Until the end of World War II and the Holocaust, Jew-haters sought the destruction of the Jewish people. Those discomfited by Judaism and Jews, though they personally might not consider themselves haters, stood aside.

        Today, Jew-haters aim at the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. Those discomfited by Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, or, more simply, by the idea non-Jews should treat Jews like they do each other—stand aside. Often, they do so in sympathy, silent or vocalized, with those who attack Israelis.

        Israel-haters falsely attribute to the Jewish state the same supremacist conspiracy theories previously pinned on the Jewish people. So, when Israel-haters cannot strike the Jewish state directly, they attack diaspora Jews. This was plain during and after Israel’s 11-day war of self-defense in May against a barrage of 4,000-plus rockets fired by Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the Gaza Strip.

 Generational as well as ideological turn-over has weakened social-cultural barriers to resurgence and mainstreaming of open antisemitism. As the World War II “greatest generation” gave way to the “baby boomers” and we now to our children and their children, the fastest-growing U.S. religious affiliation is the “nones,” now about 20 percent. The idea of Judeo-Christian ethics at the core of American civic culture—in fact, at the heart of what has made  Western civilization civilized—and of the Jewish people as prime bearers of that ethical tradition, becomes a harder sell. Like, dude, who are you with your made-up commandments from your imaginary God to tell me, my infinitely remoldable self-worshipping idol, what to do?

 That sell becomes especially hard when nones are added to “wokes.” The latter generally if unconsciously are neo-Marxists with the proclivity of religious acolytes. Their new-found and highly intolerant faith amounts to a secular fundamentalism. And like most fundamentalists, religious or ideological, they strive to suppress dissent as heresy. Chief among their hierarchy of heresy is recognizing Jews as an historically oppressed, or oppressible, small minority and an ancient indigenous Middle East people entitled to part of its historic land.