The old slurs still matter, but the next Jewish bodies may fall to slogans everyone already knows.

The American University team—Wendy Melillo, Jeff Gill, and Nathalie Japkowicz—published a piece in The Conversation last week that deserves serious attention. Their Unmasking Antisemitism project isn’t hype or a campus press release. It’s an attempt to study Jew-hatred with real instruments: language analysis, survey research, machine learning, and the recurring patterns in which antisemitism presents itself online.

Projects like this matter—which is why their focus matters too.

It’s strongest when antisemitism is written in forms we generally know: conspiracy, dual loyalty, Holocaust denial, and words like Bankster, Goycattle, Israhell, Gorillion, Happy Merchant, and Great War.

The glaring problem, however, is that the language killing Jews today is not contained in this far-right glossary.

The glaring problem, however, is that the language killing Jews today is not contained in this far-right glossary.

Their team uses far-right antisemitic seed terms from extremist spaces to find coded Jew-hatred, similar to the words in the American Jewish Committee’s Translate Hate Glossary.

The article continues by noting that the “men accused of carrying out high-profile antisemitic attacks in the United States in recent years shared an important characteristic: They posted hate speech on their social media accounts beforehand.”

An important fact we should all know. It then mentions three of these high-profile cases: the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the Temple Israel attack in Detroit, and the killing of two Israeli Embassy staff in DC.

While these tragedies have some items in common, one of them is unlike the other two. In significant ways.

Robert Bowers, the shooter in Pittsburgh who was recently sentenced to death, was part of a world the Unmasking Antisemitism project is perfect for. Bowers is a quintessential example of a white nationalist, and an antisemitic racist. He’s obsessed with Jews, violently against immigration, calls for taking up arms against Antifa and leftist groups, and believes in conspiracies like QAnon, white genocide, and the great replacement. He shared memes with classic antisemitic tropes and descriptions, such as ones depicting the “globalist,” “ZOG” (“Zionist Occupied Government”), and words using the triple parenthesis (((echo))) to mark Jews.

The authors then note that the “FBI said the man who........

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