In a searing account of October 7 and its aftermath, Israel Ellis exposes the roots of global antisemitism and the perilous crossroads facing Western society

In the crowded landscape of books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, few land with the urgency and moral clarity of Israel Ellis’s Wake Up Call: Global Jihad and the Rise of Antisemitism in a World Gone MAD. Written in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack, Ellis’s work is not just a chronicle of tragedy, but a passionate plea for the world to recognize the resurgent threat of antisemitism and the larger ideological battle now raging in the West.

From the outset, Ellis’s voice is both deeply personal and fiercely analytical. The book opens with an anecdote in a resort town, where an ordinary exchange between Jewish strangers—“Shalom”—is tinged with a new, chilling secrecy. “Is this where we are?” Ellis asks, “Jews needing to secretly identify themselves to other Jews in such a clandestine fashion?” This moment, he writes, “committed this book to me,” marking Wake Up Call as a work born not of scholarly detachment, but of lived fear and responsibility.

Ellis’s narrative is anchored in the horror of October 7, when over 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 251 kidnapped in a meticulously planned Hamas assault. He refuses to let readers look away from the brutality: “This book is the frustration, the anguish, the record of the bizarre dissonance of a world gone mad and the exposure of hate.” The visceral recounting of survivors’ stories—the mother hiding under her bed with her children as terrorists torch her home, the festival-goers fleeing for their lives, the wounded soldier calling his father to........

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