A few months before I graduated from college, I received my first death threat from an anti-Semite. Although I am not Jewish, I had become a pro-Israel activist on campus. The threat came in the form of a six-second YouTube video. First it showed me holding an Israeli flag, then a picture of someone in a hospital, and finally a picture of a tombstone; the accompanying audio called for the use of bullets—six to be exact—to take me out.
It was the first time I experienced anti-Semitism, not as a historical phenomenon to be discussed in a classroom, or even as an alarming contemporary news item (anti-Jewish violence in Paris, genocidal threats from Iran, or hateful words from American radicals, right or left), but as a palpable danger that was, to quote the subtitle of Deborah Lipstadt's important new book Antisemitism, “here and now.” A sense of dread entered my dreams and stayed with me even after I woke up.
The subject of anti-Semitism is hardly new to Lipstadt. A distinguished historian at Emory University, she has written books on the American press during the Holocaust, the phenomenon of Holocaust denial, and the Eichmann trial. She was also famously sued in British court by Holocaust denier David Irving in 1996, and her book on the experience was adapted for the 2016 film Denial. Nonetheless, as she writes in the introduction, this compact primer on present-day Jew hatred is, in some ways, her most unsettling book:
As horrific as the Holocaust was, it is firmly in the past. . . . Though I remain horrified by what happened, it is history. Contemporary antisemitism is not. It is about the present. It is what many people are doing, saying, and facing now.
In fact, the book is, unfortunately, even more timely than she could have known. The massacre of 11 Jews praying at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh occurred while her book was being printed, and, as I write this week, Lipstadt has been interviewed on NPR and elsewhere about Representative Ilhan Omar's public insinuation that Jews have dual loyalties and the ensuing crisis in the Democratic Party.
