There is a reason the attacks during Hanukkah felt like a rupture.

Not because something fundamentally new occurred — but because, for the first time in months, it became impossible to keep describing what was happening in softened terms.

When a mass-casualty terror attack targeted Jews gathered for a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, killing at least 15 people, authorities immediately identified it as antisemitic terrorism. When Jewish cultural events in Amsterdam were disrupted by hostile protests, arrests, and chants, and when a Jewish home in California was riddled with bullets for displaying Hanukkah decorations, the language finally shifted. What had long been called “tensions” or “spillover” was suddenly recognized as something far more serious.

But what changed was not the nature of the threat.

What changed was the willingness to describe it honestly.

For much of the past year, Jews in the diaspora have been targeted in public space — harassed, verbally and physically attacked, excluded, and intimidated — under the moral pretext of........

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