“[A colleague] felt the need to remind me that criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. I hadn’t said otherwise. I had not even mentioned Israel.”

I’m not going to say we’ve all been there. But me, I have been there!

Flora Cassen’s Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism, published by the University of Toronto Press in March, and with a foreword by Yossi Klein Halevi, is a post-Oct. 7 book, but is so much more than that, that I feel bad even placing it into that slot. Cassen, a history professor who leads both Jewish Studies and the Study of Anti-Jewishness at Brandeis University, is not among the Jews who’d been naively going through life, imagining antisemitism was a thing of the past, and then woke up either on Oct. 7 or during the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally (of “Jews will not replace us” notoriety) or any other recent-memory rupture points. Rather, she’s known what was up for some time. She grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, where the environment American Jews are newly experiencing and Canadian ones sort-of-newly is just what it’s been all along. It’s not that she views the entirety of Jewish existence as a prelude to the horrors of the Holocaust, but, more precisely, that she’s attuned to the precarious, conditional nature of Jewish existence.  

Stained Glass is a hybrid history-memoir, written in short chapters and plain language. There’s documentation where needed but not so many footnotes that a reader outside academia would find the book inaccessible. Her narrative voice is not that of a junior scholar with a need to prove she did her homework, but rather of someone with confidence enough to speak with ease on a wide range of topics. Heavy topics, but a light touch. And the book covers more ground than a review could do justice to. Medieval anti-Judaism and antisemitic soccer fandoms, Flemish Jew-mocking carnivals and—who’d have expected?—the Spanish Inquisition.

Rather than comparing our moment to the Second World War or even the Dreyfus Affair, she analogizes it to the Middle Ages, with its “coexistence of privilege and persecution.” Like her fellow historian Joel Swanson, Cassen sees Trump’s catch-heavy promises to American Jews as evoking the history of court Jews, of promising a kind of protection that amounts to precarious status.

Cassen makes many important arguments in Stained Glass, but one she makes earliest on, and that’s maybe hardest to conceptualize for North American Jews, is the way the Holocaust didn’t merely kill six million Jews (this we know!) but also de-indigenized European Jewry. Directly and indirectly, it made it so that the presence of Jews in continental Europe didn’t feel continuous. Didn’t feel that way because it was not. Jews left and returned, or new Jews arrived, from different places. North African Jews in France, Russian Jews in Germany. Lots and lots of Jewish wandering.

This is part of why the calls these days for Jews to go back to Europe sting. It’s not just the ambiguity of go back to Poland (as in, to reside in Poland or to a camp?), but also that the best-case scenario for a post-Holocaust European Jew is that of a tolerated foreigner. Cassen describes the well-meaning European gentiles who would, in their expressions of solidarity, speak of her country as Israel and not Belgium. She is Belgian, not Israeli. Let her be Belgian!

But plenty of Europe-residing Jews are foreign (Israeli included) wherever they live, or of recent immigrant heritage, precisely because of these ruptures. The vibe that Jews are foreign in Europe is rooted in........

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