and he said the encounter chilled him in a way fifty years of writing about the subject had spared him.

That morning a journalist had asked him whether French Jews should emigrate as their grandparents should have in the thirties. To go where, he answered. In the thirties there was America; there was the Yishuv, the Jewish community building a homeland in British........

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