Chapter 1: The Return of the Big Lie CHAPTER 1 THE RETURN OF THE BIG LIE THE INFAMOUS CONGRESSIONAL HEARING in December of 2023 about antisemitism at American universities, during which the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university''s policies only "depending on the context," quickly became a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds--except that all of the punditry about free speech and criticism of Israel extravagantly missed the point. The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn''t want free speech, or that they didn''t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead they didn''t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations'' buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings'' windows. They didn''t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn''t want their college instructors spouting antisemitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn''t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures or their dorm windows plastered with "FUCK JEWS." They didn''t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish.

At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more. I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I''d been serving on now-former Harvard president Claudine Gay''s Antisemitism Advisory Group, convened after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it. I was asked to participate because I was a Harvard alumna who had written a recent book about antisemitism. As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues--bewildered not only by what they''d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences. In Congress, all three university presidents offered some version of the platitudes that "Hatred comes from ignorance" and "Education is the answer." But if hatred comes from ignorance, why were America''s best universities full of this very specific ignorance? And why were so many people trying to justify it, explain it away, or even deny it? Our era''s ten-second news cycle was no match for these questions, because the answers were deep and ancient, buried beneath the oldest assumptions about what we think we know.

The through line of antisemitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn''t native to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational Big Lie: that antisemitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the Big Lie is winning. IN 2013, THE HISTORIAN David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism . Nirenberg''s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly five hundred pages of dense scholarship and more than a hundred pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures--including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies--have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider "Judaism." This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome. Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events.

But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of twenty-three centuries'' worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies'' ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider "Jewish," this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a society''s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If a society was nationalist, Jews were globalists; if globalism was celebrated, Jews were nationalists. If military valor mattered most, Jews were cowardly humanists; if pacifism and human rights mattered most, Jews were warmongering human-rights abusers. If a society was racist, Jews were an inferior race; if a society was anti-racist, Jews were racists. "Anti-Judaism" thus becomes a righteous fight to protect a society''s values. This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil.

Around 40 CE, after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a "debate" before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship. Apion told the emperor that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo''s rebuttal of this lie for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor. Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 CE for fifty thousand more of them to be slaughtered. In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children--a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis deliberately targeting Palestinian children and harvesting Palestinians'' organs. The absurdity of these charges is less remarkable than the high intellectual profiles of those making them: people like Apion, a scholar of Homer and Egyptian history, as well as Christian and Muslim scholars who were among the best-read people of their time. Similarly absurd claims of Jewish perfidy were later endorsed by civilizational luminaries such as Martin Luther and Voltaire.

"Anti-Judaism," Nirenberg argues, "should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed." I thought often of Nirenberg''s thesis in the months after the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, during which (it bears repeating) Hamas, an openly genocidal organization whose stated goal is the murder of Jews, lived up to its mission statement by torturing, raping, and murdering more than twelve hundred people in southern Israel and taking more than two hundred captives, including babies, children, and the elderly. Shortly after the attacks, a Cornell University professor publicly proclaimed the barbarity "exhilarating" and "energizing," while a Columbia University professor called it "awesome" and an "achievement." Comparable praise percolated through America''s top universities, where students and faculty began gathering regularly after October 8 to chant "There is only one solution: intifada revolution!" (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.) Students took these rallies inside libraries and other campus buildings. They vandalized university property with such slogans as "Zionism = Genocide," "New Intifada," and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"--referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the State of Israel. (At Harvard, some students opted for chanting an Arabic version: "From water to water, Palestine is Arab.

") On some campuses, the exhilaration escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students. When a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti-Israel protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag in November of 2023, protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student''s nose. At Columbia, students eventually expressed their enthusiasm for Hamas by copying its tactics: beating Jewish students, assaulting workers, taking over buildings, and holding custodians hostage. It wasn''t just universities. Crowds cheering for "intifada" gathered in cities around the country, shutting down and disrupting train stations and airport access roads. Lest their support for Hamas be mistaken for support for Palestinians in general, or for peace, US rally organizers named their efforts "floods" ("Flood Seattle for Palestine," "Flood Manhattan for Gaza") after "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," Hamas''s name for its October 7 butchery. (On October 7 of 2024 and 2025, these mass rallies in American cities again made their motives clear by advertising their events for this date as "honoring our October 7 martyrs"--that is, including those who were killed while massacring Israelis . One New York group even held a vigil commemorating the death of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who planned the massacre.

) The enthusiasm was hard to contain. Some people tore down or vandalized posters of Israeli hostages. Others targeted synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, spray-painting them with swastikas and slogans like "Israel''s only religion is.