“After months of warning voters against Zohran Mamdani, President Trump said he found common ground with the mayor-elect in an Oval Office meeting.”

I don’t think either Trump or Mamdani is, personally, an antisemite. So why did my antisemitism radar start dinging when I saw the expression “common ground” in a New York Times subhed about the two leaders’ surprisingly cordial meeting? Why did my mind go there, at the sight of the information that right- and left-wing populists, whose respective fan bases certainly do include antisemites, had found something to agree on?

There is much proverbial ink spilled over fighting antisemitism, and there are many resources devoted to documenting incidents. What’s lost, it seems, is analysis. Not analysis of what it is—those debates are hard to miss—but rather how it functions. What is hatred of Jews offering the people who go in for it? It does not work to speak out against antisemitism from a standpoint of assuming everyone agrees it’s bad. A bunch of people don’t; this is the problem. (It is indeed difficult lately to find consensus about anything being bad. See: measles.)

And there are a few ways antisemitism operates these days, which have come up in my earlier columns and podcasts, but in case you have not memorized all of these (for shame!), here’s a summary:

-Displaced guilt. Making Israel and by extension all Jews an avatar for whiteness, Western-ness, settler-ness, is a way of offering absolution to the sort of progressive who spent the 2010s self-flagellating for traits outside their own control. What if instead of hating yourself for........

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